Procrastinating Again? How to Kick the Habit: Scientific American
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=procrastinating-again

"Procrastination carries a financial penalty, endangers health, harms relationships and ends careers. “Procrastination undermines well-being on a wide scale,” notes psychologist Timothy A. Pychyl, director of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa. Nevertheless, recent work hints at potential upsides to this otherwise bad habit: perpetual foot-draggers seem to benefit emotionally from their trademark tactics, which support the human inclination to avoid the disagreeable." - Scientific American

Almost everyone occasionally procrastinates, but a worrisome 15 to 20 percent of adults routinely put off activities that would be better accomplished right away.

Although biology is partly to blame for foot-dragging, anyone can learn to quit

Procrastination can also stem from anxiety, an offshoot of neuroticism. Procrastinators postpone getting started because of a fear of failure (I am so worried that I will bungle this assignment), the fear of ultimately making a mistake (I need to make sure the outcome will be perfect), and the fear of success (If I do well, people will expect more of me all the time. Therefore, I’ll put the assignment off until the last minute, do it poorly, and people won’t expect so much of me).

Getting people to say yes is the goal for any sales message. It's what psychologists call “compliance. However, my ...

It's a new year and many of us have started thinking about various resolutions: updating that resume, cleaning out the attic, starting that exercise routine. But the sad reality is that most of us will not follow through on these commitments, not because we're insincere, but because tomorrow is always a better time to get going. Procrastination is a curse, and a costly one. Putting things off leads not only to lost productivity but also to all sorts of hand wringing and regrets and damaged self-esteem. For all these reasons, psychologists would love to figure out what's going on in the mind that makes it so hard to actually do what we set out to do. Are we programmed for postponement and delay? Led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz in Germany, an international team of psychologists wanted to see if there might be a link between how we think of a task and our tendency to postpone it. In other words, are we more likely to see some tasks

merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and thus reducing procrastination

The authors note that "merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and thus reducing procrastination."

"Even though all of the students were being paid upon completion, those who thought about the questions abstractly were much more likely to procrastinate--and in fact some never got around to the assignment at all. By contrast, those who were focused on the how, when and where of doing the task e-mailed their responses much sooner, suggesting that they hopped right on the assignment rather than delaying it."

It's a new year and many of us have started thinking about various resolutions: updating that resume, cleaning out the attic, starting that exercise routine. But the sad reality is that most of us will not follow through on these commitments, not because we're insincere, but because tomorrow is always a better time to get going.

portant implic

news

"Marriage counsellors often see couples who believe that sex should always be perfect, and if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it." Argh.

R

Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life, a study by a university in Edinburgh has claimed.

"Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love." Aha! I knew there were plenty of good reasons NOT to watch this type of movies :-) They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner.

Romantic comedies are bad for relationships. I knew it. Also -- a David Lynch movie is used as a control for a romantic comedy? Hee!

Totally supporting my hypotheses that Twilight is bad for people. :)

"To some there is nothing so urgent that it cannot be postponed in favour of a cup of tea. Such procrastination is a mystery to psychologists, who wonder why people would sabotage themselves in this way. A team of researchers led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz, in Germany, reckon they have found a piece of the puzzle. People act in a timely way when given concrete tasks but dawdle when they view them in abstract terms."

People act in a timely way when given concrete tasks but dawdle when they view them in abstract terms.

A very engaging look at the current practices of male/female relationships. "Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually." I think the most interesting point is this idea about female expectations: "[Women] want to compete equally, and have the privileges of their mother’s generation. They want the executive position, AND the ability to stay home with children and come back into the workplace at or beyond the position at which they left. They want the bad boy and the metrosexual." This last sentence is the major sticking point in my mind, though I've wondered since reading it if I'm just attracted to it because it justifies/reinforces my, shall we say, lack of aggression in dating.

"Earlier this year, I published an article in City Journal called “Child-Man in the Promised Land.” The piece elicited a roaring flood of mailed and blogged responses, mostly from young men who didn’t much care for its title (a reference to Claude Brown’s 1965 novel Manchild in the Promised Land) or its thesis: that too many single young males (SYMs) were lingering in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood, shunning marriage and children, and whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of World of Warcraft, and Maxim lists of the ten best movie fart scenes."

Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that the human brain—once thought to be a seriously flawed decision maker—is actually hard-wired to allow us to make the best decisions possible with the information we are given.

Probability

Yes. Yes we are.

s, God creates thing

Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.

I've found it best not to tell any professional how to do their job.

"I wrote these principles after reflecting on the content of contemporary newspapers and broadcast media and why that content disquieted me. I saw that I was not disturbed so much by what was written or said as I was by what is not. The tacit assumptions underlying most popular content reflect a worldview that is orthogonal to reality in many ways. By reflecting this skewed weltanschauung, the media reinforces and propagates it. I call this worldview the American Cargo Cult, after the real New Guinea cargo cults that arose after the second world war. There are four main points, each of which has several elaborating assumptions. I really do think that most Americans believe these things at a deep level, and that these misbeliefs constantly underlie bad arguments in public debate."

Minimalist satire on ordinary attitudes

It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively.

Studies show that information workers now switch tasks an average of every three minutes throughout the day. This degree of interruption is correlated with stress and frustration and lowered creativity.

"Paying attention isn't a simple act of self-discipline, but a cognitive ability with deep neurobiological roots — and this complex faculty, says Maggie Jackson, is being woefully undermined by how we're living. In Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Jackson explores the effects of "our high-speed, overloaded, split-focus and even cybercentric society" on attention. It's not a pretty picture: a never-ending stream of phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, text messages and tweets is part of an institutionalized culture of interruption, and makes it hard to concentrate and think creatively. Of course, every modern age is troubled by its new technologies. "The telegraph might have done just as much to the psyche [of] Victorians as the Blackberry does to us," said Jackson. "But at the same time, that doesn't mean that nothing has changed. The question is, how do we confront our own challenges?" Wired.com talked to Jackson about attention and its loss."

yes

The other important thing is to discuss interruption as an environmental question and collective social issue. In our country, stillness and reflection are not especially valued in the workplace. The image of success is the frenetic multitasker who doesn't have time and is constantly interrupted. By striving towards this model of inattention, we're doing ourselves a tremendous injustice.

Success in a relationship involves five daily habits that'll keey you and your mate satisfied. Rekindle love with dating tips from the experts and couples who have salvaged relationships on the rocks.

via rodcorp

On the problems of torture and benefits of simple detective investigation: "We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work [...] 'I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate.' [...] I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo"

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

"I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq.The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. "

How could anyone deny the opinions of someone one the ground ... especially someone on the ground who was successful.

Until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning.

Interrogator reveals practical reasons why torture was not just wrong in principle, but counterproductive in practice.

Don't constrain your self by making too much part of your identity (reminds me of much of Tom Robbins's writing)

Paul Graham

save

The lolcats, the Internet's most famous felines, may be hilarious. But in their yearning, I see nothing less than the tragedy of the human condition.

Wow!

Magenta ain't a colour dude

Video on TED.com

Magenta isn't a single color on the visible light spectrum: but it exists anyway. With diagrams.

Yes, Virginia, there is a magenta - Ars Technica

What they found, in short, is that the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs. It doesn't seem to matter how great the best member is, or what the average member of the group is like. It all comes down to what your worst team member is like. The teams with the worst person performed the poorest.

in some of the groups, the fourth member of their team isn't a student. He's an actor hired to play a bad apple, one of these personality types: The Depressive Pessimist will complain that the task that they're doing isn't enjoyable, and make statements doubting the group's ability to succeed. The Jerk will say that other people's ideas are not adequate, but will offer no alternatives himself. He'll say "you guys need to listen to the expert: me." The Slacker will say "whatever", and "I really don't care." The conventional wisdom in the research on this sort of thing is that none of this should have had much effect on the group at all. Groups are powerful. Group dynamics are powerful. And so groups dominate individuals, not the other way around. There's tons of research, going back decades, demonstrating that people conform to group values and norms. But Will found the opposite. the worst team member is the best predictor of how any team performs.

Groups that have a "bad apple" perform worse. A good leader, who asks questions, solicits opinions and makes sure everyone is heard can make a difference. See also http://liberalorder.typepad.com/the_liberal_order/files/bad_apples_rob.pdf

In a nutshell, the findings were that “emerging computerized technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle aged and older adults,” and that “internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function.” This is a long way of saying that being online helps keep those little gray cells busy. The level of brain activity was compared to that of reading a book. With internet usage, a significantly bigger piece of neural real estate lit up on the fMRI indicating that more parts of the brain were engaged.

Are our brains being rewired by using the Internet? The evidence tends to be pointing that way.

Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned.

uh oh

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist. The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, & director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases

Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa.

Paul Graham on communities

addictiveness of games and social applications is still mostly unsolved || <is that w/ chiefdelphi? feels diluted to new members and forbidding?> to keep away bad people But this way gentler and probably more effective than overt barriers || Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you... || <again, transparency> it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed || compare quality comments on community sites, average length good predictor. || <there's hope for me? 'cos I am always afraid my ideas are stupid> Prob stupidity more often ... having few ideas than wrong ones. || <so being able to make people laugh is not always admirable? hrm> put-downs are the easiest form of humor. || So the most important thing a community site can do is attract the kind of people it wants || <ouch> disaster to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time.

doodle away folks!

from Tracey Isidro

age guessing

quelle age avez vous ...

schätzen lassen, wie alt man ist

Cracked waxes downright philosophic. I love it. Mostly because they're right. We spend far too much time thinking about what we want, scared to admit that we don't know, worried that means we'll never get anywhere, when sitting and worrying about it all is doing less to help us than virtually any other activity except killing ourselves.

according to experts, it says almost everything we think about what would make us happy is dead wrong. Let's look at the five things we're most wrong about, with some pictures of adorable animals for good measure.

play children psychology parenting science ; Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed. ; KEY CONCEPTS: Childhood play is crucial for social, emotional and cognitive development. Imaginative and rambunctious “free play,” as opposed to games or structured activities, is the most essential type. Kids and animals that do not play when they are young may grow into anxious, socially maladjusted adults.

Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed By Melinda Wenner

Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed.

PLAY

"Free, imaginative play is crucial for normal social, emotional and cognitive development. It makes us better adjusted, smarter and less stressed."

As if I needed another reason to get 14 hours of sleep every night.

In the sleep-deprived, gruesome images produced 60 per cent more activity in the amygdala - a primitive, emotionally reactive part of the brain - than in well-rested people. // Evidence is growing that sleep - and dreaming, REM sleep, in particular - helps the brain to process memories. Disrupt this mechanism, and you could end up with psychological problems such as PTSD.

http://zenhabits.net/2009/02/10-ways-to-beat-the-cant-get-no-satisfaction-syndrome/ zen zenzen selfimprovement lifehacks lifestyle psychology inspiration Tips Life

th the world. 2. Banish ne

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains. Part of a field called "cognitive computing", the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa.

"The key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain."

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains. Part of a field called "cognitive computing", the research will bring together neurobiologists, computer and materials scientists and psychologists. As a first step in its research the project has been granted $4.9m (£3.27m) from US defence agency Darpa.

IBM has announced it will lead a US government-funded collaboration to make electronic circuits that mimic brains.

IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do. The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.

Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied. For example, fake franchises, real estate "sure things", get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, Nigerian money scams, charms and talismans are all used to separate the mark from his money. Variations include the pyramid scheme, Ponzi scheme and Matrix sale.

they keep changing and often contain elements of more than one type. This list should not be considered complete, but covers the most well-known confidence tricks. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is frequently called a "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim called a "mark".

Confidence tricks are difficult to classify, because they keep changing and often contain elements of more than one type. This list should not be considered complete, but covers the most well-known confidence tricks. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is frequently called a "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim called a "mark".

scam prototypes

Good introduction to X-phi, as rediculous as it sounds.

Philosophers used to combine conceptual reflections with practical experiment. The trendiest new branch of the discipline, known as x-phi, wants to return to those days. Some philosophers don’t like it.

a new philosophy field? holy moly. really good read.

Philosophers used to combine conceptual reflections with practical experiment. The trendiest new branch of the discipline, known as x-phi, wants to return to those days. Some philosophers don’t like it

windows theory

But what about a site's physical appearance? Does the aesthetic appearance of a blog affect what's written by the site's commenters? My sense is that the establishment of social norms through moderation, both by site owners and by the community itself, has much more of an impact on the behavior of commenters than the visual design of a site but aesthetics does factor in somewhat. Perhaps the poor application of a default MT or Wordpress template signals a lack of care or attention on the part of the blog's owner, leading readers to think they can get away with something. Poorly designed advertising or too many ads littered about a site could result in readers feeling disrespected and less likely to participate civilly or respond to moderation. Messageboard software is routinely ugly; does that contribute to the often uncivil tone found on web forums?

Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say. This works well when leaders know what they're talking about, but what if they don't? If someone acts like a boss but thinks like a boob, is that still enough to stay on top? - "More-dominant individuals achieved influence in their groups in part because they were seen as more competent by fellow group members," Anderson and Kilduff write.

"Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say" - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Found at http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/presentation-research/speaking-enhance-career/

speaking up makes you look intelligent

It might seem an idle pastime but academics have come up with a mathematical equation for why people procrastinate.

The psychologist, from the University of Calgary, has subsequently formed an equation for why people procrastinate, which began by studying 250 college students. The equation is U=EV/ID. The 'U' stands for utility, or the desire to complete a given task. It is equal to the product of E, the expectation of success, and V the value of completion, divided by the product of I, the immediacy of the task, and D, the personal sensitivity to delay. Prof Steel says procrastination is becoming a bigger issue because many more jobs are "self-structured", with people setting their own schedules. This means that people tend to postpone things with delayed rewards in favour of activities that offer immediate rewards. "Procastinators tend to live fro today rather than tomorrow. for short term gain for long term pain" he writes. Until now, psychologists have generally linked procrastination to perfectionists who avoid tasks rather than produce less than perfect products.

U=EV/ID

The equation is U=EV/ID.

Prof Piers Steel, a Canadian academic who has spent more than 10 years studying why people put off until tomorrow what they could do today, believes that the notion that procrastinators are either perfectionists or just lazy is wrong. Prof Steel, who admits to becoming distracted by computer games himself, argues in a new book that those prone to putting things off suffer from a vice of their own - impulsiveness.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

TED Talks Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it&#39;s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we&#39;re predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can&#39;t grasp.

An overview of how to set up your accounts to allow automation to help you manage your money better. Also contains scripts for negotiating with companies about financial matters, e.g. waiving late fees.

Eh

interesting though probably incorrect in many ways. relationship from sat scores to music taste

healing songs

Why Your Friends Don’t Save Money, Eat Healthier, or Clean Their Garages

Analisis de los mensajes que circulan en Twitter.

5 Ways Your Brain Is Messing With Your Head. Who can you trust?!

Check this out

market for news that circumvents government control but, as we have found out, rumor mills like to fill inf

In large corporations, almost everything new is impossible. Try to do anything new, and typically you are met with dozens of reasons why it can’t be done. As a consultant (which I was throughout my time in the corporate world), however, you’ve been hired to get something specific done, so you don’t get to echo the “it can’t be done” line back to your client. Your job is, effectively, to do the impossible.

Best. Art. Evar.

The tweenbot, a cardboard-bodied, cheerful little bugger, is equipped with a flag stating its intended destination. Since it can only move forward, it depends on the kindness of strangers to guide it and remove obstacles.

This is a unique story about Columbine that was basically the start of a new era and gave kids idea about killing that the shouldnt have

The real story?

slide show about designing interaction.

You know you want to...

this is an awesome article.

Sailors are given 30 seconds to answer or they're kicked out of the program. If they say they want to keep going, they're given another 30 seconds to recover and then they're thrown back into the pool. It may sound sadistic, but the Navy is simply trying to identify who will survive the most dangerous missions and who won't. Through this grueling test, it finds soldiers and sailors who refuse to give up, who can suppress the need to breathe, who trust that they'll be rescued if something goes wrong and who are prepared to lose consciousness—or even die—following orders.

The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.

The underground world of "neuroenhancing" drugs.

The underground world of "neuroenhancing" drugs Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

haha/do we really need a 'significant other' to be a worthy person?

Why The Smartest People Have The Toughest Time Dating

I can haz higher IQ?

Instead of seeing a single series of items like the one above, test-takers saw two different sequences, one of single letters and one of spatial locations.

Find N-Back test on web

The scene: A rigorous intro-level survey course in biology, history, or economics. You're the instructor, and students are crowding the lectern, pleading for study advice for the midterm. If you're like many professors, you'll tell them something like this: Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter. That's not terrible advice. But some scientists would say that you've left out the most important step: Put the book aside and hide your notes. Then recall everything you can. Write it down, or, if you're uninhibited, say it out loud. Two psychology journals have recently published papers showing that this strategy works, the latest findings from a decades-old body of research. When students study on their own, "active recall" — recitation, for instance, or flashcards and other self-quizzing — is the most effective way to inscribe something in long-term memory.

