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A recent research has found clear connections between good nutrition and a healthy brain. Previously studies linked vitamin deficiencies to bad cognition. But this new study uses biomarkers in the blood to determine the relationship between vitamins and brain health. For research purpose of this study, the researchers adapted a more reliable method of looking at the biomarkers in the blood of the 104 participants and determine their vitamin levels. Apart from this they also conducted MRI scans and took tests to measure thinking and memory functions of the participants. As expected, they found some striking relations between nutrition and brain health. People with high level of omega-3 fatty acids, vitmain C,D,E and B family had good performance in cognitive tests. On the other hand, people with high levels of trans fats score low in memory tests. They also determined that nutrient biomarkers accounted for 17 percent and other variables like age, education and high blood pressure accounted for more than 46 percent of thinking and memory test. Though the results of the findings need to be confirmed but certainly its very amazing that in future people would be able to provide best nutrients to their brains and hence maintain cognitive health.

Rice explores housing changes in the new economy. The magazine, Builder, creates a new “concept home” every year. This year they called the concept the “Home for the New Economy.” For years the trend has been for homes to increase in size, but with the economy changes, companies are trying to decrease the size of homes to make them more affordable. The square footage is on a trend to decrease. Marianne Cusato designed Katrina Cottages to replace the government trailers set up after Katrina and they are just 300 square feet. Rice writes that the trend of building smaller homes didn't start because of the economy necessarily. Other people have influenced the trend such as Henry David Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond which only is 150 square feet. Some people suggest that the consumers always choose size over quality. The average size of the American homes built peaked at 2,500 square feet in 2007, which had proved odd because household size had declined. Residences in lower class areas are much larger compared to ones in Europe. Culturally, in America, home size is an expression of wealth. In the industry today smaller homes are selling more reliably, but not necessarily because consumers desire less.

Teaching in batches from one central pedagogue has been the traditional method of teaching since Ancient Greece – The opportunities offered by the digital age include flexibility for different ages and abilities, as well as a horizontal transfer of knowledge, taught by students to other students, rather than a vertical transfer from Lecturer to student. This has been capitalized on by the Khan Academy, TED, and other video learning tools. As technology has progressed, teaching styles have not kept pace – many lectures feel threatened by these new teaching options, but do not know how to best utilize them in the classroom. The current model of teaching has long been criticized for teaching knowledge about, rather than understanding, of concepts. Some of the difficulties involved are in assessing how quickly and effectively a student learns a topic, so that their progress is constant with their colleagues – as although the teaching method can develop, the assessment methods will change much more slowly.

Early admission applications to colleges and universities have increased significantly--doubling or tripling in some cases. Applicant diversity is also on the rise, with more students applying from all over the country and overseas, and with a greater number of black and Hispanic applicants as well. Typically, students are only allowed to apply to one college in December for early admission. Colleges may fill up to half of their openings in this way before the regular spring applications are even received. Therefore, applying for early admission increases one's chances of getting into a top university, and more and more students are choosing to take part in the process. The increased number and diversity of applicants for these spots has created some concern among the traditional applicant pool--predominantly East Coast private school high achievers. They fear that colleges may be accepting other applicants for their appeal in creating a more diverse student body, or because their international tuition fees will boost the school's bottom line.

Natural disasters fill the headlines. Though the toll in human lives has not necessarily grown, their toll in economic costs have. Take the 2011 disastrous flooding in Thailand that cut economic growth world wide as supply chains were disrupted. Insurers confirm that the price of catastrophe has been steadily growing. These increasing costs are not caused by more natural disasters. Even global warning is not necessarily increasing the frequency of tropical cyclones. Instead the cause is human development and often, the very efforts taken to prevent disasters in the first place. For instance, reclaiming land from the sea in Holland encouraged economic development and population movement into the most vulnerable areas. Higher dykes just pushed flood waters, when they did come, on to other locations. Wildfires in the US have cost more as people have built more densely into woodlands since fires have been suppressed. However, that fire suppression has increased the build up of fuel in the forest so when fire does come, it is harder to contain and more destructive. Other examples abound. Better solutions could be found. Public policy would be better served if there were contingency plans for when disaster does strike. Mov

Second windpipe transplant successful Swedish surgeons managed to replace a cancerous windpipe with a synthetic one. The patient, a 30-year old American man had cancer which was deemed inoperable, however doctors in Sweden created a synthetic trachea covered in stem cells from his bone marrow. So far the transplant seems to have worked and the windpipe seems fully adapted to patient's organism. It was a second procedure like that in the world. Treatment cost is estimated about 450 000 dollars. Windpipe was designed by Dr. Macchiarini and his team from Advanced Center for Translational Regenerative Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Doctor specializes in tissue engineering and aims to create replacements for many tissues and organs of human body. It was his twelfth trachea transplant, though the first ten windpipes were taken from cadavers. So far in the world there were successful attempts to create synthetic skin and bladder with trachea being the newest on the list.

Researchers at I.B.M. have found out that data can be stored and it can be retrieved from the array of 12 atoms. They have crossed the boundaries of storing in magnetic storage and reached a new level. The magnetic storage devices which we are using now comprises of more than one million atoms for simply storing either digital zero or one. At the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Hamburg in Germany a group of researchers reported on the ability to perform computer logic operations on an atomic level in order to minimise the size of storage devices. This idea is implemented by the group at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center. This research is led by Andreas Heinrich. The team has now created the smallest possible unit of magnetic storage. Now it is possible to store digital information on closely arranged two rows of six iron atoms on a surface of copper nitride. The researchers believe that in future this technique would impact largely on minimised storage devices.

Seriousness of obesity is known to us from long time and it is increasing day by day everywhere. A newly published study states that a specific hormone produced while doing exercise can drastically burn fat and decrease obesity. It is called as PGC1-alpha which is produced in muscles while workout. Researchers at Harvard University studied that this specific hormone can break high amount of protein into small pieces. Our brain gives signals to each cell and makes them react accordingly, but the effect of PGC1-alpha was unknown so far. This experiment was carried on many volunteers to know the exact behavior of this hormone. They prepared similar substance called “isirin” and took many trials on mice and some people and they found proven responses. Isirin proved to be most important in our metabolism process. Dr. Bruce Spiegelman and many other researchers at Bio Universities are studying behavior of this hormone and will be of much useful to us in near future through products and medicine.

It's no secret that alcohol can be an addictive substance for some people, but according to Jennifer O'Brien for the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) newsroom, recent research may shed some light on exactly why this happens.Drinking alcohol leads to the release of endorphins in areas of the brain that produce feelings of pleasure and reward, according to a study led by researchers at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UCSF. The study utilized positron emission tomography (PET) to observe brain reaction to alcohol in both heavy drinkers and control subjects; both demonstrated endorphin increases to indicate pleasure, but heavy drinkers experienced this in a way to suggest greater inclination to a chemical 'reward.' "This is something that we’ve speculated about for 30 years, based on animal studies, but haven’t observed in humans until now," said lead author Jennifer Mitchell, PhD, clinical project director at the Gallo Center and an adjunct assistant professor of neurology at UCSF. "It provides the first direct evidence of how alcohol makes people feel good." As O'Brien details, this may pave the way for more effective options in the treatment of alcoholism.

Forget just .com or .net - the go-to domain name suffix for internet sites is about to be blown wide open, according to Gloria Goodale in the Christian Science Monitor. As she details, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit in charge of online registry, plans to throw open the doors to hundreds, potentially thousands of new suffixes, called top-level domain names. Legal headaches promise to be abundant, as ownership over a brand name loom large - as Goodale notes, it's hard to tell whether the airline company or faucet manufacturer owns the right to the name 'Delta.' Reputations are also at stake, as companies are hurriedly snatching up the adult entertainment-related extension .XXX, to claim ownership and avoid any potential embarrassing association. “Already, large and small trademark owners struggle to prevent cybersquatting and other malicious uses of their trademarks in connection with third-party domain-name registrations,” says Trevor Schmidt, an intellectual property attorney with Moore & Van Allen. With so many new names soon available, Goodale addresses how more brands are driving consumers to social media outlets instead of their webpage.

Every generation seems to doubt the abilities of their succeeding generations, this Forbes contributor claims. But why, when history has proven that there is a cause for optimism? According to the post, many parents and cultural critics have passed through their “adventure windows.” The willingness of humans to try new things and experiment with new forms of culture - our “adventure windows” — fade rapidly after certain key points in life, as we gradually settle in our ways. And generation after generation falls into the same pattern of outlook when their adventure windows slam shut. Adam Thierer, the article's author, says that many parents, policymakers or social pundits convince themselves that the good old days are behind us and the current good-for-nothing generation and their new-fangled gadgets and culture are steering us straight into the moral abyss. So how can we shape our thinking into not just accepting, but embracing the generation ahead? Thierer says the best approach to learning more about our children’s culture is to immerse ourselves in it, as consuming that content and talking to them about it might be the best way to better understand their culture and then mentor them accordingly. We should be doing the same, he says, with technology.

Why is it that intelligent people are less attractive? Well, they aren't. In fact, the opposite seems to be true: Either smart people are more beautiful than average or dumb people are more ugly according to Slate, which researched the Explainer's 2011 question of the year. The article cites studies dating back to the early 1900s, when scientists found that it was possible to gauge someone's intelligence just by sizing him up. Those findings, or the "halo effect," showed that if someone looks handsome, people tend to assume that he's smarter, more sociable and better-adjusted. Basically, better looks can lead to a better life, but why the assumption of the opposite - that smart people are ugly? Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics says here that we may be assuming that smart people are nerdy, and that nerdy people tend to lack social skills - not very attractive. Another theory holds that certain environmental factors in the womb can produce both facial disfigurements and cognitive impairments on one side, or facial symmetry and high intelligence on the other. Also, attractive children are treated better which can nurture a sharper mind. The article further attributes smarter people's abilities to care for themselves - and their looks.