That old study method still works, researchers say. So why don't professors preach it?

The Boston Globe

an interesting article about baby's brain

doodling makes you smarter!

More doodles of infinite awesomeness. Love!

"[The] team asked 40 people to listen to a recording containing the names of people and places. Afterwards the people wrote down the names they could remember. While listening, half of the test subjects were also required to shade in shapes on a piece of paper. Afterwards, they remembered one-third more names than test subjects who didn't doodle while listening. "

Doodling improves concentration

12 year old girls become basketball heroes by defying convention. SWEET!

"David" can beat "Goliath" by playing by his rules, not the established ones.

When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Article from the Boston Globe.

Or: why setting the wrong goals fails. Or: why poor management fails.

Why setting goals can backfire

eriments in an fMRI machine. Carolyn says she will be participating in the sc

Cho chweet: "Footage of these experiments is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can’t see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal."

Summary of EQ, delayed gratification studies.

The secret of self-control. People who are able to delay gratification appear to be more successful in life.

The secret of self-control.

study of success and happiness or the lack of same

The panhandler's secret /Seth's Blog/ - When there were old-school parking meters in New York, quarters were ... http://tinyurl.com/dcm4ub [from http://twitter.com/jorgefsb/statuses/1257713242]

I love this story. Brief, worthwhile.

Great way to solicit donations. http://is.gd/l5kT [from http://twitter.com/davidwees/statuses/1303875101]

The panhandler's secret: "Do you have a dollar for four quarters?" and then "Can you spare a quarter?" Smart man.

"the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” “What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”

Brain research can help us craft spaces that relax, inspire, awaken, comfort, and heal. By Emily Anthes.

Brilliant Statistically proven ways that work.

Devil’s advocate example works with large organizations. Leaders who consistently seek out dissenting opinions earn more respect, and generally have better agreement with people in the room than those who rule by lying the law and persecuting dissenters.

Twitter, Adderall, lifehacking, mindful jogging, power browsing, Obama’s BlackBerry, and the benefits of overstimulation.

In Defense of Distraction

If I didn't write this sentence, most of my friends who started to read this article would quickly lose focus and start scanning it.

because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a glamorous friend of mine was there to "

Charlie Brooker: I'm convinced no one actually likes clubs. It's a conspiracy. We've been told they're cool and fun; that only 'saddoes' dislike them.

Brooker is god and right about everything.

"Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable."

interesting title

Is Google Rewiring Our Brains? http://is.gd/m748 [from http://twitter.com/msdaibert/statuses/1881375194]

Is Google Rewiring Our Brains, very interesting, http://bit.ly/lsRAr [from http://twitter.com/gregbond/statuses/1288562619]

Gord Hotchkiss: Are Our Brains Becoming “Googlized?” http://is.gd/m9nr / Is Google Rewiring Our Brains? http://is.gd/m748 searchengineland [from http://twitter.com/bibliothekarin/statuses/1289466114]

Jeff Hawkins

Jeff Hawkins kertoo aivotutkimuksen teorianmuodostuksesta sekä esittelee parhaan kuulemani älykkyyden määritelmän. Kiva kuullaa miestä, kun on aikoinaan lukenut tämän saman hänen kirjastaan.

Treo creator Jeff Hawkins urges us to take a new look at the brain -- to see it not as a fast processor, but as a memory system that stores and plays back experiences to help us predict, intelligently, what will happen next.

TED talk - currently no theory about how brain works because there is not framework for the theory - The framework is memory and prediction not behavior and computational ability.

interesting

A MUST SEE VIDEO for every programmer: The Psychology of Incompetence (via @ldfallas) http://ff.im/-39AcJ

The Psychology of Incompetence - Ron Burk

RT @timoreilly: Post by @dalepd about how people are actually starting to prefer the sound of Mp3 http://bit.ly/sn2Yw [from http://twitter.com/NicMcPhee/statuses/1331634656]

students increasingly prefering the sound of MP3 over higher quality music:

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

who could wait only thirty sec

The marshmallow test -- longitudinal studies show that it may predict future success better than intelligence

The ability to delay gratification is a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. "Intelligence is really important, but it's still not as important as self-control."

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

Don’t! The secret of self-control.

The problem with Google, from a design perspective

"The male brain, extreme or not, is compatible with visual design. It allows you to learn every font in the Letraset catalogue and work from a grid. In fact, the male-brain capacity for years-long single-mindedness explains why the heads of large ad agencies and design houses are overwhelmingly male. (It isn’t a sexist conspiracy.)"

Work at Google? (Via Daring Fireball: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/27/clark-google ).

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

Genius - The Modern View

IQ persistence and success

"The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft."

a place where you try to guess who's the criminal for a crime

via AF identify which of these people committed the crime in question. funny/horrible

Match the mugshot to the crime

Don't let the cats get to your head.

Kevin Lafferty is a smart, cautious, thoughtful scientist who doesn't hate cats, but he has put forth a provocative theory that suggests that a clever cat parasite may alter human cultures on a massive scale.

Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.

I cannot convey to you the size of my man-crush on Reg Braithwaite.

"Let's recap. When we explain something in our heads, our explanations have three properties that matter to whether we are optimistic or not: Whether we explain things in a personal or impersonal way, whether we explain things in a specific or general way, and whether we explain things in a permanent or temporary way. / [...] / Optimists explain good things as being personal, general, and permanent, and explain away bad things as being impersonal, specific, and temporary. And if you point out the contradiction in their explanations, they see no contradiction. To them, the bad stuff really isn't about them, it's just that one thing that one time."

Discussed by Jared Spool, others on IxDA site

Psicologia de los colores a la hora de hacer un logo.

Color Psychology in Logo Design - Free Logo Critiques - http://www.logocritiques.com/resources/color_psychology_in_logo_design/

090608

But to the stakeholders -- managers, CEOs, customers, shareholders, etc. -- software development is a mystery. They don't want to know everything about it, but they want to know enough to be able to predict the behavior of software development, at least approximately.

Why do we need an analogy? We know what we do. We program computers, with all that entails. And we know what that means, because we do it. But to the stakeholders -- managers, CEOs, customers, shareholders, etc. -- software development is a mystery. They don't want to know everything about it, but they want to know enough to be able to predict the behavior of software development, at least approximately.

t replace a programmer with just any other programmer and get similar results. It also suggests that you should evaluate what kind of project you're creating when you decide who your team should be, and how it will run. The creation of mysteries and young adult fiction and so-called "bodice rippers" and the vast sea of nonfiction books all have their own particular structure and constraints (you'd be surprised at how rigid and controlling publishers are about these things, as if they are manufacturing some kind of basic commodity -- "the murder has to happen in the first 10 pages" etc.). None of these are the mass-market bestsellers ("killer apps") that are sold by the author's voice and style (few of which I find readable). The mass-market bestsellers usually don't coincide with the great writers, since most people don't have the patience to read these meta-craftsmen, just as most programmers don't read the source code for compilers.

Agreed. Interesting comments, too. I write one-liners, short stories and novels in Python. I have many unfinished novels.

I really like you. I do. You're so nice, and sweet, and you listen to all my problems and respond with the appropriate compliments. But, well, I...

Article on a book I'd like to read

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.”

Well written piece.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

Always useful to know how best to co-erce money out of loved ones.

f a sign imploring people not to steal pieces of petrified forest from the park. One mentioned large amounts of petrified forest taken away on an annual basis, the other one simply asked the visitors not to remove petrified wood. The first one actually tripled t

The joy of less.

blah, analyzes your account

By Lera Boroditsky

ong time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered

Interesting recent work on Linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis related ideas in cognitive linguistics

Something to think about when you wonder if you “see” reality.

So we’re forced to realize a very interesting conclusion. The wavelength of a photon certainly reflects a color – but we cannot produce every color the human eye sees by a single photon of a specific wavelength. There is no such thing as a pink laser – two lasers must be mixed to produce that color. There are “real” colors (we call them pure spectral or monochromatic colors) and “unreal” colors that only exist in the brain.

While we consider this rather trivial today, at the time you’d be laughed out of the room if you suggested this somehow illustrated a fundamental property of light and color. The popular theory of the day was that color was a mixture of light and dark, and that prisms simply colored light. Color went from bright red (white light with the smallest amount of “dark” added) to dark blue (white light with the most amount of “dark” added before it turned black).

"Tricks work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world," says Macknik, lead author of the paper. "Even when we know we're going to be tricked, we still can't see it, which suggests that magicians are fooling the mind at a very deep level." By reverse-engineering these deceptions, Macknik hopes to illuminate the mental loopholes that make us see a woman get sawed in half or a rabbit appear out of thin air even when we know such stuff is impossible. "Magicians were taking advantage of these cognitive illusions long before any scientist identified them," Martinez-Conde says.

GReader: Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion http://ow.ly/5xUu [from http://twitter.com/ChipRiley/statuses/1725035126]

Retweeting @copyblogger: Penn & Teller Reveal the Neuroscience of Illusion - http://is.gd/vRUV [from http://twitter.com/apoorvgadwal/statuses/1698147950]

""People take reality for granted," Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. "Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple." For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything—the world is too big, too full of stimuli."

y or may not want to reveal themselves as the Seer, a.k.a. Werewolf Enemy Number One). It’s not much to

We kill the quiet ones cause they aren't helping.

This was an amusing, insightful... overall a good read.

Hey, Shakers, Liss has graciously allowed me to yell in her forum. Many thanks, Liss. I have no other outlet for what I'm about to say. I want to tell you first: at least one of you knows me in person. What I'm about to say is something you do not know about me. If it's not you, then one of your friends might be like me.

Post-adoption and post-abortion effects on women compared.

I have given a baby up for adoption, and I have had an abortion, and while anecdotes are not evidence, I can assert that abortions may or may not cause depression - it certainly did not in me, apart from briefly mourning the path not taken - but adoption? That is an entirely different matter. I don't doubt that there are women who were fine after adoption, and there is emphatically nothing wrong with that or with them; but I want to point out that if we're going to have a seemingly neverending discussion about the sorrow and remorse caused by abortion, then it is about goddamn time that we hear from birth mothers too.

RT @diannagraf: RT @drtiki Want to get ahead? Sleep in http://bit.ly/Op41P @JonathanStrahan don't get up before me in Tas, that's just wrong [from http://twitter.com/meika/statuses/1665793930]

"Smug early birds take note: Night owls actually have more mental stamina than those who awaken at the crack of dawn, according to new research."

RT @jontybrook: Finally! Science confirms that late sleepers are more productive: http://ping.fm/KqtBS (via @tferriss) &lt;- YAY! [from http://twitter.com/danphilpott/statuses/1715473753]

This is an interesting article, but it leaves way too many gaps. Does it measure productivity by hours awake?

Why attractive things work better

The visual aesthetics that frame and define content are much more than simply a “skin” that we can apply or discard without consequence. Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view

User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success.

The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. Even though the stripes are not the same color all the way around the spiral , the overlapping spirals makes our brain think they are. The very fact that you have to examine the picture closely to figure out any of this at all shows just how easily we can be fooled.

Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen.

うわあああこの緑と青、同じ色だって

[via http://friendfeed.com/mtanski/40cd35d3/game-theory-salary-negotiation-and]

3. Happiness Must be Shared The other night I was watching the movie adaptation of Into the Wild, the true story of Chris McCandless (see above photo which is a self-portrait found undeveloped in McCandless's camera after his death). Fed up with the rat race, McCandless graduated college in the early 1990's, left his worried parents in the dust, sold all his belongings, and ventured deep into the Alaskan wilderness. Before dying of starvation, he seemed to regre

3. Happiness Must be Shared The other night I was watching the movie adaptation of Into the Wild, the true story of Chris McCandless (see above photo which is a self-portrait found undeveloped in McCandless's camera after his death). Fed up with the rat race, McCandless graduated college in the early 1990's, left his worried parents in the dust, sold all his belongings, and ventured deep into the Alaskan wilderness. Before dying of starvation, he seemed to regret his isolationist ways and wrote these last words in his journal, “Happiness only real when shared.”

We’ve all heard countless studies, articles and TV interviews on happiness. But the other day I stumbled upon something that is just now being revealed to the media for the first time.* It's a 72 year old study that began all the way back in 1937 when 268 Harvard University sophomores were asked to participate in a study measuring “a formula-some mix of love, work, and adaptation-for a good life.” And while many of those who were college sophomores in 1937 are now dying or in their fading twilight, this study continues to be diligently maintained to this very day.

This collaborative site allows you to improve your happiness - and that of those around you - with some handy and helpful tools

Guy dates a girl who claims to be a geek too, he catches her because she claimed to prove P=NP. Reminds me of the lies I faced when I dated ER, but this one is worse.

The sad story of a guy taken for a ride.

excerpt from book by Jim Collins - How the Mighty Fall and why Some Companies Never Give In

Every institution is vulnerable, no matter how great. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall, and most eventually do. But all is not gloom. By understanding the five stages of decline we uncovered in our research for How the Mighty Fall, leaders can substantially increase the odds of reversing decline before it is too late—or even better, stave off decline in the first place. Decline can be avoided. The seeds of decline can be detected early. And decline can be reversed (as we've seen with notable cases such as IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Merck (MRK), and Nucor (NUE)). The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.

overview of an upcoming book that analyzes the 5 stages to failure for a company or country.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, on how to spot the subtle signs that your successful company is actually on course to sputter—and how to reverse the slide before it's too late -- THE SILENT CREEP OF DOOM

As the Weekend Edition math guy, I spoke to Scott Simon and told him the body mass index fails on 10 grounds:

So very awesome at striking down one of the worse medical myths in current society. Everyone should read this.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo says happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future. He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives.

Here are 10 insightful studies that give a flavour of what has been discovered about the dynamics of group psychology.

Good tools for learning groups/management techniques.

I'm not staring into space, I'm trying to live a balanced life

Everyone who knows me needs to read this article

Promoting the people most competent at one job does not mean that they'll be better at another, according to a new simulation of hierarchical organizations.

But is there a better way of choosing individuals for promotion? It turns out that there is, say Pluchino and co. Their model shows that two other strategies outperform the conventional method of promotion. The first is to alternately promote first the most competent and then the least competent individuals. And the second is to promote individuals at random. Both of these methods improve, or at least do not diminish, the efficiency of an organization.

"All new members in a hierarchical organization climb the hierarchy until they reach their level of maximum incompetence."

Person is good at job, person is promoted. Repeat until person ends up in job they're not good at.

Agent-based simulation of the Peter Principle

reminds me of community service with children

Nw1AS.jpg (JPEG-kuva, 950×848 kuvapistettä)

ganzfeld procedure, inverted binoculars painkiller, rubber hand illusion, pinocchia illusion, purkinje lights

Cat purrs train humans

I suspected this all along posted July 13 2009

Hey RIA and web vendors: how can your tools let people do this kind of experimenting?

You should follow me on Twitter

Experiment on increasing CTR to your twitter page

Experimenting with different phrases.

The neurological assessment of the benefits of swearing. Also, researchers found that when we swear too much, the words lose the power of emotion.

"I'm the only conscious human..."

"Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and *think!* I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep."

haha :)

Me recuerda una frase de Ciorán: «El diálogo a solas con la idea incita al desvarío, anula el juicio y produce la ilusión de omnipotencia».

Times Online

Turned up on oursignal.com ...

Human Skills

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” – Robert A. Heinlein

"abstract thinking makes it easier for people to form surprising connections between seemingly unrelated concepts"

blah blah

Topic for discussion in AP

Steven Pinker on how violence has declined over history.

Interesting, somewhat counterintuitive hypothesis here - mankind has been getting steadily LESS violent since pre-historic times - and a bunch of theories as to why.

Steven Pinker explains why he thinks humans have evolved to be more peaceful over time.

I just don't know why they put up with the way men look http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6727710.ece [from http://twitter.com/JacksonATL/statuses/2917669057]

Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

"The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern." In my opinion, nowhere did they say there were any kind of studies done to analyze images of women from ancient past (as if such images could even be considered to be accurate), compare them to images of modern women, and determine that modern women are objectively more beautiful. Not to mention that beauty is subjective anyway. The whole article is deeply unscientific.

Women are getting more beautifu

Psychology

Why is this no big surprise? "EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It's a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people's self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice."

good stuff

the auditory illusions are interesting!

New Scientist's guide to the simple techniques that will uncover the inner workings of your grey matter

useful.