The impact of citizen journalism evident in the Arab Spring is only becoming more seamless, according to Janko Roettgers for GigaOm. The idea behind hypermedia is as simple as it is compelling: More and more media publishers are providing closed captions for video content online – a move that is both prompted by SEO strategy as well as increased pressure to make web video accessible. And in the audio space, radio networks like NPR have long had transcripts of their recordings. Boas and others simply view this text as meta-data that points to specific pieces of a recording. What if there was an application that would help compile new videos or audio recordings based on the remix of this kind of meta-data? “Audio authoring tools and video authoring tools can be quite complex,” HTML5 developer Mark Boas argued. Boas’ app on the other hand, which he has been calling Hyperaudio Pad, could look as simple as a text editor. Just copy captions from a few sources into the same document, and the program will automatically compile an audio recording. The intersection of web and media is already evident on sites for RadioLab and Al Jazeera, and hint at what opening up the 'black box' of complex compilation utilities means for citizen-journalists around the world.

Ever wonder how some people seem to see Jesus' face on a piece of toast? A new study from MIT Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Pawan Sinha and his colleagues reveals the brain activity that underlies our ability to make that distinction, according to Anne Trafton for the MIT News Office. On the left side of the brain, the fusiform gyrus — an area long associated with face recognition — carefully calculates how “facelike” an image is. The right fusiform gyrus then appears to use that information to make a quick, categorical decision of whether the object is, indeed, a face. The researchers found that activation in the left side of the fusiform gyrus preceded that of the right side by a couple of seconds, supporting the hypothesis that the left side does its job first and then passes information on to the right side. Though multiple areas are utilized, the specific tasks of the left side - primarily indexing/comparison - provide clues to future research and possible treatment of visual impairments. “From the computational perspective, one speculation one can make is that the left does the initial heavy lifting,” Sinha says. “It tries to determine how facelike is a pattern, without making the final decision on whether I’m going to call it a face.”

Grocery stores stay constantly busy by rotating out products approaching or past their expiration date, but as Nadia Arumugam details for Forbes, you might be surprised where expired food ends up. Fresh vegetables and meats, are often cooked up for in-store deli and salad counters before they spoil, says supermarket consultant David J. Livingston. A portion of it is inevitably thrown into the garbage and ends up in landfills. But surprisingly much of it finds a second home: some is given away to food banks, some sold to salvage stores and the rest taken by people who scrounge outside supermarkets. Arumugam also notes how the Food and Drug Administration surprisingly says it's okay to eat expired foods - the expiration dates serve primarily as a manufacturer-supplied suggestion of optimum quality. “Foods can remain safe to consume for some time beyond sell-by and even use-by dates provided they are handled and stored properly,” says Dr Ted Labuza, professor of food science at the University of Minnesota. For fresh produce and refrigerated foods this means storage at below 41 degrees Fahrenheit. Canned foods and shelf-stable goods like salad dressings, Labuza adds, can be consumed for years beyond their expiration dates.

Forget dieting and joining the track team. Pediatricians today have hopped on board with different path of weight loss for teenagers: stomach banding surgery. According to an article in The New York Times magazine, Allergan, the maker of the popular Lap-Band, a surgically inserted silicone band that constricts the stomach to make the patient feel full quickly, is seeking permission from the Food and Drug Administration to market it to patients as young as 14, four years younger than is now allowed. So why the extreme measure? When dieting fails, obesity can sometimes be a matter of life and death for teens. Further, the 25-minute procedure is often covered by private health care plans along with Medicaid. This procedure constitutes 39 percent of all bariatric surgeries, has little risk, and is less invasive than the popular gastric bypass surgery. Though, while the weight sheds, there are still plenty of challenges. Because the device occupies part of your stomach, patients have to learn eat slower, as overeating causes vomiting and pain. Patients constantly battle hunger and some doctors fear malnutrition. Further, patients may need subsequent surgeries within two years if they do not follow the regimen and try to eat too much.

Are women less assertive than men? Rumor has it, and this blogger for Harvard Business Review takes a mathematical approach as to the reasoning for it. In this article, Jodi Glickman says that in school, if you graduate with a 3.76 grade point average, you round up and call it a 3.8. In politics, when the polls tell you candidate A is leading the pack at 28%, you can sure bet the numbers didn't shake out to a perfect integer. And when economists talk about our federal deficit, they're rounding up (or down) to the nearest gazillion. This isn't fudging the numbers, or being deceitful, she claims; it's an accepted mathematical tool that says that when the amount by which you round is small in comparison to the magnitude of the quantity you are measuring, it's just as well to go with a, well, "round" number. Yet women aren't using this convenience, and in fact, tend to round down. She summed it up by saying, "This small but cold, hard, rational tweak in our thinking could have a major impact on our outcomes: higher salaries, better jobs, and a real, true strength we've been afraid to admit is ours."

We've heard how imagining yourself as successful is a precursor to experiencing it. That may not be so, however, according to Nancy Darling for Psychology Today, according to what she refers to as 'model railroader syndrome.' As she illustrates, Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen recently published a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggesting that the more clearly you visualize success, the less motivated you are to actually try to achieve it. In the paper, 'Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy', they report experimental replication of old research, which has found that people who spontaneously dream about a rosy future tend to have lower achievement. That research is interesting, especially n that it flies in the face of a lot of popular psychology ideas about 'visualizing success.' Darling suggests that this may be similar to studies that suggest imagining the process of eating actually has a negative effect on an individual's appetite. As she concludes, these experimental results are important because they tell us that something about fantasizing itself - not about the people who are fantasizing - contributes to the decline in motivation.

Imaging if your whole body was a giant eyeball - for scorpions, they may not have to imagine. Scorpion bodies are studded with eyes, sometimes as many as twelve — and scientists may have found one more, according to Dave Mosher for Wired Science. Their entire exoskeleton may act as one giant light receptor, a full-body proto-eye that detects shadows cast by moonlight and starlight - that’s still just a hypothesis, but it would help explain why they glow so brilliantly under ultraviolet light. “It might be a sort of alarm that’s always going off until the scorpion finds shelter,” said biologist Douglas Gaffin of the University of Oklahoma. “Shade might turn down the alarm on that part of their body, so they preferentially move in that direction.” Other researchers have blocked the scorpion's eyes and still observed them moving to specific locations in relation to various objects, indicating that they may be able to process the ultraviolet sunlight and moonlight some sense of orientation.

If you looked in a drawer and saw a bunch of leftover smaller computer components, you would say "Oh; here's a bunch of leftover smaller computer components." If, however, you were Carnegie Melon Computer Science Professor Dave Andersen, you'd see the specs to build the kind of hardware that internet megaliths run on. According to Cade Metz in Wired, Andersen and his students were able to string together a sequence of these low-powered DNS servers in what is referred to as a 'wimpy' core design. After tinkering with his tiny machines, they realized that if you strung a bunch of them together, you could run a massive application each machine could never execute on its own. The trick was to split the application’s duties into tiny pieces and spread them evenly across the network. “They were right,” Andersen says of his students. “We could use these boxes to run high-performance large-scale key-value stores — the kind of [databases] you would run behind the scenes at Facebook or Twitter. And the rest is publication history.” Researchers are just beginning to push the envelope of 'wimpy' design, and the practicality of these versus their 'brawny' brethren have yet to be fully articulated.

Human beings probably have killed more members of their own species than any other animal species on this planet, so it's undeniable that ours is a pretty aggressive species when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, says Dario Maestripieri, Ph.D. for Psychology Today. But why? This article cites competition as the reason. When animals compete, it's over food, a mate or space. And in a case of say, monkeys fighting over bananas, winner takes all. Humans are driven by the same motivators, competing often for resources that can be monopolized -- making aggression worth the risk. This author compares aggression to economics and describes it as a valuable tool that's available at a low price. "Given the potential high benefits and low costs of aggression, Homo sapiens is a species with a high potential for aggression. Whether or not this potential is realized, that is, whether or not we compete in aggressive or nonaggressive ways, depends on the environment in which we find ourselves," the article states. Some ways to alter the outcome? Reducing the expression of aggression happens by not rewarding violence. Similarly, the costs of aggression and violence are increased through punishment.

Wondering how you're able to walk and chew gum at the same time? Recent research into an unlikely source - a bat's brain - may hold some clues of how that's possible, according to a press release from the Georgetown University Medical Center. Publishing in the European Journal of Neuroscience, Jagmeet Kanwal, PhD, associate professor in the department of neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center, reports on how and in which hemisphere of the brain, bats process incoming signals that allow them to orient and navigate while make sense of what other bats are trying to tell them. Kanwal examined the brain activity of bats utilizing echolocation, and discovered how the bat brain processed this in a lopsided, task-specific manner at the neural level. Not only do the brains of bats have to process a constant stream of pulses and echoes, they also have to simultaneously process the bats’ social communications. Bats make angry sounds such as “back off,” warning sounds like “watch out!” and other sounds for communicating messages such as “please don’t hurt me, or even “I love you!” Results may open the door for research into human brain activity; no word on if the bats have the ability to check their work email while driving to the grocery store, however.

The content-aggregator metasite Huffington Post (HuffPo) is no stranger to controversy - it's made headlines by lifting (linked; attributed) content, and it's made founder Arianna Huffington rich. Critics claim that the site actively engages in theft or plagiarism by not adding additional content and giving a cursory facelift to pieces written by others, but as Matthew Ingram argues for GigaOm, this 'over-aggregation' claim misses the point. As he points out, many of the aggregated stories actually could be seen as better than the originals, providing external links and corralled stories the reader may find relevant. According to Ingram, if an outlet — or even another newspaper — quotes facts and includes attribution and a link, as well as more information on the topic, how is that an offense? The short answer is that there is no offense, except to the pride of the original outlet, and possibly to their view of how the world should work. As he notes, the laws which govern communication are often far behind the communication itself; the fact that information dissemination and aggregation will continue - in increasingly complex forms - remains about the only given.

We all know the advantages of practicing yoga and its positive impact on both body and mind. Yet we never hear of the mishaps, injuries and damage it can cause. What happens when typically sedentary people make attempts at contortion? That's something Glenn Black can tell you. A yoga teacher for nearly four decades, Black recognizes that it's not for everyone, saying in this article from The New York Times Magazine that the vast majority of people should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm. He describes yoga as being beneficial for those in good physical condition but claims that most people have underlying physical weaknesses that make them prone to injuries. According to the article, some 20 million Americans do yoga, and with that comes an increase of unqualified instructors who lack the training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. This article cites case after case of people injured while in yoga poses -- mostly from those practicing more advanced poses or battling a case of big ego. At a recent conference Black said, “My message was that ‘Asana is not a panacea or a cure-all. In fact, if you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.’ A lot of people don’t like to hear that.”

How do you cook? Though we've made electronic many aspects of our lives, cataloging recipes remain somewhat antiquated. While the Web and other digital technologies have greatly amplified our exposure to new foods and cuisines, how we store, organize, and sort that wealth of culinary data remains practically unchanged, according to Kevin Fitchard for GigaOm. Recipes are still largely isolated on the Web, either residing on Websites, trapped in e-cookbooks or buried within a plethora of cooking apps. Fitchard declares that what’s needed is a standard recipe media format that can be shared between applications and the Web. Like the MP3 or ACC format used in music, a recipe can become a standardized digital good, one that can be bought, sold, shared, edited and annotated. Standardizing a format has thus been a challenge, but Fitchard claims adjusting business models to accommodate new digital recipe media can actually be easy. If someone buys a cookbook, the publisher can allow them to download the complete library of recipes into any recipe management app, just like many music distributors have begun to encourage the revival of vinyl by packaging an album’s digital tracks with the analog record. E-cookbook publishers can do the same - a tasty idea.

Dating back to the 1960s, the majority of women have aligned with the Democratic Party and the Republican vote has been more associated with men when it comes to presidential elections. This Slate article attributes the 1980s as the culmination of years of change in women’s lives. By then more women were working, more were single and living on their own. The women’s movement reinforced the growing sense that women’s political interests could and should be different than those of their husbands and fathers -- until Reagan came along. At that time, more men had changes of heart; Regan struck a chord with men. According to this article, women did not steer away from Reagan in disgust, however, their emerging beliefs in their own political entitlement permitted them to stay right where they were. Paul Kellstedt, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, found that if women move just a little bit to the right or left, men will move many more percentage points. This asymmetrical movement causes the gender gap to expand and to shrink, he said. Contradicting our assumptions about gender, women's beliefs have remained steady and men have experienced the fluctuation in stability. Why? Among the reasons, men are more responsive to changes in government policy.

The impetus for marriage today vs. 50 years ago has changed dramatically. It is no longer the carrot at the end of the stick in order to attain co-habitation, parenthood or even sex. Social pressures have morphed leaving us to wonder why we should even bother -- especially when most marriages result in divorce, not to mention the sky-high costs of today's average wedding. So what is the motivator? According to Psychology Today, the difference between now and centuries ago is that, more frequently, romantic motives are the driving force, encouraged by society's obsession with "love conquers all." OK, but why buy in when marriage most often fails? This article's author blames our need for institutionalism and conformity and says marriage creates a bond based on mutual dependency that can be detrimental to our creativity and individuality. Basically, we enter relationships for fear of being alone and we stay in them because we fear loss. "Wouldn't it be more meaningful if when entering a relationship, we accept the truth that it's going to end some day. Then we can attach with fewer expectations and value and learn from what is real during our time together rather than holding on to a fantasy of what should happen in the future." To that, some say, "I do."

If you're a high school student approaching graduation, how do you figure out what comes after the diploma? As David Zax details for FastCompany, the way future collegians navigate those waters may be changing. Some form of counseling is common at many schools; among wealthier metropolitan areas, some families have been known to spend up to $30,000 a year on private counseling. But a single college counselor can only know so much. The solution? An idea called Mytonomy.com, a hub for crowdsourced college counseling founded by ex-Google employee Vinay Bhargava and Sean Burke, a counselor at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia. 15 schools, including some from the DC area, Detroit, Rochester, and the Bay Area, are inviting alumni from their schools to submit advice-laden videos that they hope will be particularly helpful within their community. How important is the overnight visit? Should you do early decision? How should you prep for standardized tests? The site answers all of these questions. More to the point, the site has the potential to answer them in highly personalized ways. “We’re really scaling alumni mentoring,” says Bhargava, as not everyone can afford a private college counselor. “We’re trying to democratize that."

Facing budget deficits and economic hardships, cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., and others are discussing a new revenue generating strategy: selling the naming rights of their public transit stations to private buyers. Yet as Eric Jaffe reports in the Atlantic, this proposal has its share of detractors. For starters, the rights haven't been very lucrative; whatever the reason, corporations don't consider whole transit stations to be valuable advertising platforms (so to speak). New York's deal with Barclay's fetched just $200,000 a year. Those drops in the budget bucket would look even smaller if one considered the cost of reprinting an entire system's maps. The maps bring up a second reason not to sell out the names of transit stations, namely basic city navigation. A stop's name should indicate something essential about its location in the city or the neighborhood it services. "The whole situation raises the frightening prospect in the near future that, instead of riding the Broad Street Subway from City Hall to Pattison, people will take the Coca-Cola Trolley from Pizza Hut to AT&T," wrote Yonah Freemark at Transport Politic when the news emerged in 2010.

The "un-internet" as author Dave Winer puts it, is a reference to technology companies taking control over how we connect with the digital world. It's something that is cyclical and goes between chaos and total freedom for users, and a "Disneyfied" pure experience, but one that perhaps lacks a spirit of innovation. A decade ago controls came in the form of anti-piracy software which ultimately was always circumvented. Today we see companies like Apple creating walled-garden which protect us, but also may prevent the next greatest application from residing on our computers because certain gatekeepers don't approve. Despite this recurring loop, as Winer explains, the "users" always win. They get around the systems in place that are meant to control. Sometimes this is lead by evil-doers, but the masses eventually bring some sort of civility into the control they take back. In this respect, the "un-internet" once again becomes the internet.

With 800 million users, no one can deny that Facebook has had an impact on society and the ways in which we socially interact. But this blogger Daniel Gulati goes as far to say that Facebook is making us miserable. In this Harvard Business Review blog, he cites three main reasons: First, it creates a den of comparison. "Since our Facebook profiles are self-curated, users have a strong bias toward sharing positive milestones and avoid mentioning the more humdrum, negative parts of their lives. Comparing ourselves to others is a key driver of unhappiness," he said in the post. The second driver is its fragmentation of our time. By accessing the network on multiple platforms, users are never really present where they physically are. Finally, Facebook is causing a decline of close relationships. What was once a tool to enhance personal networks has now become a replacement to meetings, relationships and get-togethers. While quitting is unrealistic, we can be cognizant about changing our patterns and strengthening real-world relationships. Gulati's advice? Block time for Facebook use, unfriend ex-partners and gossipy coworkers and invest time in building off-line relationships.

We love a pretty face, but how we experience this may be contextual, according to Sam Sommers for Psychology Today. In a paper to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology next month, researchers in Germany examined the attentional bias we usually pay toward attractive members of the opposite sex. Adult respondents were shown a series of faces on a computer screen. Participants were asked to observe geometrical shapes alternating with both 'average' and 'attractive' looking faces, and their ability to identify the shapes was related to what kind of face had also appeared. This shift proved to be particularly challenging when the previous face was an attractive one – the tendency to linger and look longer at good-looking faces slowed down their shape identification. But not all the respondents showed this bias to stare a bit longer at attractive faces. Who was more easily able to break the spell of the pretty face? Participants who had previously been asked to visualize that they had just learned that someone they had a crush on also had feelings for them. Reciprocated romantic interest, as the researchers refer to it. It has a powerful influence on us, this finding out that someone out there has a thing for you.

Advanced biotechnology may be coming to a garage near you, according to Ted Greenwald for Forbes. Access to the machines and software are entering a new age of ubiquity, which may have you sequencing DNA before you know it. Josh Perfetto and Tito Jankowski are at the forefront of a new era of biosciences in which molecular biology is becoming more and more like software development, performed on commodity machines by people with basic skills. The two innovators have brought down the price of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the key process in any kind of genomics, by 80 percent, shunting this once-specialized technology toward the mainstream. Fully equipped for serious research, an open-sourced and affordable PCR machine unleashes the potential of low-cost innovation in a field that, until now, has been associated with high costs and long development cycles. And Perfetto is making PCR cheaper yet: He has designed a prototype stripped-down unit called PersonalPCR that goes for a mere $149. “When you don’t have a lot of money and you want to accomplish a goal, you look at the problem far differently than someone who has resources,” Perfetto says.

According to this article by Tony Schwartz, human beings are designed to pulse rhythmically between spending and renewing energy. That's how we operate at our best -- not by wasting 10 hours at a desk which reduces our capacity to be productive. Maintaining a steady reservoir of energy –- physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually -– requires refueling it intermittently. That's why when two employees with the same jobs and same hours can produce drastically different results when one works more intensely but takes breaks often, and even naps. In this instance, according to Schwartz, you get more done, in less time, at a higher level of quality, more sustainably. This article cites airline pilots whose reaction times improved when they were able to nap more. So how can we become more simultaneously energized and productive? Think of it like strength training. You must stress your muscles and recover -- only then you build strength. The same goes with our work and our goals. It's known as the "pulse and pause technique," but basically, when you're working, work hard, and when refreshing, truly take the time to refuel.