While there is no surefire on-the-spot way to sniff out dissemblers, there are some helpful tactics for uncovering untruths. Liars often give short or one-word responses to questions, while truth tellers are more likely to flesh out their answers. A liar provides fewer details & uses fewer words than an honest person, and talks for a smaller percentage of the conversation. Liars are often reluctant to admit ordinary storytelling mistakes. When honest people tell stories, they may realize partway through that they left out some details and would unselfconsciously backtrack to fill in holes. They also may realize a previous statement wasn't quite right, and go back and explain further. Liars, on the other hand, "are worried that someone might catch them in a lie and are reluctant to admit to such ordinary imperfections,"

Reid Technique

Liars often give short or one-word responses to questions, while truth tellers are more likely to flesh out their answers. According to a 2003 study by DePaulo, a liar provides fewer details and uses fewer words t

Everyone stretches the truth a little. Here's what to look for (and how not to get found out).

Forty of the best psychology blogs, chosen to give you a broad sweep of the most interesting content being produced online right now. The list is split

40 Superb Psychology Blogs

Excellent Excellent Article.

ein without his pipe, George Burns without his cigar or Jackson Pollock without a cig

love this...amazing story about love and strength

"Let’s say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. […] Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: 'I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.' But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say 'I don’t love you anymore' and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result."

They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

been thinking about this since moving back to sf — this quote is nice, and not just for guys: " 'And that you’re never going to have any fun again, because you have to work. You’re never going to have sex again because you’re going to get married. Your life is over.' So why bother? Literal and figurative fucking around is infinitely more appealing to men who are still sorting out what they want their lives to look like."

I wish I didn't appreciate this, but I can't help it.

An interesting article on how many 20-somethings see the world.

Tongue in cheek Beschreibung der Lebensverhältnisse junger PhD und schlimmerer Versager.

Definitely one to read if you're twenty-something and less than content.

Cover the basics of speed reading fast!

This post is a condensed overview of principles I taught to undergraduates at Princeton University in 1998 at a seminar called the “PX Project”. The below was written several years ago, so it’s worded like Ivy-Leaguer pompous-ass prose, but the results are substantial. In fact, while on an airplane in China two weeks ago, I helped Glenn McElhose increase his reading speed 34% in less than 5 minutes. I have never seen the method fail. Here’s how it works…

Why PowerPoint kills decision making

As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool

Sub-hed: "As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool"

"Unfortunately, by using PowerPoint inappropriately, we have created a thought process centered on bullets and complex charts. This has a number of impacts. First, it reduces clarity since a bullet is essentially an outline for a sentence and a series of bullets outline a paragraph. They fail to provide the details essential to understanding the ideas being expressed. While this helps immensely with compromise, since the readers can create their own narrative paragraphs from the bullets, it creates problems when people discover what they agreed to is not what they thought they had agreed to. Worse, it creates a belief that complex issues can, and should, be reduced to bullets. It has reached the point where some decision-makers actually refuse to read a two-page briefing paper and instead insist PowerPoint be used."

As a decision-making aid, PowerPoint is a poor tool By T. X. Hammes

hyperthymestic syndrome,

This piece blew my mind.

Researchers had never found a subject with a perfect memory — then along came Jill Price.

a mulher que não esquece nada

The woman remembers dates to the day. Amazing. But know few quizzers who can do the same.

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous.

brain research and new social media

by Emily Yoffe. Summary of research by Jaak Panskeep and Kent Berridge into our desire for additional information. Speculates this desire is akin to addiction systems. "How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous."

"The dopamine system does not have satiety built into it," Berridge explains. "And under certain conditions it can lead us to irrational wants, excessive wants we'd be better off without." So we find ourselves letting one Google search lead to another, while often feeling the information is not vital and knowing we should stop. "As long as you sit there, the consumption renews the appetite," he explains. Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

Muy importante, leer detenidamente

User-centric web design is a method of web design where the content, design, and usability factors are all placed in accordance to the target audience’s needs and goals — a design that is centered around the user. This article will cover the basics of what user-centric web design is, and how to achieve it.

Well worth the read http://bit.ly/J9ctr [from http://twitter.com/JacksonATL/statuses/3385969448]

If humans are seeking machines, we've now created the perfect machines to allow us to seek endlessly. This perhaps should make us cautious.

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in tr

On a case study, and investigators discussings the difficulties

How modern information gathering technology complicates the lives of those who want to start a new life.

The urge to disappear, to shed one’s identity and reemerge in another, surely must be as old as human society. It’s a fantasy that can flicker tantalizingly on the horizon at moments of crisis or grow into a persistent daydream that accompanies life’s daily burdens. A fight with your spouse leaves you momentarily despondent, perhaps, or a longtime relationship feels dead on its feet. Your mortgage payment becomes suddenly unmanageable, or a pile of debts gradually rises above your head. Maybe you simply awaken one day unable to shake your disappointment over a choice you could have made or a better life you might have had. And then the thought occurs to you: What if I could drop everything, abandon my life’s baggage, and start over as someone else?

a plan to escape

For Matthew Alan Sheppard, all of the anxiety, deception, and delusion converged in one moment on a crisp winter weekend in February 2008.

Great Errol Morris series about lies and lying http://bit.ly/CgUcb [from http://twitter.com/pkedrosky/statuses/3208516239]

Errol Morris interviews Ricky Jay.

Jump to: navigation, search The Dancing Plague (or Dance Epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, France (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) in July 1518. Numerous people took to dancing for days without rest, and over the period of about one month, most of the people died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion.

"The Dancing Plague (or Dance Epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, France (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) in July 1518. Numerous people took to dancing for days without rest, and over the period of about one month, most of the people died from heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion."

"It's exactly like a leaderboard in a game, where you want to have the bragging right of being on top, so you work harder at getting better," says Steffen Walz, a game theorist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Walz says governments worldwide are hiring designers to create games that encourage healthier behavior; he himself is creating one, where teenagers will run around their city with GPS-equipped mobile phones, unlocking prizes by visiting different locations.

using rewards & tracking to encourage everyday behaviours

"Games create drama and excitement," as Jane McGonigal, one of the leading thinkers in the field, told the crowd at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. "We've done that for years with videogames, and now we can apply that thinking to the rest of life."

Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent's Outlook inbox. Reeves figured this would encourage people to send less e-mail: Those who are parsimonious would wind up with lots of tokens, which means when they really have something to say, they can load it up with tokens and make sure it'll get through. Sure enough, that's what happened. When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem.

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

visual and audio mind benders

Blind kid & genius phone hacker

Traffic jams are sometimes caused by drivers&#039; competitive behavior. In certain situations the actions of a single driver can lessen traffic congestion or even erase a traffic jam completely.

Traffic jams are sometimes caused by drivers' competitive behavior. In certain situations the actions of a single driver can lessen traffic congestion or even erase a traffic jam completely.

In several benchmark tests of focus, college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers.

Some people suspect that a multitasking lifestyle has changed how they think, leaving them easily distracted and unable to concentrate even when separated from computers and phones. Their uneasiness may be justified. In several benchmark tests of focus, college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers.

Two scientists suggest that depression is not a malfunction, but a mental adaptation that brings certain cognitive advantages

"Two scientists suggest that depression is not a malfunction, but a mental adaptation that brings certain cognitive advantages"

[Multitaskers are] "suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them." "They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," Ophir said. "The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."

You might think a lot gets done when you multitask, but a study conducted by Stanford researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner says it isn't so.

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.

Interesting, LONG article about the placebo effect. I always liked the thought that your mind has the power to heal you. Or if you are in a negative mood, sometimes just saying positive things can alter your feelings.

Placebos have long been used to control for the effects of taking *any* medicine. However, now those effects seem to be getting stronger... Fascinating.

"It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger."

Mida Beecher avastas, miks see tähtis on ja kuidas edasi, kui platseeboefekt ise näib tugevamaks muutuvat?

Changing Corporate Culture

d culture, instead of making the

"You change a culture with stories

# Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it. # Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.

Humans don’t always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply "wishful thinking." This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. But now, scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making - and may eventually help explain the success of human cognition overall.

Need to read more carefully; till then, count me as skeptical

LOL. The first few sentences made me think of Busemeyer, even before he was mentioned.

Explain how to read books quickly.

ふむふむ

お金をインセンティブにすると、効率とかクオリティが落ちることがある。

この成功報酬的な動機付け―If Then式に「これをしたら これが貰える」というやり方は、状況によっては機能します。しかし多くの作業ではうまくいかず、時には害にすらなります。

Life change may seem to take years to achieve but there are steps you can walk today and in the next week that perhaps can change your life forever. Most are

Gullibility on the rise? Count me in!

2009-08-24

Saturday 05 September 2009 | Health News feed | All feeds

funny

Even if you can't beat the system, there are some cunning ways to tilt the odds in your favour

How come you can recognise the tune of the number one song of 1968 as being Hey Jude by the Beatles, but not the number two song? Why has the iPod had the success that the Zune has been denied?...

Joel Spolsky's talk at Business of Software 2008 on being number one

Ambition makes determination, and then determination makes wealth.

This feels like it needs some more fleshing out.

good blog on determination. Indeed, if you want to create the most wealth, the way to do it is to focus more on their needs than your interests, and make up the difference with determination.

so much better than any of the other articles on this, especially "10 traits to look for when hiring a programmer"

The stereotypes that lump IT professionals together are misguided. It's actually the conditions that surround the IT pros that are stereotypical, and the geeks are just reacting to those conditions the way they always react -- logically.

A great review of Predictably Irrational - the hidden forces that shape our decisions by Dan Ariely. Why we act the way we do when we buy and how we are constantly manipulated by companies and advertisers. The question we have is will this change because of social media?

"7. Capitalize on our Aversion to Loss" - : - A good reason for subscriptions to have multiple levels

# f what you've spent so far on a service, product, or relationship -- in effort or money -- is probably far less than you think. Be willing to walk away. # Once you've bought something, never rely on your internal judgment to assess its value, because you're too close to it now. A

It's a fascinating examination of why human beings are wired and conditioned to react irrationally. We human beings are a selfish bunch, so it's all the more surprising to see how easily we can be manipulated to behave in ways that run counter to our own self-interest. This isn't just a "gee-whiz" observation; understanding how and why we behave irrationally is important. If you don't understand how these irrational behaviors are triggered, the marketing weasels will use them against you.

Another pellet, please

Ever find yourself sitting down at the computer just for a second to find out what other movie you saw that actress in, only to look up and realize the search has led to an hour of Googling? Thank dopamine. Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system.

p. 2 is the fun bit.

How the internet impacts our thinking

Men and women have very different ways of arguing. So, in a better effort to help couples understand each other (which, really, is what we're all about here at Maxim), we decided to break down the thought process of both a man and woman, during an argument.

Sometimes it's hard to understand where your boyfriend or girlfriend is coming from in an argument, and why they're saying what they're saying.  Let us be your guide on this journey...

Sometimes it's hard to understand where your boyfriend or girlfriend is coming from in an argument, and why they're saying what they're saying. Let us be your guide on this journey...

Periodically, bring a few key IT brains to the boardroom to observe the problems of the organization at large, even about things outside of the IT world, if only to make use of their exquisitely refined BS detectors. A good IT pro is trained in how to accomplish work; their skills are not necessarily limited to computing. In fact, the best business decision-makers I know are IT people who aren't even managers.

Awesome article that gives anybody (managers out there???!!!) some mega-insight into the psychology of a geek.

Is it you pachamama?

I'm not actually sure what this is -- links to a bunch of related NPR stories, I guess. But it looks interesting.

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual — from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual &mdash; from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

putting some absurdly expensive item on the menu. Rapp doesn’t expect many consumers to buy it, but having it there makes expensive items appear cheap by comparison

Have you ever gone to a restaurant and found some ridiculously priced item on the menu? Of course you didn’t buy it — you’re no sucker. Or are you? This Today Show piece on Gregg Rapp may surprise you. Rapp is a menu engineer. He helps restaurants maximize revenue by hacking common flaws in human decision-making. For example, by simply removing “$” signs from prices, people are less intimidated by them. And he advises against listing items from least to most expensive, because that focuses the consumer on price. Instead he mixes up items, making it hard to find their price — thereby encouraging the customer to emotionally commit to something before finding out what it costs. But my favorite strategy of his is that of putting some absurdly expensive item on the menu. Rapp doesn’t expect many consumers to buy it, but having it there makes expensive items appear cheap by comparison. Think about it: How many times have you ordered a bottle of wine in the middle of the price range?

Interesting Article on the human mind and price from a "Menu Engineer"

OkCupid study using the messages sent by its users.

Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message

Mmmmm stats applied to online dating - fascinating looking at what words work best. I wonder if similar principles apply to blog posts.

We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. This is the second post of our statistical investigation into the optimal online dating message

Lehrer is interested in the historic dichotomy between "emotional" decision-making and "rational" decision-making and what modern neuroscience can tell us about these two modes of thinking. One surprising and compelling conclusion is that people who experience damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to decide, because their rational mind dithers endlessly over the possible rational reasons for each course of action. The Platonic ideal of a rational being making decisions without recourse to the wordless gut-instinct is revealed as a helpless schmuck who can't answer questions as basic as "White or brown toast?"

“Sometimes dogs are doing mistakes adapting in metro, but they are studying.” via donna

Interesting news from Russia in English language.

who russian dogs adapt to their urban environment, ride subway cars, scare people into dropping food. little grifters.

2 câmeras escondidas. Várias crianças. 1 marshmallow para cada uma. O resultado...

I'm pretty sure the geneva convention defines this as "cruel and unusual". And funny as hell.

Unresolvable

A new study suggests that people from different cultures might read facial expressions differently.

A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently. East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face. In the research carried out by a team from Glasgow University, East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions.

HMS FACIAL EXPRESSIONS, EMOTIONS As I was reading Lewis, et al., I remembered this recent study report on facial expressions. This study directly refutes the claims of Ekman reported on pp 39-40 and points up a bias in the Lewis text against cultural explanations. Obviously as an anthropologist, I am not sympathetic to a pure biology approach to love, but I still find Lewis et al. compelling. Does it matter than one small piece of their evidence has been proven empirically to be false?

东方人和西方人表达感情时候都差别──西方人用整张脸。而东方人都眼神更为精妙

Color illusion 12

very well-written article by Tim Kreider on using alternate life paths as a way of gauging and judging the choices we have made.

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.

on how people judge others out of jealousy or fear, and on the different choices we all make, and on how one choice cancels out other choices and on how that's hard. See comments for great discussion.

A mental health nurse's comic about schizophrenia.

A comic about schizophrenia.

Very well done.

Dumb Little Man shares ideas to make the everyday person more productive in life. Expect to read tips on finance, saving money, business, and some DIY for the house.

Plus Maths Magazine: Feature Article

The Carol syndrome

A mathematical explanation of how pretty girls scare boys away.

Mooie vrouwen worden zelden aangesproken. Wiskundige onderbouwing waarom

"mind"

This weeks Sunday Siesta has been postponed as I have been working all weekend on this article. It’s my longest article ever at over 4500 words but I think it was worth the time and the effort.

ou are the least bit hesitant or apologetic for offering the money, you are doomed. No one likes to take money if he feels as though the person is stretching himself to give it away. Remember, the more public the favor, the more private the pass. Whip out the bill, move swiftly. Fold it in quarters for discretion. Use the right palm. Smile knowingly. Wave it flat, like

Gutsy: "I skipped the ticket counter altogether, walked straight into first class, and announced that I'd give anyone twenty dollars for his seat. There was some laughter, some nervous ass shifting, and just when I figured no one would bite, a big guy with a beltful of pagers and cell phones took the deal... The FAA would shit their pants if everyone could do that... One of the guys flagging cabs pointed me to the back of the line. That's when I grabbed him by the elbow, pulled him close, and shook his hand, passing the next twenty... As we pulled away, someone in the line threw a half-empty cup of coffee against my window... At 3:00 that very morning, I had called an Eighth Avenue bodega and told them I'd give them twenty dollars for a pint of milk and a Hustler magazine.... I got my shoes resoled in twenty minutes instead of two weeks..."

...Then I realized something else: Most people aren't willing to lose their job for twenty bucks, but if they have something they already take for granted--a place in line, a seat, a ticket to a show they've already seen--they'll jump on a twenty like a possum on a wet bag of groceries. How to Grease a Palm IT'S ALL ABOUT ATTITUDE AND NEED. You have to have the attitude. You must discern the need. If you are the least bit hesitant or apologetic for offering the money, you are doomed. No one likes to take money if he feels as though the person is stretching himself to give it away. Remember, the more public the favor, the more private the pass. Whip out the bill, move swiftly. Fold it in quarters for discretion. Use the right palm. Smile knowingly. Wave it flat, like a flag, when you're after more favors, more fealty. In this case, use the fingertips. Either way, it's really just a sort of greeting. Treat it like a how-do-you-do and nothing more.

Neuroscience

happiness most often comes from experiences...