Apple, Inc. is now in fact the most undervalued large-cap stock in America. Despite year after year of record-breaking performance, the stock's performance relative to it's valuation, fundamentals and the performance and fundamentals of other companies is awful. This is largely due to over-exaggerated headlines from the press based on inconsequential facts. Example: iPod sales are slowing. Yet, "iPhone sales outpaced the market by 400%" goes unreported. Apple's valuation hasn't been this low in 10 years despite the companies incredible growth. In Q2, 2011 Apple reported the highest earnings and growth rate in 6 years. That quarter, the stock price dropped by $50. Eventually, however, Apple's price will have to rise even to stay at it's depressed P/E ratio.

A fire aboard a Russian nuclear submarine on Friday was eliminated by submerging the vessel at a shipyard. There was no radiation leak, authorities said. The nuclear reactor had been shut down and all weapons had been removed. The ship known as the Yekaterinburg has launched an intercontinental ballistic missile ICBM from the Barents Sea as recently as July.

Perspiration without much inspiration may yield some success, but the ideal combination is a large supply of both, according to Dr. Piers Steel for Psychology today. In their paper "Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance," David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz kill the myth that talent doesn't matter. They examined complex scientific task performance against basic cognitive abilities while taking levels of domain knowledge into consideration. The results indicate that 'general' smartness matters - those with high basic cognitive abilities fared best within task-specific applications. This isn't completely determinative of success, however. Even if someone wasn't born with genius in their genes, they can outperform the smartest of individuals - as long as they work hard and the latter doesn't. Also, the differences between the smart and the not-so-smart shrink quite a bit if they both work hard. That means that talent still counts, but hard work puts you right up there - all the more reason to put that nose to the grindstone.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) has led the way in content access with its OpenCourseWare system, but soon anyone will be able to earn a certificate from taking M.I.T. courses online - for free. As James Marshall Crotty details for Forbes, the program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree, but those passing the material taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online content. According to the New York Times, in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body - M.I.T.x - that will be created within M.I.T. Students using the program will be able to communicate with their peers through student-to-student discussions, allowing them an opportunity to ask questions or simply brainstorm with others, while also being able to access online laboratories and self-assessments. In the future, students and faculty will be able to control which classes will be available on the system based on their interests, creating a personalized education setting.

An algorithm developed by examining smokers' brains mimics the predictive quality of search engines and cell phones, according to Jennifer Marcus of the UCLA Newsroom. In a new study, the UCLA research team describes several crucial advances in cognitive prediction, using fMRI and machine learning methods to perform "brain reading" on smokers experiencing nicotine cravings. The team classified data taken from cigarette smokers who were scanned while watching videos meant to induce nicotine cravings. The aim was to understand in detail which regions of the brain and which neural networks are responsible for resisting nicotine addiction specifically, and cravings in general, said Dr. Ariana Anderson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Integrative Neuroimaging Technology lab and the study's lead author. "We are interested in exploring the relationships between structure and function in the human brain, particularly as related to higher-level cognition, such as mental imagery," Anderson said. In essence, the algorithm was able to complete or "predict" the subjects' mental states and thought processes in much the same way that Internet search engines or texting programs on cell phones anticipate and complete a sentence or request before the user is finished typing.

What if your birthday was always on a Wednesday, or Christmas always a Sunday? As Brandon Keim writes for Wired, that kind of predictability is finding support thanks to a proposed new way to keep track of our year. According to Richard Conn Henry’s calendar, eight months would each have 30 days. Every third month would have 31 days. Every so often, to account for the leftover time, a whole extra week would be added. The upshot: Years would proceed with clockwork regularity, with no annual re-jiggering of schedules required. Each day would occupy the same position as it had the previous year and would in the next. Were this 364-day calendar, known officially as the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, adopted on the first day of 2012, both Christmas and New Year’s Day would forever fall on Sunday. The Hanke-Henry calendar would streamline financial operations, they write in an article republished by the libertarian Cato Institute, because Gregorian calendar anomalies make a muddle of interest-calculating conventions. Sunday-only Christmas and New Year’s holidays would also eliminate their mid-week appearances and “get rid of this zoo we’re in right now, when the whole economy collapses for two weeks,” Henry said.

Rumors are swirling that Google is developing augmented reality goggles that would leap-frog wearable technologies currently in the market like watches, fitness gear, and of course, smart-phones. Technology that add to your normal vision certainly has limitless applications, but a few obvious features would include mapping, adding annotations to people and places, and add opinions and reviews to any item. While the opportunities seem largely positive and exciting, some do worry that this is yet another opportunity for powerhouses like Google to insert more advertising opportunities into our worlds, but through this technology, much more literally. Some argue that's the main driver of why Google wants to champion this technology in the first place. Regardless of the potential negatives, and the idea of augmented reality being a "gimmick" it is increasingly becoming a likely part of our lives in which the world itself becomes our "app store."

Author Don Peppers asserts that although social media has enriched our lives and connected us to other people in positive ways, it has also created a framework for more frequently comparing ourselves to each other and re-evaluated our individual value. The notion is that although we're happier with incremental improvements in our lives, we also tend to like seeing our situations better than those around us. Social media makes the latter comparison take place infinitely more frequently because of how much people share about their personal and work life on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In many ways, social media has turned the concept of success into a game. Whether it's having a larger following online, sharing smarter thoughts, or posting successful news to the world, in many ways we're being encouraged to one-up each other constantly in whatever method we can. It may not be in an aggressive manner, but certainly interpersonal competition is far more visible. Competition can be a great thing for improving a free market, Peppers explains, but it should be acknowledged that it comes along with envy.

1) Stress suppresses it. 2) Great thinkers have attributed creativity to lack of focus . 3) Many scientists connect creative thought to Dopamine production. 4) It must go beyond simple observation to living and breathing insides one's mind. 5) Brain chemistry may play a big role in the variance of creativity among individuals. 6) A slower nervous system (in the brain) may be in indicator of creative thought. 7) Stepping away from a creative problem can help solve it. 8) Early creative analysis led to three divisions: Person, Process, and Environmental components. 9) Aerobics can improve creative processing. 10) Trying to gamify creativity can deplete it. 11) Improvisation stimulates linguistic creativity. 12) Understanding more than one language can boost one's creativity. 13) Creative people may tend to be more dishonest due to their ability to flesh out false stories without errors. 14) There may be a tie between high IQ and creativity. 15) Mental illness can also be linked to creativity.

Many scientists are convinced that the ultimate survival of humanity could be dependent on the human colonization of other planets .The discovery of microscopic worms which are biologically very similar to humans may be the key to helping humans colonize other planets like Mars by giving clues on coping with long-term space living. Scientists from Nottingham University blasted 4,000 of the worms, known as known as Caenorhabditis elegans, into space on board the Space Shuttle Discovery, and studied their progress. If mankind wants to avoid the natural order of extinction then we need to find ways to live on other planets. Surprising, many of the biological changes that happen during spaceflight affect astronauts and worms in the same way. Scientists have been able to show that worms can grow and reproduce in space for long enough to reach another planet and that we can remotely monitor their health.

Who will be the first to produce a plastic soda bottle made entirely of plants? Coca Cola and PepsiCo are in a race to be the first. Unfortunately don’t expect to see all plant bottles in the stores soon. Coca Cola announced that it plans to work with three companies that are developing this technology while Pepsi declared that it has cracked the code of the all-plant plastic bottle. The test run by Pepsi will conclude what products to sell in the all-plant bottles. Both companies stay very cautious as to announcing on what date they will launch such bottles. Allen Hershkowitz of the National Resources Defense Council said that creating plastics from plant sources generate smaller amounts of greenhouse gasses. Both Coke and Pepsi have taken broad initiatives to make their operations more environmentally friendly.

It is now four years since the onset of the recession and there are 6.6 million lesser jobs in America. The government thought that it was enough to save the banks as they would help to return the economy to where it was before. But that is not what happened. The situation we are facing now is as 80 years ago as then as now we are facing a breakdown of the banking system. The active work population has fallen by twice as in any post World War 2 downturn. The real economy is in a bad state and the problem of dislocations was never addressed. Eighty years ago the real economy stagnated because of increasing productivity in agriculture.It was only when government spending for the war increased that the nature of the economy changed again positively. Today we are moving from a manufacturing to a service economy whereby jobs are lost again because of higher productivity and globalization. The bubbles in housing and lending concealed the problem for while but the bubble has burst. The economy will not bounce back on its own and monetary policy is not going to help. Government should not try to preserve the old economy but fix the financial system and spend on education, basic research, innovation and a clean energy production.

When it comes to finding a mate, confidence counts - biologically. According to Emily Sohn for Discovery News, researchers suspect that there may be deeply rooted reasons why signals get crossed when men and women check each other out. The findings may offer insight for women who are sick of unwanted advances and advice for men who are repeatedly confused by women's reactions to their solicitations. "For men, missing out on a mating opportunity is a huge cost," Carin Perilloux, a psychologist at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts said. "Women could have sex with 1,000 men in a year and still have only one or maybe two offspring. Mating opportunities aren't as directly related to reproductive success for women." To better understand how that kind of bias plays out and why, Perilloux and colleagues put about 200 college students into a speed-dating sort of situation. When first impressions were rated, men tended to think that women were a full point more interested in them than women actually were. Women, on the other hand, guessed that men were a full point less interested than they actually were. When it comes to mating, for men, it seems that confidence may be biologically hardwired - whether warranted or not.

Marketing strategists take note - that talking cat video you've been kicking around may be a dud, according to Eric Smalley for Wired. It turns out that the degree to which your friends’ tastes and yours are connected has more to do with how you became friends in the first place than the force of that allegiance later on. When it comes to taste, “peer influence is virtually nonexistent,” said Kevin Lewis, a Harvard sociology graduate student who co-authored the study analyzing 1600 college students over four years. Lewis cautioned that the experiences of those studied on Facebook may not apply to everyone in all circumstances, but the results offer a sobering counterpoint to the conventional wisdom on the ubiquity of taste diffusion. “The extent to which friends’ preferences actually rub off on each other is minimal,” he said. The study’s findings suggest that it would be much more worthwhile to invest in understanding how and when friendships are a conduit for preferences, rather than assuming that they are and planning marketing strategies accordingly. “They clearly are under some circumstances, but we still don’t know whether those circumstances are common or important enough to warrant the time and money of business strategies,” said Lewis.

Technology, and more specifically computers have solved, but also created problems for us. For example, staring at a screen when it is either socially awkward, or worse, unsafe. But technology can also bring us a solution to such a problem, and some think that it will come in the form of "wearable computers." Author Nick Bilton explains this broad term as anything ranging from a watch, to lenses that provide us with information about our surroundings in real-time. Wherever this technology is going, the major tech companies like Apple and Google are already spending plenty of time and money to get us there. In the immediate future, the smart-phone seems to be the gateway device to get us there. It's powerful in terms of processes, is almost always with us, and can can transmit information. Everything from gaming, to businesses, to education, to fashion is likely to be disrupted by such a move in how data and our surroundings interact. Certainly an opportunity to revolutionize for the better, but as the Bilton puts it, likely to unleash a whole new set of problems that need to be solved.

1. Map out the really important stuff. Don't let important things become urgent; try to avoid urgency. 2. Pick a system and stick with it for at least 90 days. Look for no more than a week before settling on one, and then stick with it for at least 90 days. 3. Don’t use a calendar for to do items. ...anything that does not have a set time shouldn’t even touch the pages of your calendar. 4. Empty your head regularly. That means writing stuff down or capturing it in some other fashion. 5. Don’t be afraid to break familiar patterns. Mixing it up isn’t always a bad idea, and it can actually make the process of discovery part of your workflow. 6. Disconnect often. If you’re always on the go then you’ll never know how to properly stop and get the rest you need. 7. Get up early. 8. Be proactive. Being proactive allows you to actually craft what you’re doing with superior quality and effort. 9. Embrace curation. Be honest with yourself and examine what is stealing your attention. 10. Forget Inbox Zero. Create a folder within your email client and call it “Keepers”. Drag what you feel you must keep into that folder, and then delete the rest periodically.

Do you ever wonder if there's a total stranger out there who knows everything about you? Well it turns out Tyson Balcomb was the total stranger who found himself in the elevator with a women he'd never met, yet he could recall much of her history because he had seen her on Facebook. Tyson and others like him make up the minority who feel that Facebook is not as healthy as it seems. Over 200 million Americans use Facebook, roughly two-thirds of the population. Many of the young people who refuse to have a Facebook account say that they feel as if they would lose personal contact with their friends because they would be able to read up on their lives online. Facebook acknowledges that they won't be able to get every American to log on but the company is no longer worried because it is now trying to reach out to a different market. Facebook is trying to gain users in Asia and Latin American where there are still people who haven't heard of Facebook. Could it be?

Amazon may be taking a giant Orwellian step with their most recent venture, according to Erik Sherman for CBS News. A patent, made public last week, covers a system to not only track, through mobile devices (such as the Kindle), where individuals or aggregated users have been, but determine where they're likely to go next to better target ads, coupons, or other messages that could appear on a mobile phone or on displays that individuals are likely to see on their routes. The system could also use someone's identity to further tailor the marketing according to demographic information. Mobile devices provide a specific location, which can be transmitted in real-time. The system calculates a path and then predicts a set of likely next destinations. Then the system takes bids from third parties that want to send marketing messages to displays along the route the person takes, probably monitoring speed and direction to time displays for maximum chance of visibility. Additional claims make clear that the ad could also go to the mobile device - including a message to tell the person to look over at a particular display. No word on if the next step is the technology telling you that yes; one more tequila shot really is a bad idea.

If you were a hungry Velociraptor, you'd likely try to use every advantage to get dinner - and since you wouldn't be built for running, you might utilize your claws to your advantage. That's the reasoning behind new research from Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies which suggests that clawed dinosaurs may have contributed to the advent of flight within birds. In a paper published Dec. 14 in PLoS ONE, researchers Denver W. Fowler, Elizabeth A. Freedman, John B. Scannella and Robert E. Kambic describe how comparing modern birds of prey helped develop a new behavior model for sickle-clawed carnivorous dinosaurs like Velociraptor. "This study is a real game-changer," said lead author Fowler. "It completely overhauls our perception of these little predatory dinosaurs, changing the way we think about their ecology and evolution." The key is in the structure of predators better suited for grasping and tearing than for running and pursuit. Physiology and behavior found in hawks suggest some dinosaurs may have pounced and stabilized prey with their claws. The researchers suggest that this 'stability flapping' uses less energy than flight, making it an intermediate flapping behavior that may be key to understanding how flight evolved.

The incadescent lightbulb might someday be a historical relic, according to Dan Koeppel for Wired. This is due primarily to the intersection of government and technology - if all goes according to plan, the provisions of 2007’s Energy Independence and Security Act will effectively ban 100-watt incandescents starting in 2012. We've already seen the introduction of compact fluorescent bulbs, but as Koeppel illustrates, the new leader of the pack may soon be LED lighting. LEDs are semiconductors, and like all solid-state technology, they are getting better and cheaper on a predictable curve. In 1999, a researcher named Roland Haitz, then heading up semiconductor R&D at Hewlett-Packard, coauthored a paper that became the lighting industry’s manifesto. By charting the historical prices of LEDs and projecting forward, Haitz estimated that the amount of light they produced would increase by a factor of 20 per decade, while the cost would correspondingly drop by a factor of 10. Current LED lighting technology serves to reflect this progress. There is still a long way to go, however - current LED technology lacks the warmth of natural light the human eye has adapted to, at least in a format that won't burn skin if touched. Today pen lights; tomorrow your kitchen.

In a New York Times poll taken by professional techies around the world, most people predicted that in about 65 years from now man will have the ability to connect his brain to the internet via Wi-Fi. The Times asked its readers what technology will be like in the near future and most responses were pretty optimistic. The ones who thought we would be able to hook up our brains to the internet imagines a future where everyone would have a nearly unlimited memory and communication ability. Other ideas included infallible robot-driven cars and a human memory backup system. Those who took a more pessimistic view of the future of technology were just as creative as the optimists. For example, one opinion was that by 2170 humans will have become so integrated with electronics that more people will die from computer viruses than from biological viruses. Among this variety of opinions it seems like everyone could agree on one thing however, the possibilities with technology are truly endless.

Emerging world markets face a unique dilemma - their economies have grown faster than their ability to keep track of the people within it. As Jamie Holmes details for Slate, countries like India and Nigeria are utilizing biometric information, such as iris scans, to combat things such as the 'ghost worker.' This long-running scam drains millions of dollars each year from already strained public coffers in countries like India, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan. Using biometric IDs instead of traditional paper documents can eliminate duplicate enrollments and guarantee that the actual payee receives the money, usually by employing fingerprint verification at pay points. Utilizing databases and electronic payments alter the dynamic dramatically - infants and the deceased can’t be signed up (although presenting a baby for biometric registration would be entertaining, the fingerprints wouldn’t be the right size), and nonworking “workers” now feel uniquely identifiable. A fingerprint reader at a pay point is often enough to discourage no-shows from attempting to collect payments, probably because they are afraid of the electronic trail incriminating them. For these countries, electronic catalogs may prove to be more of a fraud deterrent than anything else.

Paul Davies, a notable physicist, has spoken out about the potential for human colonization of Mars. One way to make the notion more feasible: remove the aspect of a round trip. Among the considerations when NASA scientists think about manned spaceflight to Mars are the travel time (two years) and the price tag ($80 billion). But according to Davies, things could be done more inexpensively if scientists were sent to establish a permanent colony, eliminating the need for an expensive return flight to Earth. The major hurdle, Davies has said, is not so much the technology necessary to survive the hostile environment, but the culture of meekness that has permeated NASA throughout the Space Shuttle era. The first step in such an undertaking would be finding the right people to volunteer for the job; people with practical research abilities would be ideal, though romantic notions about extra-planetary exploration may tend to draw the interest of dreamers.

According to NPR's Jon Kalish, innovation may be coming from an unexpected place - your public library. As information becomes more digital, public libraries are striving to redefine their roles. A small number are working to create "hackerspaces," where do-it-yourselfers share sophisticated tools and their expertise. "We see the library as not being in the book business, but being in the learning business and the exploration business and the expand-your-mind business," says Allen County Public Library Director Jeff Krull. "We feel this is really in that spirit, that we provide a resource to the community that individuals would not be able to have access to on their own." The Allen County facility includes a CNC router, a computer-controlled power tool that cuts wood, plastic and some metals. The Maker Station - a 50-foot trailer housing the hackerspace in the library parking lot - also has a lathe, scroll and band saws, an electronics bench and an injection molding machine, which makes objects by heating up recycled plastic chips. As Kalish details, these DIY headquarters are ground zero for public 3D printing, a hot trend in hands-on fabrication.