Cars that make you happy: BMW 325, 535, M3, and X3, Audi A4, Jaguar, Mazda Miata, Subaru WRX, Toyota Matrix, Prius, and Corolla, Honda Civic.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE POLYMATH

People who know a lot about a lot have long been an exclusive club, but now they are an endangered species. Edward Carr tracks some down ... &nbsp;read&nbsp;more&nbsp;&raquo;

That is why modern institutions tend to exclude polymaths, he says. “It’s very hard to show yourself as a polymath in the current academic climate. If you’ve got someone interested in going across departments, spending part of the time in physics and part of the time elsewhere, their colleagues are going to kick them out. They’re not contributing fully to any single department. OK, every so often you’re going to get a huge benefit, but from day to day, where the universities are making appointments, they want the focus in one field.”

People who know a lot about a lot have long been an exclusive club, but now they are an endangered species.

“Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity."

"People who know a lot about a lot have long been an exclusive club, but now they are an endangered species..."

Great stuff to remember, links to other posts

Research in to link occurrence, average syllables per word and readability grade levels of retweets vs. regular tweets.

Interesting. Linguistic analysis of tweets and retweets: http://tr.im/qsxn (via @NiemanLab) [from http://twitter.com/mkeagle/statuses/2420004728]

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past http://bit.ly/118DuN [from http://twitter.com/robinhowlett/statuses/4629005159]

Nothin' like a little self-hate to fan the flames

I didn't see that coming...

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

2009-10-05, by Mert Tol, "It’s worth repeating that the single most important thing you can do to build appeal, mood, and ambiance for your site is to select an appropriate color scheme. There really are no awful colors—any color can look attractive when placed with appropriate color companions. Even though web colors are mixed differently than traditional media, that doesn’t mean that you need to learn all new theories to make color work on the web; the old theories about pleasing color schemes still hold true. [...]"

It's worth repeating that the single most important thing you can do to build appeal, mood, and ambiance for your site is to select an appropriate color scheme.

Susan Blackmore: Consciousness Paul Broks: What should I do? David Buss: Overcoming irrationality Robert Cialdini: Over-commitment Marilyn Davidson: Lost opportunities Elizabeth Loftus: Nightmares Paul Ekman: Death and forgiveness Sue Gardner: Dark places Alison Gopnik: Parenthood Jerome Kagan: Methodological flaws Stephen Kosslyn: Satiators and addicts Ellen Langer: Optimism David Lavallee: Sporting rituals Chris McManus: Beauty Robert Plomin: Nature, nurture Mike Posner: Learning difficulties Stephen Reicher: Who am I? Steven Rose: The explanatory gap Paul Rozin: Time management Norbert Schwarz: Incidental feelings Martin Seligman: Self-control Robert Sternberg: Career masochism Richard Wiseman: Wit

The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue. That's over 900 quality, peer-reviewed psychology journal articles digested since 2003. To mark the occasion, the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. Their responses are by turns candid, witty and thought-provoking. Here's what they had to say:

Psychologist writes about what they don't understand about themself

Artikel med länksamling där ett antal personer på 150 ord ska beskriva "one nagging thing" de inte förstår med sig själva.

"The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue. That's over 900 quality, peer-reviewed psychology journal articles digested since 2003. To mark the occasion, the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves." Via Mind Hacks.

the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. Their responses are by turns candid, witty and thought-provoking. Here's what they had to say:

this is good to hear.

When things don’t add up, the mind goes into high gear.

Studie: Absurditäten rütteln die Sinne wach.

This is really interesting.

Wow. Perfect.

"If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem."

I set my own risk tolerance. you must be aware of what signals you are sending by your appearance and the environment. Learn to understand and respect women’s communication to you. If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem. Don’t rape. Nor should you commit these similar but less severe offenses: don’t assault. Don’t grope. Don’t constrain. Don’t brandish. Don’t expose yourself. Don’t threaten with physical violence. Don’t threaten with sexual violence. Shouldn’t this go without saying? Of course it should. Sadly, that’s not the world I live in. You may be beginning to realize that it’s not the world you live in, either.

a man's guide to talking to strange women without seeming crazy/serial rapist by Phaedra Starling

Shouldn’t this go without saying? Of course it should. Sadly, that’s not the world I live in. You may be beginning to realize that it’s not the world you live in, either.

Newsflash, Mr. Nice Guy: Being pushy or creepy tends to set off alarm bells.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Ftechnology%2F3304496%2FBe-lucky---its-an-easy-skill-to-learn.html

My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

[A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others and that it is possible to become luckier.] haha! coincidentally I was talking with Frank M about this just today..

Very interesting. I tend to dismiss "luck" as a silly non entity but would definitely file myself under "lucky" rather than "unlucky" if you made me choose. I agree entirely that being positive and dealing with what you actually have rather than what you'd like to have are useful attributes. On the intuition front I don't think most decisions matter that much - making them one way or another and getting on with it is more important than what the decision is. I guess thinking you can make things work out either way is a "lucky" kind of a thing.

Moiz Syed: Highly recommend this read to understand contemporary organizational structures: http://bit.ly/WcmwS

wow! MacLeod hierarchy. Sociopaths, clueless, and losers. Fascinating.

Hyvä video optisista harhoista.

TED Talk, fascinating as always...

TED presentation on optical illusions - explanation that they are not failures of the senses, but simply the brain taking empirical and historical data it has gathered from other experiences that have been useful and analyzing data it receives. TL;DR - information has only the meaning we give it.

"People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information."

People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning.

"People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning. It’s an idea that has obvious applications for education, but could be useful for anyone who is trying to learn new material of any kind."

Reminded me that asking questions BEFORE reading the chapter is a better way to prepare students for learning.

Free videos from Bob Marley to Albert Einstein on topics from Arts and Archaeology to Quantum Physics and Zoology

Coming soon a free university. We are currently in development enter your email address below to be notified when we enter open beta.

Scientific studies have shown that you can destroy a child by calling them "smart." Even when they're very young, little kids know that being "smart" is what makes them special - and so, the first time they encounter something they don't understand immediately, it's a threat. Their specialness is in danger of being stripped away. And if they lose that smartness, then what are they?

You're going to live in fear, smarty. The question is, which fear?---------As long as they were in the drawer, they could be good. And I could be a good writer. If I worked at it. Which I wasn't, but that potential gave me all the glory of feeling like I might be a great writer some day without all of that icky negative feedback. Sure, I had this constant underlying fear that maybe I wasn't good enough - but I had a moderately popular journal, some folks who liked me, and wasn't that enough?

the

Not to make too much of it, but this struck a chord with me. I can identify with this.

Yet another reason to avoid the middle of the grocery store. (via @seldo)

Eating a diet high in processed food increases the risk of depression, research suggests. What is more, people who ate plenty of vegetables, fruit and fish actually had a lower risk of depression, the University College London team found.

food inc.

The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be. By Anuschka de Rohan

@tommorris: "Oh my, justification at last: http://is.gd/4Pdl0" (from http://twitter.com/tommorris/status/5493288033)

I like this

'A grumpy person can cope with more demanding situations than a happy one because of the way the brain "promotes information processing strategies".'

In a bad mood? Don't worry - according to research, it's good for you.

n "promotes information processing strategies". Negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world Professor Joe Forgas He asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events

Notable site!

Some interesting videos and camera tricks explored.

Series of Six videos on people who abuse science by calling it paranormal because they don't know the difference. Or often used by scammers who pretend to have "powers".

Compulsive must watch video. Recorded for mainstream British TV and now released on the Internet.

"Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation."

Nature vs Nurture

David Brooks on why genius is created through deliberate practice.

"The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft."

"I track myself - 40 things about my body, mind, and activity - every day" -- Alexandra Carmichael

"I track myself - 40 things about my body, mind, and activity - every day. The fact that I do this tracking seems to interest people. Whether they are driven by curiosity about the phenomenon of personal data collection, or by the desire for a yardstick by which to measure and compare themselves, the fascination exists."

The differences between rational thinking and intelligence.

Is George W. Bush stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and "as a result ill-informed".

the

Ways to increase sales on ecommerce sites and increase sign-ups on service sites,

Read it. Do it. Awesome advice from Tog.

I'm about to give you a number of ways to increase sales on ecommerce sites and increase sign-ups on service sites, but first, raise your hand if you personally, when surfing the web, enjoy registering to use a site.

Summary. This article presents results from a study investigating the personality of typefaces. Participants were asked to rate 40 typefaces (from serif, sans serif, display, and handwriting classes) using semantic differential scales. Responses are shown by typeface class and individual typeface using scaled scores. These results are helpful to practitioners when deciding which typeface to use for online text.

Survey results of typefaces and their usability.

user reponses to web typefaces

40 onscreen typefaces for useability

influence or manipulation?

Seven principles of knowledge management by Dave Snowden

"We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down."

Dave Snowden's Seven Principles of Knowledge Management

kes sense to you, the best thing you can do now is creating your learning log. It doesn’t need to be perfect, a

Learn how to remember things you learn.

How we, as creative people, can harness this understanding of the left and right brain to be more creative, as well as succeed in other work-related tasks.

The concept of the left and right brain only lately popped up in the late 1960's, but since has become a well-known part of human psychology. While we all

Too often we get stuck in inaction — the quagmire of doubt and perfectionism and distractions and planning that stops us from moving forward.

<img src="http://zenhabits.net/fotos/20091109walk.jpg" /> <small>Taking action doesn't mean making life a blur.</small>

Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats...

rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress. When placed in the unfamiliar space, they didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

This is great!! Found via Mental Floss.

Great comic strip on "normal" people.

Cool comic about how there is no such thing as "normal".

people are weird

Other researchers have looked at how exercise alters the activity of dopamine, another neurotransmitter in the brain, while still others have concentrated on the antioxidant powers of moderate exercise. Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress. In an experiment led by researchers at the University of Houston and reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, rats whose oxidative-stress levels had been artificially increased with injections of certain chemicals were extremely anxious when faced with unfamiliar terrain during laboratory testing. But rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress. When placed in the unfamiliar space, they didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored.

Amazing.

The rise of overparenting. Insightful and amusing.

The literature on overparenting raises a number of sticky questions. For example, is it really wrong for us to push our children to excel in areas where they are talented?

“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.” The article reviews books about the new "crisis" of overparenting. There are some helpful comments, but it is nice that the author acknowledges the pendulum swings in pop psychology and in parenting. Would be nice to follow some of the implications of these movements. The article briefly touches on the implications of the selfishness of current parents, but it is only hypothesis. I'd be intersted in a thorough analysis of implications from a historical perspective. Every generation seems to believe the next generation is spoiled and lazy, which seems to be the real critique behind the overparenting books.

The rise of overparenting.

Psychology is one of those subjects that everybody likes to think they know something about. We love to go around diagnosing our friends and co-workers, both to make sense of the world and to make ourselves feel like we're smarter than they are. But like any science that makes its way into the pop culture, a lot of the "common sense" statements we hear every day are so wrong that they border on raving idiocy. Such as...

I’ve had many instructors before and since, but few that I remember with as much fondness – and why my favorite professor was a chronic liar.

great idea

Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

A Harvard Psychiatrist Explains Zombie Neurobiology

Many of the strategies employed in competitive and recreational sports are applicable in business and our personal lives. One lesson I learned from alpine ski racing was the "40-30-30 Rule." During training, early on, I tried to go fast, and I also focused on not falling. On a ride up the ski lift, my coach told me I was missing the point. He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks.

If you're not risking failure, you're not risking enough. Why pushing outside of your comfort zone is a crucial part of the creative process.

The 99 Percent

As I grew older, this conclusion lay dormant and unexamined in my mind. RPGs continued to be my favorite genre. I relished the opportunity to watch interesting, lovable characters develop and interact in epic storylines. (Comparatively interesting and lovable, anyway - say what you will about Cecil, but his quest for redemption revealed a lot more depth than Mega Man's quest to shoot up some robots.) And I loved feeling like a hero. I saved the world in Final Fantasy IV, again in Lufia II, then again in Chrono Trigger.

When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Someone like roomtodance above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten. ....the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.

This week we will be confronting a fact that, by definition, haunts the average online dater: no matter how much time you spend polishing your profile, honing your IM banter, and perfecting your message introductions, it’s your picture that matters most.

Posted by angela

Yawn It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain.

It’s one of the best things you can do for your brain.

"My advice is simple. Yawn as many times a day as possible: when you wake up, when you’re confronting a difficult problem at work, when you prepare to go to sleep, and whenever you feel anger, anxiety, or stress. Yawn before giving an important talk, yawn before you take a test, and yawn while you meditate or pray because it will intensify your spiritual experience."

Introduction by John Brockman "What is this stuff, you ask one another," says the narrator in Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, "and how can it still be kicking around, given how much we already know?"

There's an excerpt from novel here, but the important part is the non-fiction appendix analyzing and refuting the actual arguments for God.

A few weeks ago I had the miserable experience of reading Twilight. A friend bought it for me and I took it with me to read on a long flight from Seattle to Houston. I knew it was going to be crappy, but I thought it would be a guilty pleasure kind of crappy - where you know it's bad but you still get enjoyment out of it. I actually managed to power through around 400 pages until I gave up and started reading Sky Mall. I've been seeing Twilight everywhere lately, especially with Vampire Teens II New Moon's release, so I thought I'd break down why chicks go apeshit for it.

"If you're male and you like Twilight, you're gay. I don't mean that in the derogatory sense, I mean it in the "you want to put your testicles against another man's testicles while gripping handfuls of chesthair" kind of way." /via @seldo

"If you're male and you like Twilight, you're gay. I don't mean that in the derogatory sense, I mean it in the 'you want to put your testicles against another man's testicles while gripping handfuls of chesthair' kind of way."

May 26, 2009 The Difference Between An Amateur, A Scientist, And A Genius

"An amateur is full of wonder and speculation, tinkering towards the truth but suffering from a lack of knowledge and idleness; he's not even sure if someone else has already made these discoveries. "Is this a worthwhile pursuit?" A scientist performs experiments to confirm or disprove a hypothesis, and in that way he grinds out the truth. A genius has three abilities, which are actually the union of amateur and scientist: 1. to know the state of the art, what is known and what is not known. 2. To be able to think "out of the box". 3. To be disciplined enough to concentrate on the tedium of a formal investigation of his wondrous speculations."

The old sayings "success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration" or "90% of anything is just showing up" really speak not to the necessity of work, but to the point that most ideas are mediocre and it doesn't matter. Diligent application can make almost anything a success.

An amateur is full of wonder and speculation, tinkering towards the truth but suffering from a lack of knowledge and idleness; he's not even sure if someone else has already made these discoveries. "Is this a worthwhile pursuit?" A scientist performs experiments to confirm or disprove a hypothesis, and in that way he grinds out the truth. A genius has three abilities, which are actually the union of amateur and scientist: 1. to know the state of the art, what is known and what is not known. 2. To be able to think "out of the box". 3. To be disciplined enough to concentrate on the tedium of a formal investigation of his wondrous speculations.

http://tinyurl.com/mancyg

"A genius has three abilities, which are actually the union of amateur and scientist: 1. to know the state of the art, what is known and what is not known. 2. To be able to think "out of the box". 3. To be disciplined enough to concentrate on the tedium of a formal investigation of his wondrous speculations."

News from UC Berkeley

In a study recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.

EEGs show brain differences between poor and rich kids

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 02 December 2008

The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations.

Study on 5000 people across China. “Women’s orgasm frequency increases with the income of their partner,” said Dr Thomas Pollet, the Newcastle University psychologist behind the research. [...] The study is certain to prove controversial, suggesting that women are inherently programmed to be gold-diggers." Replicated in Germany and USA.

gest lifestyle studies. The Chinese Health and Family Life Survey targeted 5,000 people across China for in-depth interviews about their personal lives, including questions about their sex lives, income and other factors. Among these were 1,534 women with male partne

Scientists have found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner’s bank balance.

Hilarious! Now I understand why my wife has a constant smile :-)

g abo

The ever-knowledgable Rands waxing intellectual on nerds and their games. A great read.

a must-read, as usual.

How games appeal to the nerd mind.

menus marketing tricks

principles of menu design

Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 1)

"To be sure, the Van Meegeren story raises many, many questions. Among them: what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren — we want to know more."

Han van Meegeren

Long OpEd piece on a fake Vermeer and Nazi ties in Amsterdam

At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed "Dex", heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity--vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and misdemeanors--targeting U.S. businesses and residents.

The Smoking Gun: Telephone Terrorist

A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality

Outing An Online Outlaw A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality

interesting article on following through with your goals

Whether you plan to cure cancer, lose weight or be the world's best parent, results of a new study suggest you'd do well to keep your mouth shut about it. And not just to avoid annoying other people. Researchers report that when dealing with identity goals — that is, the aspirations that define who we are — sharing our intentions doesn't necessarily motivate achievement. On the contrary, a series of experiments shows that when others take notice of our plans, performance is compromised because we gain "a premature sense of completeness" about the goal.