Continual awareness of our consumption may soon be commonplace thanks to new tech resources, according to Marty Travers for FastCompany. Advanced metering infrastructure - smart meters - report on consumer electricity usage at regular intervals throughout the day instead of monthly. This data will be available to customers online, allowing them to track their household energy consumption. This data can then be used by the utility for implementing programs that encourage customers to use less energy at peak times and potentially receive a credit for this behavior on their utility bill. Smart meters, however, don’t only have to be for electricity. Water is another great example of what such smart systems can accomplish. When distribution systems are integrated with the latest telecommunications advances, customers can manage their water usage through a smartphone or an in-home monitor. If your clothes washer or faucet is leaking, you’ll know in a matter of minutes. The business impact of smart integrated infrastructure is potentially vast. Utilities - electric, gas, and water - can now invest in a suite of technologies that collect operational data on the distributed equipment in their networks. It might be time for your washing machine to go on a diet.

Letting your pet sleep with you can be life-threatening, according to Wired magazine’s story on an Emerging Infectious Diseases article, “Zoonoses in the Bedroom.” People have died from diseases ranging from plague to meningitis. For example, a 2008 study of nine plague survivors found that almost half (four humans) slept with their dogs. A number of cases of meningitis have occurred where dogs regularly licked their owners’ faces or where the owner often kissed the dog. The lesson? Don’t share your bed and please don’t kiss your pets, especially if you are very young or immuno-compromised. Cite: Chomel BB and Sun B. Zoonoses in the bedroom. Emerg Infect Dis. Feb 2011.

Iran plans to learn all about a crashed CIA spy-drone [RQ-170 Sentinel] that was claimed to have landed on their territory. Reverse engineering could potentially unlock the secrets to how stealth technology works to avoid radar. Although the threat remains that these secrets could fall into the hands of many interested countries, engineers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) say the task is extremely difficult. The Chinese and Russian could offer technical aid in the reverse engineering process, since both nations have historically been successful in copying stealth technology. Features of the RQ-170 that could be unlocked include: its radar-evading shape, techniques to make welds undetectable to radar, exhaust ducting, and the exact composition of the alloy and non-metal composites. A Boeing engineer reassures that reproducing the alloys are much more difficult that figuring out what they’re made of. Finally, software anti-tamper measures, if present, should protect the sensors technology on the RQ-170 -- technology that may be present on F-22 and F-35 fighter planes.

Have you ever wondered why the disembodied voice that speaks to you from your smartphone, GPS, or other enabled device tends to be female? Using Siri, Apples digital personal assistant as an example, it has become clear that, at least in America, old stereotypes that we have about women, and about their place in the world, as the stereotypical secretary, or mother figure perhaps, haven't changed much in the last 100 years. The decision was made at Apple, and elsewhere, that trust was paramount , and what is more trustworthy than the comforting sound of a feminine voice? As we change our attitudes towards technology in the future, perhaps a male voice, soothing yet commanding, will become the de facto standard in use, but for the time being Siri and others like her will be there to greet you whenever you book a plane ticket, request information from your phone, or simply need directions to the next coffee shop, efficient, sulty, and worthy of all of your love and trust.

Darpa, a research branch of the Pentagon, has been working on an experiment named "Assessment of Asymmetric Social Indicators", which aims to employ voice-sensing technology and algorithms for the recognition of body language to measure and analyze social interactions in military-related contexts. The main current purpose is to detect unsocialized individuals, testing the algorithms on computers and mobile platforms. The experiment isn't as extravagant as it may seem: a phone app already exists, that reads the user's feelings based on the sound of the voice. Before this can be done, technology needs to be improved in the aspect of data collection in noisy environments, as well as in the analysis of speech patterns in large groups. According to Daniel Olguin Olguin, beneficiary of Darpa's funding for this experiment, the main issue is convincing people of the importance of the metrics obtained.

Friends are people who click together - literally, according to Jonah Leher in the Wall Street Journal. A new study by Stefan Wuchty and Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University found that we exchange the highest volume of email with those people we know the least. The researchers developed an algorithm that let them predict the nature of a given relationship based solely on the details of an email exchange. "We didn't need to read the messages or anything like that," Mr. Uzzi says. "Just looking at the speed of a reply was more than enough." People reply to their close friends, on average, within seven hours of getting the email, the data show. Professional contacts take a bit more time - we don't hit send for nearly 11 hours. But the biggest difference came when the scientists looked at those people we barely know. On average, it took us 50 hours to reply. "Although these messages [from people we don't know well] account for the majority of messages, people replied much more slowly to them," Mr. Uzzi says. "We clearly give email priority to our close friends, just as we do in real life. In other words, there's a surprisingly easy way to figure out how you feel about someone — just count the hours before you hit the "reply" button.

Holiday cheer is a powerful thing - and according to Melanie Greenberg in Psychology Today, retailers are harnessing this power by tapping into our brain functions. Researcher Brian Knutson, a Stanford neuroscientist and his colleagues scanned the brains of 26 volunteers in real-time while they made decisions whether to purchase displayed items. A potential purchase item, such as a box of Godiva chocolates or holiday video was displayed on the screen, followed then by a price. Four seconds later, two boxes appeared and the shopper had the opportunity to check "yes" or "no." Immediately the desirable products were displayed, participants showed increased activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain area associated with dopamine release, reward circuitry and new learning. It seemed that participants were pleasantly anticipating the upcoming purchase. This process isn't without rationality, however - when shown the price of a given item, researchers noticed activity in the prefrontal cortex, responsible for higher-level decision making and consequence consideration. Retailers are no strangers to these findings, as sales and credit options and layaway plans tempt consumers to trigger the rewards while mitigating perceived cost.

Dr. Stanley Milgram had a peculiar assignment for his first-year graduates. He wanted them to head down into the NY subway system and ask random strangers on a crowded train if they would give up their seats. Many of the students, feeling quite uncomfortable with the idea, did just that and the results were astonishing. 68% of riders gave up their seats willingly. But the experimenters became the experiment. The experiment turned out to be extremely difficult and sometimes traumatic for the students. Changing the experiment slightly, by asking for a patrons' seat because they couldn't read standing up, dropped the percentage rate to 38%. Milgram's experiment tested the natural social laws within our society and discovered how it is the only thing that separates us from chaos.

Peter Herman has designed a coffee cup that eliminates the need for a petroleum-based lid on top. Herman spent two years trying various prototypes in order to finally get to a folding top which leaves a spot large enough to easily sip coffee from. Ultimately, the idea is for these cups to be composed of paper and cellulose-based plastic so they can be composted. Herman believes this container could save retailers money since it's one piece which eliminates the need for having a supplier for cups, and lids. No launch date is set yet but Herman is in the midst of talking with several retailers and manufacturers.

It is well known that companies, especially technology companies are struggling with the number of women directors and board members. Software and semiconductor sectors, in particular, fare very poorly, with 1 in 28 of the highest paid executives a woman. A dozen big companies have no women directors at all. According to Ms. Nagel, chief executive of Watermark, the reasons are: for one, board members of tech companies are selected from chief executives of other companies. And two, global tech companies focus on racial diversity more. Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit, believes that gender diversity at top level is necessary for hiring and keeping good talent. Of the biggest tech companies, most have not more than 3-4 women directors. In California, not only tech companies, but even big public companies have only 10% women board members. Notwithstanding the fact that gender-diverse boards show a 53% higher return on equity.

Before steve jobs had fallen ill there were many things in his mind. One of the things is to put the ipad tablets on the hands of Doctors. So it started in chicago, where the doctors in a hospital were given ipad tablets 4 month before that version of ipad has released in the market. To this jobs also set out a person called Afshad Mistri who is the medical marketing manager. Nobody had an idea of why apple such a huge company is pushing it's product to hospitals. Afshad Mistri conducted many conferences to implement the usage of ipads in hospitals. Many doctors accepted this and started using this. But they used it with care by using protective covers. Apple has developed many apps for the usage of ipads in hospitals and it also many doctors to keep in track of the patients health.

After a prolonged timeline of slow growth the continent of Africa seems to be catching up with its richer neighbours, Asia and Europe. The evidence of this new boom in the economy is seen in Onitsha market in southern Nigeria where shops are stocked with goods (ranging from rice to soaps and from computers to construction equipment) as high as six feet, and with a daily crowd of 3million people, it is considered to be a hub for the budding entrepreneurs from the gulf of guinea. Hence it wouldn’t be wrong to call it one of the world’s biggest markets. Statistics show that Africa has grown faster East Asia, including the manufacturing giant japan. The IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and the succeeding year. Even though most of the people in Africa live in less than two dollars a day, there are signs of prosperity and growth in places such as Angola and Equatorial Guinea which are rich in oil and countries such as Rwanda and Ethiopia are setting the right economic metrics in their countries. This has enabled the African middle class to grow at a high rate, 60m Africans have an annual income of 3000 dollars according to the standard bank. Due to Africa’s new found affinity for technology productivity is growing at a rate of 3%.

Where's the next travel hotspot? It happens to be Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, whose recent change from a military to a political government made the country more accessible to tourists. The change in regime has brought change in people's daily lives from the importation of new buses for public transportation to the country's first ATMs. The historic visit from U.S Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also represents the upturn towards a more peaceful Burmese government. With the country expecting a visit from at least one million tourists in the next few years, a crucial concern that arises is that there will not be enough hotels to accommodate all of them. While Myanmar is seen as Asia's most promising destination, it is important that the country maintains its distinct cultural heritage and does not go the way of rampant commercialization.

QR codes - those arrangement of black and white squares designed for mobile devices to scan and link to content (usually websites) - have popped up everywhere, thanks to marketing departments. Yet as Tim Maly details in FastCompany, their ubiquity doesn't necessarily translate into usability. They are often in places where you can't scan them properly (e.g. on subways with no data reception) or safely (e.g on billboards above a highway). Besides, as Adam Greenfield's Urban Scale research team learned, no one knows how to use them. In a field survey, they found that though most people knew what QR codes were for, only 2 of 28 respondents were able to successfully resolve a URL, "even when coached by a knowledgeable researcher." Maly details how this prevalence led to a reimagination of the QR code at MoMA's recent 'Talk to Me' exhibit, within Svanes Kolding's film The Things We Keep. Kolding arduously turned a working QR code into a crossword puzzle. "Since I was interested in creating a commemorative souvenir about my film, which itself is a story about souvenirs, it seemed rather logical to use the QR code as a central motif," he says, "The puzzle format allowed me to highlight certain areas of interest that my film covered."

Getting money for college may be literally at your fingertips, according to CNN's Rachel Garrett. The Kentucky Fried Chicken Foundation is asking eligible high school seniors to tweet a photo that illustrates their commitment to education and enriching their communities for a chance to win up to $5,000 per year in scholarship funds. KFC started the Twitter contest last year as a way of reinvigorating its scholarship program for the social media age. Other organizations, perhaps weary of wading through applicants' lengthy essays, also are offering eager students ways to turn a 140-character message into money for college. Last summer Scholarships.com awarded a "Short and Tweet" $1,000 cash prize and Amazon Kindle e-readers to three students who tweeted winning answers to questions like, "What would an extra $1,000 for college mean to you?" Why a tweet? Jodi Schafer, the University of Iowa's director of MBA admissions and financial aid, told USA Today that application essays were "becoming unoriginal." She said "we're hoping that incorporating social media in the process will help bring back some of that creativity." Applicants were encouraged to include in their tweet links to blogs, videos or Facebook accounts.

Ever wonder why some people are able to bluff their way through a big presentation? While a number of different factors surely play a role, recent research suggests that the difference in performance may not have to do so much with actual ability, but perceptions of that ability, according to Scott Barry Kaufman in Psychology Today. He highlights four experiments that asked people to mentally-rotate a three-dimensional object and predict its appearance. They found that that confident people, regardless of their gender, tended to be more accurate. So confidence matters for everyone. They did find statistically significant gender effects though. Consistent with prior research, males, on average, were more confident and more accurate than women on the mental rotation test. Note these are only averages, there were women who were more confident and performed better than men. At any rate, when confidence was taken into account, the sex difference in mental rotation scores almost completely evaporated. This is quite impressive, considering there are very few studies showing that one variable can completely account for this very large sex difference. Kaufman suggests this supports that teaching people to be confident may be as important as the content learned.

Increasingly batteries US citizens turned in for recycling are ending up in Mexico. This is because strict new Environmental Protection Agency standards on lead pollution put restrictions on domestic recycling, but do not prohibit companies from exporting the batteries. Mexico needs the batteries to satisfy a growing demand for lead now in short supply worldwide. Around 20 million American vehicle and industrial batteries will end up in Mexico this year. Mexican officials blame financial concerns and manpower shortages for the fact that, in many cases, even Mexico’s lower legal environmental standards are not followed, and unsafe methods are used in the recycling process, causing lead to leach into the environment. Lead is blamed for serious and devastating health problems of many children and babies near the recycling plants. Doctors, parents and school officials have so far been unsuccessful in getting the government to address the problem. Environmental advocates have said that the US should bear more responsibility for what happens to its old batteries.

What if you only had to charge your smartphone once a week? As Megan Fellman and Sarah Ostman detail for Northwestern University's NewsCenter, we may not have to speculate for much longer. A team of engineers at Northwestern has created an electrode for lithium-ion batteries - rechargeable batteries such as those found in cellphones and iPods - that allows the batteries to hold a charge up to 10 times greater than current technology. Batteries with the new electrode also can charge 10 times faster than current batteries. The researchers combined two chemical engineering approaches to address two major battery limitations - energy capacity and charge rate - in one fell swoop. In addition to better batteries for cellphones and iPods, the technology could pave the way for more efficient, smaller batteries for electric cars. “We have found a way to extend a new lithium-ion battery’s charge life by 10 times,” said Harold H. Kung, lead author of the paper. “Even after 150 charges, which would be one year or more of operation, the battery is still five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries on the market today.”

Exercise has long been known as the way to build and keep muscle - that may soon be changing at the genetic level, however. According to Science Daily, an international team of scientists has created super-strong, high-endurance mice and worms by suppressing a natural muscle-growth inhibitor, suggesting treatments for age-related or genetics-related muscle degeneration are within reach. The scientists found that a tiny inhibitor may be responsible for determining the strength of our muscles. By acting on this, they were able to modulate the activity of certain genes, creating a strain of mighty mice whose muscles were twice a strong as those of normal mice. "There are now ways to develop drugs for people who are unable to exercise due to obesity or other health complications, such as diabetes, immobility and frailty," says Ronald M. Evans, a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Lab, who led the Salk team. "We can now engineer specific gene networks in muscle to give the benefits of exercise to sedentary mice." Scientists suggest this research may pave the way for both muscle strengthening in humans, as well as a possible treatment for muscular dystrophy.

According to this post from Behance’s research arm and think tank, the minute that we lose momentum, we lose the thread. We become extremely vulnerable to distraction and defeat. Our inner critic awakens, and we start second-guessing ourselves, doubting the possibility of success. Other people’s demands creep in, and we start to generate shiny, new ideas that seem even more worthy of execution, tempting us to move onto the next big thing without ever finishing. If we can keep moving on our projects every day, it’s infinitely easier to stay focused, make great strides, and blast through the roadblocks that inevitably come up. In this posting, the author offers tips on not just building – but maintaining – momentum: 1) Know that momentum takes time to build. It’s important to set small, realistic goals at first. Challenge yourself, but don’t overdo it. 2) Carve out a consistent block of time to work on your project. Don’t wait for this free time to magically open up. Rather, proactively carve out a block of time in your daily schedule – and make it public. 3) Work on your project every day. No seriously, every day. 4) Once you really get some momentum going, don't be afraid. When it comes to creative execution, the key is to get moving, and keep moving.

A new study at Albert Einstein College of Medicine recruited 34 adults to help determine the effect heading a soccer ball has to a soccer players skull. The study showed that players who had headed the ball more had a more severe loss of white matter in their brains. In areas roaming from memory to attention. The results have been noted to be similar to that of people who experience traumatic brain injury. Apart from those findings the players that headed the ball more then 1,100 times in twelve months also had troubles recalling lists of words read to them. The information from this study is of particular concern to players that have been playing and heading the ball longer then others.

When it comes to our minds, author Nicholas Carr argues that our obsession with connection has a cost. The Internet, Carr argues in his new book "The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains," is a distraction factory. In this article, Forbes spoke with Carr about his belief that Internet-connected people are losing their ability to think deeply. What the Internet means is that all forms of information, including text, are being funneled online and coming out in a mode with lots of things at once, lots of alerts and updates and distractions. If you just look at the time we spend online -- or more broadly, in front of screens -- you could argue that never before has a medium so dominated our time, he said in the article. Carr also states that the one thing we've learned from scientists is that the brain likes lots of stimulus, whether it's important or trivial. The Internet isn't doing anything against our will. We enjoy being distracted. But the net puts no brakes on that side of our cognitive desire. "The only way to counter the effects of the Net is to spend less time on it. That's it. You have to actually sit down and exercise concentrated thoughts for a significant period of time," he said.

Studies in the past about bad consequences for soccer players who often head the ball weren’t considered reliable because those studies weren’t related to concussions. Current studies show that frequent heading the ball will lead to brain damage. Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York used a questionnaire and diffusion tensor imaging, a new M.R.I. technique, for getting the new results. Respondents who headed the ball more than about 1,100 times in the last year lost more white matter in the brains than respondents who headed the ball fewer times. It’s about the white matter in the front and back from the head and it’s involved with memory, attention and visualizing information. Another study from the Humboldt State University in California showed that respondents who frequent head the ball have more headaches and periods of dizziness than other respondents. Heading the ball too much might lead to problems for children, but heading the ball can’t be forbidden.

Your clergy - or your conscience - may keep you away from the well-known seven deadly sins, but as Randy Shore details each sin for the Edmonton Journal, what we think of as bad may actually be (somewhat) good. Research published in Psychological Science also found that anger can help prime you to effectively complete unpleasant tasks and compete more forcefully for the things that you need to acquire. Red wine is rich in antioxidants called polyphenols, which, according to the Mayo Clinic, may help protect the lining of the blood vessels in your heart. A study published by Harvard researcher Sara Mednick in Nature Neuroscience found that a midday nap improved people's performance in visual processing tasks - a one-hour nap was as restorative as a full night's sleep, she found. The British Nutrition Foundation published a bulletin that found moderate lean red meat consumption is consistent with good health. The journal Biological Psychology found women who engage in intercourse respond to stressful tasks with more calm and lower blood pressure, in addition to getting a workout. Marijuana may prevent Alzheimer's disease, and chocolate can stave off heart disease and cancer as well. The seven deadlies, in moderation, may add more to our lives than we know.

Many popular movies, including “The Return of the King” from the Lord of the Rings franchise, show a character dying in lava by sinking into it. Lava has a density over three times that of water and between one hundred thousand and one million times its viscosity. Because the human body has a density just over that of water, it is impossible for a human to sink in lava; he or she would float! This can be shown by a simple experiment: make a small figure out of Styrofoam. Push him into a bucket or tray of motor oil. He will, of course, simply float across the surface. Ignoring the fact that he didn’t burst into flames, this shows what would happen to a human falling into lava.