"Researchers report that when dealing with identity goals — that is, the aspirations that define who we are — sharing our intentions doesn't necessarily motivate achievement. On the contrary, a series of experiments shows that when others take notice of our plans, performance is compromised because we gain "a premature sense of completeness" about the goal." You have to pay to read the journal article but the abstract is here: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122306810/abstract

"(Take) a mother who talks about all the great things she's going to do for her kids — help them do better in school, get better test scores, give them extra training — while all the other mothers nod in approval," says Gollwitzer. "The chances are high that she won't do as much as she could to achieve those goals because she's already viewed as an ideal mother just by sharing her wonderful intentions." He explains the intentions function as a symbol of possessing the desired identity. This is evident in the statement of a "high-order goal," such as losing weight to become a healthier person, but not in planning to drop three pounds to fit into a dress.

Whether you plan to cure cancer, lose weight or be the world's best parent, results of a new study suggest you'd do well to keep your mouth shut about it. And not just to avoid annoying other people. Researchers report that when dealing with identity goals — that is, the aspirations that define who we are — sharing our intentions doesn't necessarily motivate achievement. On the contrary, a series of experiments shows that when others take notice of our plans, performance is compromised because we gain "a premature sense of completeness" about the goal.

The Site is Now Missing (as of 10 march 2009) But Lucky i annotated most of the part , so click on the Expand and read from ther Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.magazinetimepass.com%2Foddities%2Fmost-bizarre-experiments-of-all-time

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers. The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation.

ht: @STRtweets -- interestingly, dig into the really small percentage of atheists.

Cathy Lynn Grossman 3/17/09

Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds

How to concentrate and get rid of distractions

How to Succeed at Programming

Many copywriting and marketing gurus teach simplistic ideas about psychology. They insist that people can be fully understood and manipulated ...

People are highly complex and often mysterious, so we all struggle to understand our fellow humans. However, now that you’ve gotten over being afraid to sell, here are a few basic psychological tidbits that can help you write compelling copy.

Screw ups, disasters, misfires, flops. Why losing big can be a winning strategy.

"There are advantages to thinking on the margin. When we look at a problem from the outside, we’re more likely to notice what doesn’t work. Instead of suppressing the unexpected, shunting it aside with our 'Oh shit!' circuit and Delete key, we can take the mistake seriously. A new theory emerges from the ashes of our surprise."

"This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box."

Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Article about the messiness of science, its failures and how an “in vivo” investigation that attempted to learn from the messiness of real experiments -

Dear US government and TSA. This is reality, not TV. Please act accordingly not stupidly.

A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.

“By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant "bring 'em on" rhetoric. There's a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.”

Professor Schneier does it again. He puts into words what I've been thinking, much better than I could have done so.

Last week's attempted terror attack on an airplane heading from Amsterdam to Detroit has given rise to a bunch of familiar questions. How did the explosives get past security screening? What steps could be taken to avert similar attacks? Why wasn't there an air marshal on the flight? And, predictably, government officials have rushed to institute new safety measures to close holes in the system exposed by the incident. Reviewing what happened is important, but a lot of the discussion is off-base, a reflection of the fundamentally wrong conception most people have of terrorism and how to combat it.

instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.

Good article on the rising rate of obesity in the US and around the world.

"The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.” "

A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.” Kessler invents his own term—“conditioned hypereating”—to describe how people respond to these laboratory-designed concoctions. Foods like Cinnabons and Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos are, he maintains, like drugs:

"Early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes. In America today, obtaining calories is very nearly effortless; as Power and Schulkin observe, with a few dollars it’s possible to go to the grocery store and purchase enough sugar or vegetable oil to fulfill the average person’s energy requirements for a week. The result is what’s known as the 'mismatch paradigm.' The human body is 'mismatched' to the human situation. 'We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,' Power and Schulkin write. 'We now live in Candyland.'"

One of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans—how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often—comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjected to a battery of tests in special trailers that the C.D.C. hauls around the country. The studies, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since.

Research behind design

Provides examples that include 'Kingsdale School in London [which] was redesigned, with the help of psychologists, to promote social cohesion; the new structure also includes elements that foster alertness and creativity.'

How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood

ists are giving their hunches an empirical basis

Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can. The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them. “The brain is plastic and continues to change, not in getting bigger but allowing for greater complexity and deeper understanding,” says Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California, who has studied ways to teach adults effectively. “As adults we may not always learn quite as fast, but we are set up for this next developmental step.” [via xeks]

“As adults we have these well-trodden paths in our synapses,” Dr. Taylor says. “We have to crack the cognitive egg and scramble it up. And if you learn something this way, when you think of it again you’ll have an overlay of complexity you didn’t have before — and help your brain keep developing as well.”

This is an excerpt of a large-scale guide to the inner workings of The Shining. The written probe here (we have a patterned visual probe for printing later) is evidence of a conscious attempt to create motion-glyphs out of seemingly mundane and unrelated forms, signs and symbols of two continental systems. In essence a primer for a new form of visual cognition, The Shining eschews all formal genre conditions of horror crafting a vastly unseeable new genre, one that has yet to be fully integrated into our culture as re-cognition.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2010%2F01%2F03%2Feducation%2Fedlife%2F03adult-t.html%3Fem

Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma,” or something that “helps you critically reflect on the assumptions you’ve acquired.”

Memory tips

When things don’t add up, the mind goes into high gear.

Blacketer sent this to me

financial crisis

Great article -- recommended by Jeremy Shapiro. One part of the argument: the fallacy of the belief in diversification and complexity.

Very interesting article about the causes of the current crisis.

By Jerry Z. Muller Thursday, January 29, 2009 Major recessions are characterized by something novel. Opacity and pseudo-objectivity created the crisis today.

David Dobbs tells us about a new theory in genetics called the orchid hypothesis that suggests that the genes that underlie some of the most troubling human behaviors -- violence, depression, anxiety -- can, in combination with the right environment, also be responsible for our best behaviors. Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind's phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail -- but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society's most cr

People that are genetically prone to being at risk in poor environments are also more successful in good environments

found via kottke.org

"the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success"

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

a bad environment and poor parenting vs the right environment and good parenting

“stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people. The Atlantic Online | December 2009 |

based on some recent neuroscience studies

memory_brainOf course, it’s not that simple; but if you believe Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland, Twitter and Facebook are very different beasts when it comes to improve your “working memory“, which relates to “the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information in short-term memory.”

Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber

Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber http://ff.im/-7LOlp [from http://twitter.com/kenmat/statuses/3827888273]

Of course, it’s not that simple; but if you believe Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland, Twitter and Facebook are very different beasts when it comes to improve your “working memory“ [...]

Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber: Of course, it&#8217;s not that simple; but i.. http://bit.ly/mvYOS [from http://twitter.com/StoneCS/statuses/3818117834]

True or Not? Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber http://ow.ly/orHP [from http://twitter.com/gideonking/statuses/3836716669]

By Mary Jaksch Every moment we get a new opportunity to make new decisions and change how we live our life. Here is a selection of the best 100

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.

That is, if you can work hard to have self-discipline in one, small area, you create self-discipline almost effortlessly in other areas. The most famous study about this phenomena is from Baumeister, who found that students who walked with a book on their head to fix their posture ended up eating better, studying harder, and sleeping more. Without even noticing they were making those changes.

This all rings very true for me.

In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.

from a book on the same topic, describes how the "symptom repertoire" of mental illness is becoming standardized around the world, which is quite different from times past. "we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."

Fantastic!

Mostly, crappy opportunities come along, and in the meantime, you make the best of them. But that skill and habit, of making the best of your situation, is essential training. Because one day, a good opportunity will come along. And if you make the best of it -- if you're good at making the best of things -- you will turn it into a great situation

"A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest - specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - influences our ability to read emotions in other people's faces." does sleep promote brain acuity? can lack of sleep explain social deviations? are autistic people counted into this study?

"Adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life." Research suggests that sleep-deprived people are more-sensitive to negative emotions such as anger and fear. "With little mental energy to spare, you're emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you're well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival." So if you're not sleeping, and you're feeling a little on-edge, there's your reason why...

In the low self-esteem group, those who repeated the mantra felt worse afterwards compared with others who did not. However people with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive self-statement - but only slightly. The psychologists then asked the study participants to list negative and positive thoughts about themselves. They found that, paradoxically, those with low self-esteem were in a better mood when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts. Writing in the journal, the researchers suggest that, like overly positive praise, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as "I accept myself completely," can provoke contradictory thoughts in individuals with low self-esteem. Such negative thoughts can overwhelm the positive thoughts.

BBC NEWS | Health

Repeating affirmations which are, in your perception, not true will not actually help. Just the opposite, in fact.

A UK psychologist said people based their feelings about themselves on real evidence from their lives.

An excellent piece of writing.

Struggling with this article...

A reminder why I don't always feel guilty about coming off as a little bit arrogant

Rich, Black, Flunking Cal Professor John Ogbu thinks he knows why rich black kids are failing in school. Nobody wants to hear it. By Susan Goldsmith May 21, 2003 Chris Duffey John Ogbu has been compared to Clarence Thomas, denounced by the Urban League, and criticized in The New York Times. Amy Weiser It wasn’t socioeconomics, school funding, or racism that accounted for the students' poor performance, Ogbu says; it was their own attitudes, and those of their parents. Chris Duffey Lionel Fluker John McWhorter believes academia too readily blames white people. The black parents wanted an explanation. Doctors, lawyers, judges, and insurance brokers, many had come to the upscale Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights specifically because of its stellar school district. They expected their children to succeed academically, but most were performing poorly. African-American students were lagging far behind their white classmates in every measure of academic success: grade-point average, stand

John Ogbu attributes more of the responsibility for the achievement gap to Black people than other academics do.

Ogbu's work on the black middle class in Shaker Heights OH

almost-scientific quantitative analysis of dating website

Important for meeting and engaging people online, may be important for professional profiles depending on career

How to make your profile picture to pop out.

"Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit." ... "This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box."

Recomm. by Francois R.

In my journey through these systems, I’ve been seeing how each gives incentives to their users. For instance, on Foursquare every time I check in it gives me points. If I check in a new place that it didn’t know about, it gives me a ton of points. It is rewarding my behavior. This “reward” turns very addictive. Twitter, on the other hand, has its own incentive system. It puts all sorts of things in your face, like how many Tweets you’ve done, how many people you’re following, how many followers you have, and how many lists you are on. Things that are measured become games and increase addiction. But Twitter has other games going on as well. Anytime someone uses your @name in a Tweet you see it. Remember that Dale Carnegie said in his book about how to win friends and influence people that your name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

I’m an addict. You already knew that, didn’t you? After all, I’m just about to pass my 30,000th Tweet and on Facebook I have more than 10,000 friends and on Foursquare I follow more than 3,000 people (about 1% of their user base as just reported). I’m not the only addict, though. On Google there are 402,000 results for “social media addiction.” Someone even made a rap video about social media addiction. In my journey through these systems, I’ve been seeing how each gives incentives to their users. For instance, on Foursquare every time I check in it gives me points. If I check in a new place that it didn’t know about, it gives me a ton of points. It is rewarding my behavior. This “reward” turns very addictive. Twitter, on the other hand, has its own incentive system. It puts all sorts of things in your face, like how many Tweets you’ve done, how many people you’re following, how many followers you have, and how many lists you are on. Things that are measured become games and incre

Twitter, on the other hand, has its own incentive system. It puts all sorts of things in your face, like how many Tweets you’ve done, how many people you’re following, how many followers you have, and how many lists you are on.

OK, hvis nogen ved disse ting så er det nok Scoble

表情制御するらしい

顔芸自動生成ライブラリ

This is pretty funny, and true.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1078529

"This article presents some common behaviors I've observed from my past few years of interactions with geeks, nerds, and other highly-smart technical people. For brevity, I will simply use the term "geek" throughout this article as a catch-all term for such people. I don't mean to pass any value judgments on people who exhibit such behaviors; these are simply my observations and personal theories for why these behaviors occur."

Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs.

Jobs, Hoffman, LSD

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking. Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest. Thomas Frank Thomas Frank thinks that voters have become blinded to their real interests Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different: "You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them. / They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters. On BBC News.

One of my Subject

Article on challenges of living/working in a world that is full of distractions and the impact that this has on us as individuals - both in terms of productivity and sense of well being

Review of Gallagher's 'Rapt'

April 2009: Twitter and e-mail aren't making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book [Winifred Gallagher's "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life"] explains why learning to focus is the key to living better.

Twitter and e-mail aren't making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book explains why learning to focus is the key to living better. By Laura Miller

Older news, but I finally got around to reading it. Interesting piece on the importance of color.

In the latest and most authoritative study on color's cognitive effects, test subjects given attention-demanding tasks did best when primed with the color red. Asked to be creative, they responded best to blue.

Finally read this NYT Mag article. Western individualism bad for mental health treatment?

To blog about later. "For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."

Morality in animals

This thinking is another indicator of a change in human assumptions about animal consciousness -- from uncaring reductionism to reflective respect. This is not new. In 1966, Conrad Lorenz made much the same point in On Agression, but noted that humans are the only animals whose moral principles against violence are so often breached in the form of murder and war.

Scientists studying animal behaviour believe they have growing evidence that species ranging from mice to primates are governed by moral codes of conduct in the same way as humans.

Animals possess a sense of morality that allows them to tell the difference between right and wrong, according to a controversial new book.

"...thinking fast made participants feel more elated, creative and, to a lesser degree, energetic and powerful."

thinking and happiness. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciam.com%2Farticle.cfm%3Fid%3Drapid-thinking-makes-people-happy

Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy

email use primarily for positive and intelligent sharing

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics. Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)

readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles ... two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large, and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the world in a different way. “It involves the opening and broadening of the mind,” people who share this kind of article [are] seeking emotional communion, Dr. Berger said. “Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion,” he said. “If I’ve just read this story that changes the way I understand the world and myself, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”

Sociologists have developed elaborate theories of who spreads gossip and news — who tells whom, who matters most in social networks — but they’ve had less success measuring what kind of information travels fastest. Do people prefer to spread good news or bad news? Would we rather scandalize or enlighten? Which stories do social creatures want to share, and why?

the spread of articles/content online...leading the way: awe!

Results like these suggest that feeling good about yourself may in part be a matter of having a hard time feeling bad, and that confidence and even success might be triggered by interventions that do nothing but make failure seem the more intimidating possibility. The human brain, for all its power, is suspicious of difficulty, but perhaps we can learn to use that.

Phrases that are easier on the ear aren’t just catchy and easy to remember, McGlone argues, they also feel inherently truer.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.boston.com%2Fbostonglobe%2Fideas%2Farticles%2F2010%2F01%2F31%2Feasy__true%2F%3Fpage%3Dfull

in any situation where we weigh information. It’s a key part of the puzzle of how feelings like attraction and belief and suspicion work

"Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work."

Cognative fluency

...mirror neurons fire when you merely watch another person perform a similar act. It's as if the neuron (more strictly the network of which the neuron is part) was using the visual input to do a sort of "virtual reality simulation" of the other person's actions—allowing you to empathize with her and view the world from her point of view.

Brain stuff from VS Ramachandran

Ramachandran - recent piece (Jan. 09) on what various bizarre neurological disorders might imply about the self.

Is this what Antony is saying when he writes about Epilepsy? "Now imagine these same circuits become hyperactive as sometimes happens when you have seizures originating in the temporal lobes (TLE or temporal lobe epilepsy). The result would be an intense heightening of the patient's sensory appreciation of the world and intense empathy for all beings to the extent of seeing no barriers between himself and the cosmos—the basis of religious and mystical experiences. (You lose all selfishness and become one with God.) Indeed many of history's great religious leaders have had TLE. My colleague, the late Francis Crick, has suggested that TLE patients as well as priests may have certain abnormal transmitters in their brains that he calls "theotoxins"."

We all suffer occasional lapses in memory. Some people suffer severe neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's, that rob them of their ability to form memories or remember recent events. Three new studies shed light on the way the brain forms, stores and retrieves memories. Experts say they could have implications for people with certain mental disorders.

But rather than being all about creative flair a good speech-writer uses a number of techniques to get a point across. And these verbal tools are not only useful at the lectern, anyone can use them in everyday situations, from handling a boisterous child to reasoning with a traffic warden. This is because speech-writing is the language of persuasion. And the average day largely consists of trying to persuade people, says Dr Max Atkinson, a communications consultant and author of Speech-Making and Presentation Made Easy.

A brilliant speech can go down in history. But most of us write words the world will never listen to. Can speech-writing teach us skills for dealing with tricky situations in everyday life?

Max Atkinson

Some tips on good speech techniques

The average number is about 150, says leading anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

You can have friends because of what you do together or enjoy something together like football or shopping, but they're not as profound friends as those who you love for themselves because of something in their character.

Having more friends leads to earning more.

They usually consist of an inner circle of five "core" people and an additional layer of 10, he says. That makes 15 people - some will probably be family members - who are your central group and then outside that, there's another 35 in the next circle and another 100 on the outside. And that's one person's social world.

Attention Facebook users with 500+ friends: You are lying.

What's the ideal number of friends?

Interesting!

Excellent data, frank discussion of men's bias towards younger women (with graphs and pictures of cute non-young women!)

ause it has been a successful way to introduce previous posts, I wanted to put real faces on this demographic before I delve into a bunch of numbers. Pictured below are some single users in their mid-thirties or early forties, taken from the first couple pages of my own local match search. Nothing I'll talk about today pertains necessarily to any one of them, but I wanted to put forward some people to go with th

Data from OKCupid on sex match preferences and changes based on age as well as attitudes of men and women basically proving that men should date women older than they are despite the fact that typically they date younger women.

Review of "Rapt" by Winifred Gallagher -- focuses on the culture of distraction

For the focused life, forget multitasking and try meditating.

The book’s theme, which Ms. Gallagher chose after she learned she had an especially nasty form of cancer, is borrowed from the psychologist William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

Como establecer la verdad cuando nuestra identidad online esta poco mas que un avatar y pocas lineas de texto?

Few, if any, educational institutes teach the art of proper digital communication. Most of us have simply made up an impromptu strategy and crossed our fingers in the hopes that disaster doesn’t strike. With a bit of help from our friends in the fields of psychology and information technology, we can apply the age-old intuitions of face-to-face conversation to whatever advances in technology come our way.

Alright, so we keep talking about how government agencies need to gain the trust of our communities so they'll follow our recommendations. In the same breath, we declare that social media will be that silver bullet that will make everyone believe what we say and will allow our response/outreach/efforts to succeed beyond our wildest dreams. Turns out there's some research into how that actually happens. Take note and maybe your next response will be met with open ears and not wary eyes.

소셜미디어의 핵심은 진정성, 동영상으로 사례 설명한 부분이 인상적

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular Facebook Games era.

The not so hidden psychological traps in social gaming. And where it could lead (if the world wasn't such a messy place).

Jesse Schell talks about future of gaming

"Give private, anonymous feedback. Go ahead... say what you really think. " Send private, anonymous feedback to coworkers, classmates, and friends.

Send private, anonymous feedback to coworkers, classmates, and friends.

Get New Orleans, Louisiana latest news. Find photos and videos, comment on the news, and join the forum discussions at NOLA.com

"As part of his experiment, Myers decided to play the game by the designers' rules -- disregarding any customs set by the players. His character soon became very unpopular."

Interesting blog about Professor Myers' research and paper on MMO rules vs MMO social norms

David Myers, a Loyola professor and computer game scholar, looks at his computer screen with his "City of Heroes" online computer game character "Twixt" reflected in his glasses at his home in Slidell Friday, July 3, 2009. "Twixt" became perhaps the game's most reviled, abused player because his playing methods were unpopular.

On Feb. 14 I awaken to this headline: "Professor Beaten to Death by Autistic Son." I scan the story while standing, my coffee forgotten. Trudy Steuernagel, a faculty member in political science at Kent State, has been murdered and her 18-year-old son, Sky, has been arrested and charged with the crime, though he is profoundly disabled and can neither speak nor understand. Sky, who likes cartoons and chicken nuggets, apparently lost control and beat his mother into a coma. He was sitting in jail when she died. This happens to be two days after my older son's 21st birthday, which we marked behind two sets of locked steel doors. I'm exhausted and hopeless and vaguely hung over because Andrew, who has autism, also has evolved from sweet, dreamy boy to something like a golem: bitter, rampaging, full of rage. It happened no matter how fiercely I loved him or how many therapies I employed. Now, reading about this Ohio mother, there is a moment of slithering nausea and panic followed immedia

a mother's story of her violent autistic son

about a woman whose autistic son is violent

If you&#39;ve ever wondered who&#39;s in control, you or your cat, a new study points to the obvious. It&#39;s your cat.

As if you needed convincing.

From Ann Brandon via Facebook.

No surprise there.

If you've ever wondered who's in control, you or your cat, a new study points to the obvious. It's your cat.

Imported from http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/2636037970 Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds http://bit.ly/PFK0w

Duh.

READ THIS

finally they take a step or two towards the truth

So this freaking article has been showing up all over delicious for weeks, and I didn't save it when I read it, but since it's everywhere I'd like to officially say: NO. WHETHER OR NOT IT IS AN EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGE, RIGHT NOW THERE IS NO REASON TO GO THROUGH LIFE MISERABLE, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOUR PROBLEM-SOLVING OR WHATEVER IS IMPROVED. NO NO NO. Unless the *fate of the entire human population rests in your hands*, you should NOT STAY MISERABLE.

The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.

While there has been endless speculation about Darwin’s mysterious ailment — his symptoms have been attributed to everything from lactose intolerance to Chagas disease — Darwin himself was most troubled by his recurring mental problems. His depression left him “not able to do anything one day out of three,” choking on his “bitter mortification.” He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.”

Now it's twenty five years since I got out of that miserable fucking hell-hole. And people from my high school class are suddenly getting in touch, sending me email, trying to friend me on Facebook, and trying to convince me to bring my family to the reunion. (It's a picnic reunion, full family invited.) Even some of the people who used to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis are getting in touch as if we're old friends. My reaction to them... What the fuck is wrong with you people? Why would you think that I would want to have anything to do with you? How do you have the chutzpah to act as if we're old friends? How dare you? I see the RSVP list that one of you sent me, and I literally feel nauseous just remembering your names.

yes.

Very off topic: Why I won't be at my high school reunion

Your chair is your enemy. It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

Conversely, a study of people who sit for many hours found that those who took frequent small breaks — standing up to stretch or walk down the corridor — had smaller waists and better profiles for sugar and fat metabolism than those who did their sitting in long, uninterrupted chunks.

...

Man, I need to try a standing desk

Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail. This believe in your own inherent ability is what will kill your startup. Success comes from the work and ability you put in becoming better than the others, and not from some brilliance you feel you may have within you.

Dude. We did this EXACT experiment last night!

a movie about chat roulette.

a movie about chat roulette. i don't know what really know what else could be said. a movie by casey neistat NaSA Entertainment 2010

imperfect people create imperfect financial situations, regardless of prior experiences. fascinating!

Postrel on a laboratory experiment where people buy and sell a guaranteed and specified security. "Here, finally, is a security with security—no doubt about its true value, no hidden risks, no crazy ups and downs, no bubbles and panics. The trading price should stick close to the expected value. At least that’s what economists would have thought before Vernon Smith, who won a 2002 Nobel Prize for developing experimental economics, first ran the test in the mid-1980s. But that’s not what happens. Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes...you don’t just get random noise. You get bubbles and crashes. Ninety percent of the time. So much for security. "

These lab results should give pause not only to people who believe in efficient markets, but also to those who think we can banish bubbles simply by curbing corruption and imposing more regulation. Asset markets, it seems, suffer from irrepressible effervescence. Bubbles happen, even in the most controlled conditions.

financial bubbles

At least that’s what economists would have thought before Vernon Smith, who won a 2002 Nobel Prize for developing experimental economics, first ran the test in the mid-1980s. But that’s not what happens. Again and again, in experiment after experiment, the trading price runs up way above fundamental value. Then, as the 15th round nears, it crashes. The problem doesn’t seem to be that participants are bored and fooling around. The difference between a good trading performance and a bad one is about $80 for a three-hour session, enough to motivate cash-strapped students to do their best. Besides, Noussair emphasizes, “you don’t just get random noise. You get bubbles and crashes.” Ninety percent of the time.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness.

Fascinating discussion of happiness from a behavioral economics standpoint; hold on for the Q&A session afterwards, which is also interesting

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently

Vidéo TED : La mémoire et l'expérience par Ted Kahneman, Nobel d'Economie

"We think of our future as anticipated memories." Read about this talk on Bobulate.

TED Talks Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness.

as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources.

"Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit—and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism." Via Mindhacks.

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

The Economist | Depression may be linked to how willing someone is to give up his goals

Bernard d'Espagnat: What we call 'reality' is just a state of mind http://hub.tm/dkmur

Quantum reality

"You might expect the child to plan for the future, think 'OK it's cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.' But what we suggest is that this isn't what goes on in a 3-year-old's brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it."

hat tip to Leonardo Souza

“What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.”

"“What’s hard for parents is that what feels like your own personal taste, it’s everybody’s taste,” Wattenberg says. “It’s a no win situation - if you pick a name you like, probably everybody else will like it too.” And that’s what’s fascinating about watching the nation-level trends in baby naming. The national nomenclature is transformed living room by living room as one frazzled couple after another makes a seemingly personal decision for underlying phonetic reasons they haven’t considered. “People may think they named a child after great, great grandma Olivia, but they have a lot of great, great grandmas, and they picked Olivia because it fits the popular sounds,” Wattenberg says. And that’s how a country’s culture changes: People cherry-picking from the past as they look for a name to call the future."

see page 2 for "frameworks-for-business" AND "jobs-hiring": Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even have two of them: - Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day); - Complexity (so it's not mind-numbing repetition); - Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).

5 addictive mechanics explained.

Now, there's no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner's techniques. This is a big source of controversy in the world of game design right now. Braid creator Jonathan Blow said Skinnerian game mechanics are a form of "exploitation." It's not that these games can't be fun. But they're designed to keep gamers subscribing during the periods when it's not fun, locking them into a repetitive slog using Skinner's manipulative system of carefully scheduled rewards. Why would this work, when the "rewards" are just digital objects that don't actually exist? Well...

RT @cheth: Interesting read: How to Be a Positive Person, in Under 300 Words - http://j.mp/ba7nCM

Interesting read: How to Be a Positive Person, in Under 300 Words - http://j.mp/ba7nCM

"... Don’t compare yourself to others. ..."

Higher amounts of sugar, fat and salt, found in foods, makes you want to eat more. KFC, Burger King, and McDonalds show great examples of these high fat foods. The action of eating these foods is now known as “conditioned hypereating” its conditioned because of the automatic response to eating these foods and hyper because people consume the food excessively. There are a few ways to stop this process. Plan your meals, use portion sizes, cut out the foods you cant control yourself over, talk yourself out of your urges, and rehearse making the right choice before entering the restaurant.

story. Made of sugar-rich russet potatoes, they have a slightly bitter background note and brown irregularly, which gives them a complex flavour. High levels of fat generate easy mouth-melt, and surface variations add a level of interest beyond that found in mass-prod

"Our favourite foods are making us fat, yet we can't resist, because eating them is changing our minds as well as bodies"

"I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff."

TED Talks Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.

Temple Grandin's remarkable TED talk just posted (must see): http://bit.ly/cQzRtp – Michael Shermer (michaelshermer) http://twitter.com/michaelshermer/statuses/9588688450

an autistic lady talks about her expereinces

Around two-thirds of workers say the most stressful aspect of their jobs is their immediate boss, their line manager (Hogan, 2006). While this will come as no

Around two-thirds of workers say the most stressful aspect of their jobs is their immediate boss, their line manager (Hogan, 2006)...

PsyBlog | As a result of the strict hierarchies, huge pay differentials, poor decision-making, greasy-pole climbing and feeling powerless to change huge bureaucracies, followers naturally develop feelings of alienation, and alienation kills motivation and productivity, along with any hope of job satisfaction.

"If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective," Munakata said. "What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom."

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use.

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds."What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don't do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like 'I know you don't want to take your coat now, but when you're standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom."

Not too long ago, Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi were chatting with Eric Viennot, a French creator and writer. Jordan Mechner single-handedly pioneered a type of cinematic videogame with Karateka in 1984 and Prince of Persia in 1989. Eric Chahi similarly single-handedly created 1991's Another World -- known in the U.S. as Out of this World -- a painterly cinematic videogame in a similar tradition. Jordan Mechner had the following advice to share, I think it's great advice.

«It's time to declare the end of adolescence. As a social institution, it's been a failure. The proof is all around us: 19% of eighth graders, 36% of tenth graders, and 47% of twelfth graders say they have used illegal drugs, according to a study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan. One of every four girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a recent study for the Centers for Disease Control. A methamphetamine epidemic among the young is destroying lives, families, and communities. And American students are learning at a frighteningly slower rate than Chinese and Indian students.»

"Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation that has produced one of the most destructive social arrangements in human history: consigning 13-year-old males to learning from 15-year-old males." Good point.

an graduate a year early get the 12th year's cost of schooling as an automatic scholarship to any college or technical school they want to a

Sleep may be a way to sweep out the brain and get it ready for a new day of building connections between neurons, according to two new studies of fruit flies. The studies support the controversial theory that sleep weakens or entirely dissolves some synapses, the connections between brain cells. “We assume that if this is happening, it is a major function, if not the most important function, of sleep” [Science News], says Chiara Cirelli, a coauthor of the first study, published in Science.

A good insight about a classic board game, and why video games are getting better at more than just entertaining.

What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all.

Great article

Must read: excellent post on "the media hologram" and existence

A bit naive in his discussion of free markets, but otherwise a great article.

First you will experience boredom, then comes an internal psychic violence and anger, much like the experience of zazen, or sitting meditation, as the layers of your mind conditioning peel away. Don't quit, keep at it, endure it, to the end. And when you return you will find that deeply experiencing a non-conditioned reality changes things forever. What you have experienced will animate whatever intellectual life you have developed. Or negate much of it. But in serious, intelligent people, experiencing non-manufactured reality usually gives lifelong meaning and insight to the work. You will have experienced the eternal verities of the world and mankind at ground zero. And you will find that the healthy social structures our well intentioned Western minds seek are already inherent in the psyche of mankind, but imprisoned. And the startling realization that you and I are the unknowing captors.

And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

Psychology and what it might be good for considering the state of the world

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

ZenHabits

Have you ever really wanted to do something, but you just weren’t motivated enough to do it? This is always my number one reason for not taking action, as I’m sure it’s probably yours too. If you’re not motivated, you just don’t have the energy or the drive to do what you need to do, right? Simple enough

really helpful and inspirational

Be generous and list many, even if they sound silly. Example, “I love that you always know how to make your salads so colorful and appetizing.”, “I love that you have the discipline to go to the gym regularly, and you really take care of your body.”, “I love that you are so neat, and can keep your desk so organized.”

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place. If we're ever going to defeat terrorism, we need to understand what drives people to become terrorists in the first place.

"Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons...Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford, argues that this model is wrong, and discusses seven habits observed in terrorist groups that contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers...Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity."

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States. The evidence supports this. [[Some of the comments are very intriguing as well. —Ed.]]

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place—by Bruce Schneier

Smart people are good if you need to do a lot of really hard things, and we did a lot of really hard things. But it's not all upside. For one thing, smart people tend to systematically overestimate the value of being smart. In fact, it is really valuable, but they still tend to weight it too heavily compared to other virtues you might also value, such as consistency, focus, attentiveness to the emotional needs of your customers, and so on. One of the problems with really smart people is that they can talk themselves into anything. And often they can talk you into it with them. And if you're smart yourself, you can talk them into stuff. The tendency to drift and lack of focus can be really extreme unless you have a few slower people in the group to act as a kind of intellectual ballast.

interesting insight into people and psychology

yup.

A timetly takeaway: "You don’t get rich feedback when communicating over a phone, email, or text chat."

Keepers at Furuvik Zoo found that the chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles. Further, the chimp learned to recognise how and when parts of his concrete enclosure could be pulled apart to fashion further projectiles.

This is fascinating. Experts say this shows that the chimp was "anticipating a future mental state - an ability that has been difficult to definitively prove in animals."

Chimps behaviour shows they are more intelligent than it seems

Ostatnio trafiłem na świetną stronę prezentującą sto dwadzieścia sposób na to, by poprawić pracę mózgu (http://litemind.com/boost-brain-power/). Jej autor pozwolił mi przetłumaczyć tą listę. Wiele wpisów zawiera linki do anglojęzycznych stron, zawierających uzupełnienie i szczegóły. Dodatkowo dodałem parę polskich odpowiedników.

Sposoby na poprawę pracy mózgu, nie żadna chemia

About the creative (descriptive) use of language

An interesting discuss on language and how images have different meaning to different people and cultures

Lera Boroditsky's take on how language transmit culture. I'd also love to read her essay, "How Does Language Shape the Way We Think" in the anthology What's Next (Vintage Books, June 2009)

Through Juliet's lips, Shakespeare said "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." But the Bard may have been wrong &mdash; names do matter. Language researchers say your sense of the rose depends on what you call it.

Lera Boroditsky asks us to describe a bridge - "What explains the difference? Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German — die brucke — is a feminine noun, and the word for "bridge" in Spanish — el puente — is a masculine noun, native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender" (wikipedia notes that "For the Burning Man festival, she once built a banana vehicle" ;)

"The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people."

Interesting read on social gaming, e.g. FarmVille: http://bit.ly/bLPIEK – Jacob Bøtter (boetter) http://twitter.com/boetter/statuses/12443260031

Cultivated Play: Farmville liszkiewicz's picture

A story done on behavior economics and it's acceptance in the Obama administration.

RT @GuyKawasaki: Great piece on behavorial economics and social psychology. Must read! http://adjix.com/6ufc [from http://twitter.com/r1tz/statuses/2088997262]

Human beings don't always behave rationally. Now, policymakers are using research about human decision-making to design policies to protect humans from their own poor judgment &mdash; including everything from unwanted pregnancies to failing to save for retirement.

Economic models and how unpredictable human beings mess with them.

future of health

Learn about the frontiers of human health from seven of Stanford's most innovative faculty members. Inspired by a format used at the TED Conference (http://www.ted.com), each speaker delivers a highly engaging talk in just 10-20 minutes about his or her research. Learn about Stanford's newest and most exciting discoveries in neuroscience, bioengineering, brain imaging, psychology, and more.

7 youtube videos from Stanford University

acquire

In Seed Magazine, Jonathan Gottschall, a leading Literary Darwinist, reviews Geoffrey Miller's latest book, Spent, which argues that most of what we do, especially what we buy, is a kind of marketing designed to signal our power and secure our (genetic) place in the social hierarchy. That's all well and good, but it seems awful reductive.

In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

Nice piece detailing the importance of emotional design in interface design.

Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users

We’re changing. Our relationships online and in real life are shifting as we become more public with our private lives. Online social networks have helped our real world social networks transcend time and space making it easy (and seemingly essential) to share the triumphs, tragedies, and trite moments of life. No longer do you simply tell your best friend that you’ve broken up with your boyfriend. It feels natural to many people to tell hundreds of Twitter followers, and Facebook friends. No matter how you feel about the appropriateness of over sharing, the shift towards a public private life is changing our expectations of the relationships we create online. Remember the websites of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s that used formal language to create a professional, guarded persona and brand? The trend was towards the serious, because it seemed like you couldn’t land clients or entice new users if you weren’t stuffy.

:| (Also, wait, poverty-influenced stress can affect... your genes? Erm, what?)

"To test their hypothesis, Evans and Schamberg analyzed the results of their earlier, long-term study of stress in 195 poor and middle-class Caucasian students, half male and half female. In that study, which found a direct link between poverty and stress, students' blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested. Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items. So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success. When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared."

Does being poor make you physically less intelligent?

Growing up poor isn't merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

Article discussing the frame work on social interaction design and how a 2.0 expereince needs a different way of thinking focusing on the users expectations and assumptions instead of the creators intended purpose.

Yahoo isn't firing people en masse — it's "getting fit." That noisome euphemism for today's layoffs of 1,500 people must have hissed forth from the brain of some overpaid management consultant. Likewise for pages upon pages of instructions on how to sack employees — which Valleywag has obtained.

These are some seriously morbid slides from a HR perspective.

supertitious, crowd, asking for help, familiarity breeds contempt, Mondays, pets, right ear

Many fascinating insights into the human mind are hidden in the most routine activities.

Aggregation of pop-psychology articles

Good insightful articles on practical psychology

psychology blog article

e paper variants going back to the 1800s that hide illustrations in the little curlicues of the margins. And there are new videogame versions like Mystery Case Files. For thousands of years, we've derived satisfaction from searching and uncovering—and we still do each time we turn up lost car keys.

brief description of the top addictive games and why there addictive.

Short takes on some addictive puzzle games.

on tetris: "A timeless classic. Fitting pieces together feeds the same pleasure center of the brain that gets off on packing a suitcase really well or squeezing all your groceries into a single bag."

Dealing with negativity online can be tough, which was why we were all ears when Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week, took the stage at The Next Web ‘10 event in Amsterdam to discuss how to learn to love haters. While Mashable recently offered you advice on how to deal with negative feedback specifically in the social media realm, Ferriss takes the concept a step further with advice on how to contend with — and benefit from — criticism across all platforms. We caught up with Ferriss backstage at the event to find out more about his seven principles for dealing with haters. Read on for some interesting ideas and let us know which work for you — as well as your own strategies — in the comments below.

Tim Ferriss' "7 Tips for Dealing with Haters" is brilliant. I'd just add "listen well enough to know when you're wrong" http://bit.ly/cRbab2 – Chris Anderson (chr1sa) http://twitter.com/chr1sa/statuses/13312105642

Not everyone processes and understands information the same way. You can boost productivity by learning and matching your learning style to the proper tools and techniques, while also making it (gasp) more enjoyable.

Awesome.

Not everyone processes and understands information the same way. You can boost productivity by learning and matching your learning style to the proper tools and techniques, while also making it (gasp) more enjoyable. Photo by Jacob Botter. Organization blog Unclutterer digs into identifying one's own learning style, something we've discussed here before, as well as the related activities and daily habits that can increase organization and productivity. To pin your style down, you'll run through several categories and questions. Here are some sample statements from the visual category:

They enjoy TV, but watch it a lot less!

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

via Lifehacker. "But the researchers could not tell whether unhappy people watch more television or whether being glued to the set is what makes people unhappy."

Report on flexibility in the future after 30 not really occurring.

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”

“The shortest path to oneself leads around the world.”

NOOO I'M ALREADY 21 MUST SELF-ACTUALIZE BEFORE I GET SET IN MY WAYS.

Scientific American: Millions of us dream of transforming our lives, but few of us are able to make major changes after our 20s. Here's why

personality changes occur well past the age of 30 but that typically these changes are small in magnitude compared with the changes that occur between the ages of 20 and 40.

-How to work with “stupid” people http://j.mp/d8Qteb

"The growing expectation placed on schools and parents to boost pupils' self-esteem is breeding a generation of narcissists, an expert has warned."

We've been telling children they are unique and special for over a decade.

I discovered that you'd never get an answer to a problem from Linux Gurus by asking. You have to troll in order for someone to help you with a Linux problem. <dm> For example, I didn't know how to find files by contents and the man pages were way too confusing. What did I do? I knew from experience that if I just asked, I'd be told to read the man pages even though it was too hard for me. <dm> Instead, I did what works. Trolling. By stating that Linux sucked because it was so hard to find a file compared to Windows, I got every self-described Linux Guru around the world coming to my aid. They gave me examples after examples of different ways to do it. All this in order to prove to everyone that Linux was better.

How to get the Linux gurus to help you.

Useful list of ideas on how to overcome procrastination

mental tricks

Unique tips for dealing with stress.

The point is, stress attacks in all sorts of ways—which means that if you want to control it, contain it, conquer it, you need to fire back in kind.

52 Ways to Control and Conquer Stress http://twurl.nl/o7dr0x [from http://twitter.com/JonayCom/statuses/1648117599]

Looking at a sexy photo of my wife "activated part of your 'new brain' that represents the sensation of touch in your genital area,"

For me, translating love into biology is actually kind of reassuring. Yes, it takes away some of the mystery — but also the fear. Think of it like a drug: If you're high and feel like you're sliding off the face of the earth, you can tell yourself, Hey, I'm having a horrible chemical reaction, but I'll get over it. I will stabilize.

One of the hallmarks of social media is content: creating it, sharing it and engaging with it. The best content in social media inspires, informs, educates or entertains (and if you’re really lucky, it does all four!). But how do you create content that goes viral? What follows are seven strategies you can employ to help your content succeed.

Among the hallmarks associated with social media will be articles: creating the idea, sharing it along with getting from it. What follows are more effective strategies it is possible to use to help your articles do well.

7 Ways to Use Psychological Influence With Social Media Content

Social media marketing with content created on the convergence of neuroscience, human psychology and group dynamics.

wikiHow article about How to Be Creative.

TED Talks About Leadership

Video about the first follower

A year ago, journalist Lenore Skenazy caused a media sensation when she let her 9-year-old rideNew York City&rsquo;s subway by himself. In a new book, she explains why she has no

This lady is NOT the worst mom in america: http://bit.ly/v6g1i [from http://twitter.com/medwardsmusic/statuses/1808843388]

A year ago, journalist Lenore Skenazy caused a media sensation when she let her 9-year-old rideNew York City’s subway by himself. In a new book, she explains why she has no regrets.

Skenazy NY New York subway

Advice from the world's worst mom who let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone.

'Brain decline' begins at age 27 Concentration Mental abilities decline at a relatively young age, experts suspect Mental powers start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, marking the start of old age, US research suggests. Professor Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia found reasoning, spatial visualisation and speed of thought all decline in our late 20s.

Mental powers start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, marking the start of old age, US research suggests.

Thought that your mental prime years were in your thirties? Think again: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7945569.stm [from http://twitter.com/mpondu/statuses/1340264706]

An overview of a study on the shape of our learning. I suppose it is no mistake that tertiary education systems follow the curve. "A seven-year study (published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging) reveals the average age at which the top performance was achieved as 22 in nine out of the 12 tests given. The first age at which there was any marked decline was at 27 in tests of brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability. Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60."

Six more years to go before I get the dumb.

visualizing words

Some choice observations on UX including: ‘People can only look at so much information or read so much text on a screen without losing interest. Only provide the information that's needed at the moment (see progressive disclosure...).’

Umfangreicher Guide einer Psychologin zu guter Usability

L'avis d'un psychologue sur la création d'interfaces utilisateurs

"And when the surface is scratched, what you find below is extraordinary - or, rather, extraordinarily difficult to make good, clear sense of. Lying in wait are arguments that lead to, if not sheer lunacy, then bullets we're loathe to bite."

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

Meredith Chivers is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario.

A recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading.

[New York Times]

“Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “

“Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.”

good fora.tv video w/ tan le of emotiv and a live demonstration of the epoc

Tan Le, co-founder and president of Emotiv Systems, gives a live demo of a mind control device that uses a person's thoughts to input computer commands.EG is the celebration of the American entertainment industry. Since 1984, Richard Saul Wurman has created extraordinary gatherings about learning and understanding. EG is a rich extension of these ideas - a conference that explores the attitude of understanding in music, film, television, radio, technology, advertising, gaming, interactivity and the web - The Entertainment Gathering

Tan Le, co-founder and president of Emotiv Systems, gives a live demo of a mind control device that uses a person's thoughts to input computer commands.

wow.

Pssst.... it is "sentence"

Whether or not God exists, thinking about Him or Her doesn't require divinely dedicated neurological wiring. Instead, religious thoughts run on brain systems used to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. The findings, based on brain scans of people contemplating God, don't explain whether a propensity for religion is a neurobiological accident. But at least they give researchers a solid framework for exploring the question. "In a way, this is a very cold look at religious belief," said National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist Jordan Grafman, co-author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We're only trying to understand where in the brain religious beliefs seem to be modulated."

Whether or not God exists, thinking about Him or Her doesn't require divinely dedicated neurological wiring.

"In a way, this is a very cold look at religious belief," said National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist Jordan Grafman, co-author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We're only trying to understand where in the brain religious beliefs seem to be modulated."

Whether or not God exists, thinking about Him or Her doesn't require divinely dedicated neurological wiring. Instead, religious thoughts run on brain systems used to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. The findings, based on brain scans of people contemplating God, don't explain whether a propensity for religion is a neurobiological accident. But at least they give researchers a solid framework for exploring the question.

The opportunity, then, is not to insist that your customers get more rational, but instead to embrace just how irrational they are. Give them what they need. Help them satisfy their needs at the same time they get the measurable, rational results your product can give them in the long run.

"The opportunity, then, is not to insist that your customers get more rational, but instead to embrace just how irrational they are."

The problem is that your prospect doesn't care about any of those things. He cares about his boss or the story you're telling or the risk or the hassle of making a change. He cares about who you know and what other people will think when he tells them what he's done after he buys from you.

The problem is that your prospect doesn't care about any of those things. He cares about his boss or the story you're telling or the risk or the hassle of making a change. He cares about who you know and what other people will think when he tells them what he's done after he buys from you. The opportunity, then, is not to insist that your customers get more rational, but instead to embrace just how irrational they are. Give them what they need. Help them satisfy their needs at the same time they get the measurable, rational results your product can give them in the long run.

Note to self: Never forget - people buy emotionally and justify rationally

"What's "striking and paradoxical" about this research, he says, is that it shows that reaching materialistic and image-related milestones actually contributes to ill-being; despite their accomplishments, individuals experience more negative emotions like shame and anger and more physical symptoms of anxiety such as headaches, stomachaches, and loss of energy. By contrast, individuals who value personal growth, close relationships, community involvement, and physical health are more satisfied as they meet success in those areas."

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM. [Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this article.]

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM. Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep - when most dreams occur - were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.

We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep called REM sleep.

The study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.

"We found that, for creative problems you've already been working on, the passage of time is enough to find solutions. "However for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity."

WSJ.com | Top-Ten Lists Abound Online, but Following the Herd Can Make You Wonder About the Wisdom of Crowds

Look at This Article. It's One of Our Most Popular Top-Ten Lists Abound Online, but Following the Herd Can Make You Wonder About the Wisdom of Crowds

another piece about "stupidity of crowds"

Popularity is, unfortunately, still all the rage.

These online rankings are public, creating a positive-feedback loop. The more popular something becomes, even if just from a random burst of interest, the more likely it is to grow ever more popular. And that has troubling implications about the effects of all sorts of popularity rankings, from bestseller charts to election polls. Frequently, popularity rankings speak less to the merits of what's being observed and more to the fact that crowds are observing it. In other words, peer pressure.

This used to be called the "lowest common denominator." Now it is called "the wisdom of crowds" or "the democratization of X." Anyway upshot: "Frequently, popularity rankings speak less to the merits of what's being observed and more to the fact that crowds are observing it."

"Top-Ten Lists Abound Online, but Following the Herd Can Make You Wonder About the Wisdom of Crowds"

"...the study showed that popularity is both unstable and malleable ... Deducing merit from popularity 'can lead to self-reinforcing snowballs of popularity, which can become decoupled from the underlying reality," says [the] study co-author."

get things done

"Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions? "

Only just able to finish reading this.

Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says. Another proven intervention is to tell junior-high-school students that I.Q. is expandable, and that their intelligence is something they can help shape. Students exposed to that idea work harder and get better grades. That’s particularly true of girls and math, apparently because some girls assume that they are genetically disadvantaged at numbers; deprived of an excuse for failure, they excel.

Poor people have I.Q.’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics.

Good mythbuster and eye-opener on I.Q. Recommended.

"Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back. "

praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity

Social networking is a phenomenon both online and offline. "Steroid use (in baseball) spread because of the wicked combination of a closed network, or cluster, and positive reinforcement..."

Krebs believes everything is quantifiable as a social network, from steroid use to linked websites to a strand of HIV working its way through the porn industry. He is at the cutting edge of the growing discipline of social network analysis, and creator of InFlow, one of the most advanced social networking software tools. The field has exploded recently as social networks, the complex sets of relationships between members of groups, have formed the backbone of popular Web systems like Facebook and Google's search crawler. Social network analysts use software, like Keyhubs and NetMiner, to uncover how the structure of peoples' connections affect their thoughts and actions.

In the eyes of Valdis Krebs, the bulging bodies of baseball's steroid era reveal a problem exacerbated by a powerful social network.

The field has exploded recently as social networks, the complex sets of relationships between members of groups, have formed the backbone of popular Web systems like Facebook and Google's search crawler. Social network analysts use software, like Keyhubs and NetMiner, to uncover how the structure of peoples' connections affect their thoughts and actions.

What a long, strange trip it's been!

Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

The book excerpt: the Shallows

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored. The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

Scientists say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information from e-mail and other interruptions.

Get back to the normal sleep cycle and rest.

ation of an imag

RT @HoagiesGifted: 'Thirst for knowledge' may be opium craving http://bit.ly/YHoJP [from http://twitter.com/bfwriter/statuses/14961074185]

Great rationale points and starting tidbits.

Designers often don’t take the time they should to learn about how basic psychological principles can effect the experience their visitors have on the sites they build. Psychological principles are either looked upon as unnecessary, or too complicated. But the truth is that they’re neither.

"Psychological principles are either looked upon as unnecessary, or too complicated. But the truth is that they’re neither"

Allow the negative space on your site to direct your visitors to the areas you want them to focus on. By combining empty space and properly styled and proportioned elements, you can encourage your visitors to look at a certain thing and take a desired action.

Great blog!

You are not so smart.

via Subgenius Spice :D

BBC News | Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works.

Article on creativity and how the minds mimic schizophrenia. Interesting about education and the mind.

That thin line between genius and madness is now verified by science.

good

changing text content and changing button color

Christakis: "Creo que formamos redes sociales porque los beneficios de una vida conectada son superiores a los costos. Si siempre soy violento contigo o te doy información errónea o te pongo triste o te infecto con gérmenes mortales tú cortarías los lazos conmigo y la red se desintegraría."

Mind Over Mass Media http://ping.fm/Y9SGX

Steven Pinker - Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.

Mind Over Mass Media http://nyti.ms/b4IVOC | Twitter, e-mail and PowerPoint are far from making us stupid — they are keeping us smart.

The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.”

RT @kenanmalik: The Internet does not make you stupid any more than an encyclopaedia makes you smart: http://nyti.ms/d3LP6f

Humans make errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. Sometimes we can’t even answer the simplest questions. Where was I last week at this time? How long have I had this pain in my knee? How much money do I typically spend in a day? These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut.

Does anybody really believe that long hours at a desk are a vocational ideal?

Gary Wolf, of Wired and The Quantified Self, describes personal data collection and analysis in NYT magazine.

This is also a corollary to keeping them too busy to think. Of course you can't turn off anyone's thought processes completely—but you can keep them too tired to do any original thinking. The decision center in the brain tires out just like a muscle, and when it's exhausted, people start making certain predictable types of logic mistakes. Found a system based on those mistakes, and you're golden.

Sick Systems

sick systems, sick workplaces

Rule 4: Reward intermittently. Intermittent gratification is the most addictive kind there is. If you know the lever will always produce a pellet, you'll push it only as often as you need a pellet. If you know it never produces a pellet, you'll stop pushing. But if the lever sometimes produces a pellet and sometimes doesn't, you'll keep pushing forever, even if you have more than enough pellets (because what if there's a dry run and you have no pellets at all?). It's the motivation behind gambling, collectible cards, most video games, the Internet itself, and relationships with crazy people. How do you do all this? It's incredibly easy: Keep the crises rolling. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you're guaranteed ongoing crises.

Creating sick systems to ensnare unwitting lovers and/or employees.

Check out this nice meaty post by @RossHudgens. So much good stuff here that I keep going back: http://bit.ly/bfnTCm

Paul Graham is most famous for heading up Y Combinator, a seed-stage startup funding firm, and also for Hacker News, a social news website revolving around computer hacking, startup companies, and as their submission guidelines state, “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”. Graham’s essays online are highly regarded for their insight and relevance – and his book, Hackers and Painters, is no different. To help inform the great insights from the book, I included the essay title and summary, as Graham offers in the contents. A few chapters had only one or two notes or none at all, because they were overly technical or not particularly relevant to a wider audience. I have included those at the end.

Great list of thoughts from Paul Graham: http://www.rosshudgens.com/thoughts-from-paul-graham/

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: "Existence is elsewhere." — André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto | http://ow.ly/21xM1 [from http://twitter.com/avivao/statuses/16753976754]

The Anosognostic's Dilemma. Errol Morris, Dunning

Dunning

... just like patience

lazy or exhausted?

This made me wonder if story telling (or writing) is just helping others get as much out of your imagination as you do.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are. Aliefs are more primitive. They are responses to how things seem. In the above example, people have beliefs that tell them they are safe, but they have aliefs that tell them they are in danger."

"First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds."

The Pleasures of Imagination - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education http://goo.gl/c7t8 [from http://twitter.com/dcouturepdx/statuses/16164664745]

the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected.

“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him.

is it good or bad?

It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading. Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.

many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise. (Gutenberg himself borrowed his printing press from the screw presses of Rhineland vintners, as Mr. Carr notes.)

If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book.

en anglès

In fact, when you think about it, we only need to be motivated for a few short moments. Between those moments, momentum or habit or unconscious focus takes over.

"I didn't need to be motivated for long," I laughed. "Just long enough to get outside." Because once I was already in the rain, it took no discipline to keep riding. Getting started was the hard part. Like getting into a cold pool. Once you're in, it's fine. It's getting in that takes motivation.

The gist: Links are distracting, so what if we tried putting them off till the end of each post?

read this too, this is the man who said the thing I was interested in the other week . LInk from Scripting News

delinkification

AJ Jacobs: My colossal task burden - loved this article! http://bit.ly/bcwvQx

Is multi-tasking bad for you? As somebody who suffers from a chronic butterfly mind, I do wonder whether becoming a a 'uni-tasker' wouldn't be a bad idea. A thought provoking and amusing read.

As a counterpoint to the NYTimes article, AJ Jacobs on his experiment living life with no multitasking http://bit.ly/bhMVL9

When AJ Jacobs learned multitasking was bad for you, he decided to kick his chronic addiction to mental juggling. Get ready for Operation Focus…

1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.

Interssante #socialgaming insights uit #Farmville “@ProximityWW: Insights on social gaming provided by Zynga http://bit.ly/dePTnk”

Every web experience designer can learn from the tactics deployed in FarmVille to engage members over the long term. Here are 8 tactics you should include...

Designing compelling user experiences

RT @philmichaelson 8 Ways FarmVille Designs for Engagement | Making sense of good and bad content http://bit.ly/bqa9BM

.

Does anyone know if Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton's studies were published into a coffee table book? If they were, then my gift shopping for the year just got a whole lot easier.

There must be something in the water here in Lanesboro, Minnesota, because last night I dreamt of an encounter with a very muscular African-American centaur, an orgiastic experience with &ndash; gasp &ndash; drunken members of the opposite sex and (as if

RT @dubayan: The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People http://bit.ly/bmF4Yn

"The thing about habits is that for good and bad they require no thinking. An established habit, whether getting ready for work in the morning or having a whiskey after, is a pattern of behavior we’ve adopted—we stick to it regardless of whether it made sense when we initially adopted it, and whether it makes sense to continue with it years later. From a human irrationality perspective this means that something we do “just once” can wind up becoming a habit and part of our activities for a longer time than we envisioned. To get some insight into this process, consider the following experiment:"

RT @dreig: The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People http://bit.ly/cy0xy7 #productivity

By Patricia Curtis Can't remember where you put your glasses? Blanked on your new colleague's name? "Forgetting these types of things is a sign of how busy we are," says Zaldy S. Tan, MD, director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at…

pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

RT @draenews: Del Letting Go of Attachment, from A to Zen | Zen Habits: http://bit.ly/anTfzc

I liked this article. talks about letting go of bad attachments. Relationships, feelings.....

Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.

TED Talks Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world - Clay Shirky http://bit.ly/aJTIY2 /cc @feedly

"Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world."

collaboration

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world | Video on TED.com http://goo.gl/ZIgA

save for later

Before I flew out to my interview, a friend of mine who knew this person tipped me off on the executive’s interview style. The executive liked to use behavioral interviewing to weed out candidates for positions. I had never heard of this interview style before, so I set out to research as much as I could about it, aiming to be as prepared as possible. Here’s what I learned on the way to landing the job.

About how Dunnung-Kroeger began as a theory

picture emerging from the research is deeply troubling, at least to anyone who values the depth, rather than just the velocity, of human thought. People who read text studded with links, the studies show, comprehend less than those who read traditional linear text. People who watch busy multimedia presentations remember less than those who take in information in a more sedate and focused manner.

Computing: Software that disables bits of your computer to make you more productive sounds daft, but may help keep distractions at bay

Stay on target: Software that disables bits of your computer to make you more productive. http://bit.ly/bK4SIq

Column - block web access to increase productivity

LeechBlock

Psychological Study of Web Designs | Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials - http://abduzeedo.com/psychological-study-web-designs

All Joy and No Fun | Why parents hate parenting (parents are more depressed than nonparents no matter what their... http://ff.im/-nq6wU

read this when I have time...

particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with.

Via Ben. Fascinating analysis of parenting, expectations, happiness, the history of parenting, etc.

"From the perspective of the species, it’s perfectly unmysterious why people have children. From the perspective of the individual, however, it’s more of a mystery than one might think. Most people assume that having children will make them happier. Yet a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so. This finding is surprisingly consistent, showing up across a range of disciplines."

Why parents hate parenting.

oh dear,

All Joy and No Fun

Find information on wellness, diet, fitness, weight loss, mental health, anti-aging, conditions & diseases, drugs & medications, and more on Yahoo! Health

Incredible youtube video at the bottom of this post. Wow.

After we created Stack Overflow, some people were convinced we had built a marginally better mousetrap for asking and answering questions. The inevitable speculation began: can we use your engine to build a Q&A site about {topic}? Our answer was Stack Exchange. Pay us $129 a month (and up), and you too can create a hosted Q&A community on our engine -- for whatever topic you like!

Monetary incentives just don't work for cognitive tasks. Instead, you need purpose, self-direction and mastery. Get innovation by 20% time and gold cards rather than bonus schemes -- even 24hrs once a year makes a difference (cf. Atlassian)

motivation psychology business productivity management

Incredible youtube video at the bottom of this post. Wow.

After we created Stack Overflow, some people were convinced we had built a marginally better mousetrap for asking and answering questions. The inevitable speculation began: can we use your engine to build a Q&A site about {topic}? Our answer was Stack Exchange. Pay us $129 a month (and up), and you too can create a hosted Q&A community on our engine -- for whatever topic you like!

Monetary incentives just don't work for cognitive tasks. Instead, you need purpose, self-direction and mastery. Get innovation by 20% time and gold cards rather than bonus schemes -- even 24hrs once a year makes a difference (cf. Atlassian)

motivation psychology business productivity management

Incredible youtube video at the bottom of this post. Wow.

After we created Stack Overflow, some people were convinced we had built a marginally better mousetrap for asking and answering questions. The inevitable speculation began: can we use your engine to build a Q&A site about {topic}? Our answer was Stack Exchange. Pay us $129 a month (and up), and you too can create a hosted Q&A community on our engine -- for whatever topic you like!

Monetary incentives just don't work for cognitive tasks. Instead, you need purpose, self-direction and mastery. Get innovation by 20% time and gold cards rather than bonus schemes -- even 24hrs once a year makes a difference (cf. Atlassian)

conservatives have been better than progressives at exploiting anecdote and emotion to win arguments. Progressives tend to think that giving people the facts and figures will inevitably lead them to the right conclusions. They see anecdotes as inadmissible evidence, and appeals to emotion as wrong.

A well written, middle of the line piece on denialism and why normal people become extremists. Bottom line: they don't like giving up control for things that they can't see the real benefits of. Ie. Vaccines; because people no longer get diseases they are vaccinated by, denialists are prone to suspect if vaccines actually do anything or are they actually tools by a power hungry elite to control us and increase autism levels?

What motivates people to retreat from the real world into denial? George Lakoff, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that conservatives have been better than progressives at exploiting anecdote and emotion to win arguments. Progressives tend to think that giving people the facts and figures will inevitably lead them to the right conclusions. They see anecdotes as inadmissible evidence, and appeals to emotion as wrong. The same is true of scientists. But against emotion and anecdote, dry statements of evidence have little power. To make matters worse, scientists usually react to denial with anger and disdain, which makes them seem even more arrogant. Poland has reached a similar conclusion. He has experimented a few times with using anecdote and appeals to emotion when speaking to lay audiences. "I get very positive responses - except from numerates, who see it as emotionally manipulative," he says.

The first thing to note is that denial finds its most fertile ground in areas where the science must be taken on trust. ... Similarly, global warming, evolution and the link between tobacco and cancer must be taken on trust, usually on the word of scientists, doctors and other technical experts who many non-scientists see as arrogant and alien. ... This is not necessarily malicious, or even explicitly anti-science. Indeed, the alternative explanations are usually portrayed as scientific. Nor is it willfully dishonest. It only requires people to think the way most people do: in terms of anecdote, emotion and cognitive short cuts. Denialist explanations may be couched in sciency language, but they rest on anecdotal evidence and the emotional appeal of regaining control. ... He calls his opponents "the innumerate" because they are unable to grasp concepts like probability. Instead, they reason based on anecdote and emotion. "People use mental short cuts

時間とお金を失う方法。投資といってお金を使う。仕事に見えることをして時間を使う。これではまずい、と思う本能をごまかしてしまう。

Good read > The Creativity Crisis http://bit.ly/an2WvJ /RT @invisiblepilot

Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?”

Important article detailing research that indicates that tests of creative performance by children, after rising steadily from the 1950s to 1990, have been dropping sharply since that point. Story attempts to discuss some of the reasons why, how educators (here and abroad) are attempting to inculcate innovative thinking and action in schoolchildren and what sorts of familial and societal conditions spark creativity.

Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question.

Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs—and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that addicts cannot will themselves into healthy sobriety—indeed, that ego and self-reliance are often a root cause of their problem. Yet recovering addicts must be willing. That is, they must be open to the possibility that the group and its principles are powerful enough to trump a compulsive disease.

I'm not totally sure that I understand the conclusions the the scientist came to about goal setting, but I'm interested in figuring out what it means and how to apply it to more effective goal setting...

"Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question."

Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question

People with wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams than did those with willful minds. In other words, the people who kept their minds open were more goal-directed and more motivated than those who declared their objective to themselves.

will i

RT @biomatushiq: pity for us, evening owls :) Morning people rule the world http://bit.ly/9Ov9Er [from http://twitter.com/matushiq/statuses/18620682631]

사진이..ㅎ RT @bookedit: "아침형 인간이 세계를 지배하는 이유"를 밝힌 연구 결과가 나왔네요. 현재의 사회환경에서 저녁형 인간보다 좀더 주도적으로 상황을 이끌어갈 수 있기 때문이라네요. http://bit.ly/dh5Mw8

lies and stats from OK Cupid http://bit.ly/aY1kX1 :)

OK Cupid crunches the numbers on the biggest lies in online dating: http://bit.ly/9zheTf

// Cool data

"People do everything they can in their OkCupid profiles to make themselves seem awesome, and surely many of our users genuinely are. But it's very hard for the casual browser to tell truth from fiction. With our behind-the-scenes perspective, we're able to shed some light on some typical claims and the likely realities behind them."

Another amazing data analysis post from OkCupid

I'm married, but I love love love when OKCupid goes all data on us.

Interesting analysis of information gathered from OK Cupid (dating site) vs. norm.

How To Make Sure People Will Remember Your Ideas

!!!100602 Rand talks about the concepts discussed in Robert Cialdini's book, Influence: Science & Practice

From SEOmoz

Great overview

Conversion rate optmization - the practice of improving the quantity of visitors who take a desired action on your site - has been a hot topic this year. There's both an art and a science to the process of turning browsers into buyers and drive-by readers into email subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. In my opinion, no marketer should be engaging in this work without having read R...

!!!100602 Rand talks about the concepts discussed in Robert Cialdini's book, Influence: Science & Practice

Conversion rate optmization - the practice of improving the quantity of visitors who take a desired action on your site - has been a hot topic this year. There's both an art and a science to the process of turning browsers into buyers and drive-by readers into email subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. In my opinion, no marketer should be engaging in this work without having read R...

Conversion rate optmization - the practice of improving the quantity of visitors who take a desired action on your site - has been a hot topic this year. There's both an art and a science to the process of turning browsers into buyers and drive-by readers into email subscribers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. In my opinion, no marketer should be engaging in this work without having read R...

The Misconception: Your opinions are the result of years of rational, objective analysis. The Truth: Your opinions are the result of years of paying attention to information which confirmed what you believed while ignoring information which challenged your preconceived notions.

RT @joegerstandt: RT @valdiskrebs: Great post on confirmation bias by @notsmartblog -- http://bit.ly/a2f5yq

Does language profoundly influence the way people see the world? http://bit.ly/cAtxU8 (via @SteveAkinsSEO @lindahollier)

This is an interesting article describing the differences of understanding in different languages.

Language is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically, depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable. This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the languages we speak.

Add: http://bit.ly/aRLx4F @nedkumar: ..how language influences the way people see the world. Lost in Translation http://bit.ly/ba7GUV

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871

Nick Yee, (year?)

Almost 3 decades ago, in 1978, Elaine Hatfield wrote a seminal book on the topic of love - teasing apart passionate and companionate love. She defined passionate love as "a state of intense longing for union with another" and companionate love as "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined". Around the same time, Dorothy Tennov was trying to answer the same question in her book "Love and Limerence" and, similar to Hatfield, quickly differentiated between the “love” that is sincere concern and caring as opposed to the “love” that is fiery, euphoric and ephemeral. ... Tennov coined the term “limerence” for the latter so as to be able to discuss it as a concept separate from “love”. She noted that “love” is an emotion that is acted on, while “limerence” is more of a transformed state that people go into (the difference in the proverbial “I love you, but I’m not in love with you”).

Love in Four Acts: What is Romantic Love? - http://j.mp/98a0ua

Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves

Tan Le's astonishing new computer interface reads its user's brainwaves, making it possible to control virtual objects, and even physical electronics, with mere thoughts (and a little concentration). She demos the headset, and talks about its far-reaching applications.

The early stages of neural HCI.

People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.

Paul Graham.

"Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. [5] My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption."

"The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago." "Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US... You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly." "We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."

as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best. These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549363.