Incapacitation, retribution, or rehabilitation are the three choices society has for dealing with criminal behavior, according to Michael Gazzaniga in Slate. When society considers public safety, it is faced with the decision about which perspective those making and enforcing the laws should take. Determinism — the belief that all current and future events, actions, decisions, and behavior are caused by preceding events combined with the laws of nature — disputes long-standing beliefs about what it means to be responsible for one’s actions; some scholars assert the extreme view that humans are never responsible for any of their actions. Neuroscience, however, is beginning to challenge some people’s notions about criminal behavior and what we should do about it. “It’s boggling that the legal system’s gold standard for an insanity defense... is based on 166-year-old science," says Stanford psychology professor Robert Sapolsky. "Our growing knowledge about the brain makes notions of volition, culpability, and, ultimately, the very premise of a criminal justice system, deeply suspect.” With this increasing knowledge of how the brain works, the question of our view of the defendant's relative 'sanity' is likely to change in the coming years.

A stubbed toe, missed bus, or the driver in front of you - it's a good chance you've experienced these annoyance and uttered a few, um, colorful words; according to The Independent's Rob Sharp, your profane outburst actually serves a purpose. A study by Keele University confirms that swearing can act as a form of relief. But those who have become habituated to cursing (think Gordon Ramsay or Snoop Dogg) are less likely to feel the benefits. Richard Stephens, of Keele's School of Psychology, said there was no "recommended daily swearing allowance", and it remains unclear whether certain swearwords are more effective analgesics than others. "We are just scratching the surface of how swearing can influence our emotions," he added. The mechanism, the scientists say, is simple, swearing elicits an emotional response leading to what is termed "stress-induced analgesia", also known as the "fight or flight" response, along with a surge of adrenalin. Frequent swearers can utter profanities without feeling an emotional response,and thus do not get the same pain-relieving effects. So, it seems, swearing lightly in one's daily routine can help in the occasional, stressful situation. Now you #@%!ing know.

Google is working on a project to make self-driving cars come to reality. The technology is favored for various different reasons such as safety, mobility, economy and environment. The cars memorize the road infrastructure and use computerized maps to determine where to drive, to anticipate road signs, traffic lights and roadblocks long before they are visible to the human eye. The cars also use specialized lasers, radar and cameras to analyze traffic at a speed faster than the human brain can process; which makes them much safer. A second advantage will be mobility by car-sharing opportunities. A Self-driving car will come to you just when you need it and when you are done with it, the car will just drive away, so you won’t even have to look for parking. Self-driving cars can also change the way we use our highways by a method called vehicle platooning. “Platooning” is technical lingo for self-driving cars that drive so closely together that they behave more like trains than individual cars. In addition to all these benefits, everybody who are not able to drive a car right now because they are blind or have brain injury, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, will be able to drive cars by their own. A future without traffic accidents is possible.

The 2012 TED Prize will go to City 2.0, an idea for “the city of the future” and not a person, unlike previous years. Cities contribute 70% of the world’s carbon emissions, and are home to 50% of the human population, figures which are moving up. Large corporations seem least likely to win, even though some have substantial investments in future cities. According to The Institute for the Future’s Anthony Townsend, a “network of experimentation and learning around smart technologies and service innovations” will be the key to develop City 2.0. Another approach is to focus on one issue, like urban farming or electric car recharging stations. The urban historian Leo Hollis called for ideas that take a people-first position to build a “just city”.

Scientists recently discovered a planet that fits several conditions which may make it habitable. The planet, named Kepler-22b, is located 600 light years away, where it revolves around a star very similar to our sun. Also of note is the fact that the planet is located right in the middle of what scientists call the "habitable zone"- the area that is neither too close nor too far from the star. Scientists do not know yet what the surface of the planet is like. It may be rocky or gaseous, but there is also a good chance that it has areas of compressed ice or other water, such as an ocean. The temperature is predicted to be in the 70s F. This planet is the current best candidate for life because it orbits a star that is similar to Earth's sun, and because it is located in the center of the habitable zone. But more study is necessary to see if the planet ever did, or could, support extraterrestrial life. Kepler-22b is one of 29 confirmed planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope, although a couple of thousand possible planets are still being investigated.

India says it will open up to foreign retailers. Battles loom, commercial and political Less than a tenth of India’s $450 billion of annual retail sales take place in “organised” shops resembling those of the rich world .But that could soon change. On November 24th the coalition government, led by the Congress party, said that in cities of over 1m folk, foreign firms could now own 51% of “multi-brand” retailers, such as supermarkets (up from zero), and 100% of single-brand chains (up from 51%). Although the change does not need Parliament’s formal approval, its proceedings have been brought to a noisy halt since the announcement. Critics may keep obstructing parliamentary business unless the government backs down.

With the ubiquity of the text message what exactly has this new channel of communication meant for how we express ourselves (and what has it done to us)? As Alice Walton writes for Forbes, "what’s fascinating is what people are willing to say in texts that they would never say in person. Somehow it’s OK to be a little more revealing, forthright, and feisty than it is when you’re talking face to face." This works well enough that Dr. Alan Manevitz, a psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, has integrated texting into a therapeutic practice for his patients. “Texts allow us to capture people’s voices in the situations they’re in, right when they’re in them," he says. "Then when they come in to the office, we talk about what’s happened, but I’m already aware of it through their texts in the preceding week. The events are captured instantaneously. This is not from memory (which can pose accuracy problems), it’s in real time.” As Walton details, however, it's not all rosy - bullying and 'sexting,' or sending graphic/nude images of oneself, results in higher incidents of depression and suicide attempts in adolescents. With more research likely on the impact of texting, we'll gain insight into how what we say says things about us.

Aging is inevitable, but the inevitabilities that come with it are not always as they seem. Some, such as general confusion associated with aging, may be addressed by certain key vitamins, according to Jane Brody of the New York Times. As we age, our ability to absorb vitamin B12 from food declines, and often so does our consumption of foods rich in this vitamin. A B12 deficiency can creep up without warning and cause a host of confusing symptoms that are likely to be misdiagnosed or ascribed to aging. As an essential vitamin, it provides a number of roles in the body, from producing blood cells to regulating the nervous system. Major B12 deficiency results in easily-detected anemia, but more subtle effects of a B12 deficiency may include muscle weakness, fatigue, shakiness, unsteady gait, incontinence, low blood pressure, depression and other mood disorders, and cognitive problems like poor memory. Within an elderly population which may have built up this deficiency, it's difficult to tell exactly where 'normal' aging-related effects stop and B12-related setbacks may begin.

Southbury, a picturesque suburb, off Interstate 84, is increasingly becoming a locality with a difference. “Kids” here are sometimes as old as 64 years. And why not? When a significant population of the suburb is in their eighties and nineties, being 64 is definitely like a kid, with so many “elders” around! With rising numbers in the population of people above 60 (which is currently at 30 percent, a big jump of around 21 percent in a decade, and is expected to grow to 40 percent by 2020), real kids, especially those under the age of 18 find themselves badly outnumbered here. Three assisted living centers, two nursing homes and a public housing complex for the elderly have come up in this small town with a population of 20000 people. And with ever growing numbers of the gray force, the waiting lists in such complexes are only increasing.

S. Amanda Caudill and her team had traveled about four hours daily to check the traps for conducting a survey on mammals. The obstacles were the barbed wire spikes, the painful needles of pejibaye trees and the razor shaped fully grown leaves of sugarcane. The team had learned to move skillfully through these obstacles watching carefully the spikes of barbed wire, needles of pejibaye trees and crawling under the fallen fully grown sharp sugarcane leaves. Moreover, the team had to learn the tactics to maneuver the domestic animal like horse, dog and cow. Especially a dog, named Mancha, was really frightening to them. Mancha regularly joined with them at the time of trekking. The team member who held his leash, kept him at a safe distance. However, their remarkable achievement was the capture of three individual mammals. Among these captures, two are the new species whose presence in that area was not known to the scientists. These were roof rat (Rattus rattus) and gray four-eyed opossum (Philander opossum). They had also discovered the presence of a female juvenile dusky rice rat whose weight was less than 30 grams. This miniature cute animal traveled about 300km.with the team.

Chris Cox was a 26 year old who doctors wanted to pull the plug on. Following an ATV accident, Chris accidently overdosed on the drug oxycontin, slipping into a coma and vegetative state, suffering irreversible brain damage. Chris' condition was so bad that doctors attempted to convince his parents to sign his life away, to take away his support and allow him to die. Their refusal to sign the documents however have paid off, with the Chris of three years later steadily improving. Chris can now respond to basic commands, in a state known as 'minimal consciousness'. Despite not being the Hollywood revival some might have hoped for, this is still incredible progress, especially seeing as it has been caused by a sleeping aid. The drug Ambien has a paradoxical effect on such patients, appearing in many cases to awaken them from their vegetative state. There are now 200,000 people in the USA in a similar state of consciousness to Chris. This is all the more remarkable due to doctors previously believing that such a state did not exist. This poses questions as to where the advancements regarding this drug will go to next, and whether the dangers outweigh the pros.

The annual study using federal tax documents, found that over 36 private colleges earned more than $1 million in 2009 and the highest paid was Constantine Papadakis of Drexel University who earned $4,912,127.William R. Brody of Johns Hopkins University ($3,821,886),Donald V. DeRosa of University of the Pacific ($2,357,540) and Henry S. Bienen of Northwestern University ($2,240,775) were also in the top list. Kevin J. Manning at Stevenson University in Maryland earned $1,491,655 — 16.1 times as much as the pay and benefits. Ms. Jackson of Rensselaer; Mr. Zeppos of Vanderbilt; Frances Lucas of Millsaps College, in Jackson, Miss.; Jehuda Reinharz of Brandeis University (he is no longer president); and J. Timothy Cloyd of Hendrix College, in Conway, Ark also earned in such a manner.Pressure on private college presidents is increasing on many fronts like uncertainty about the sustainability of the traditional financial model, calls for further regulation, greater competition, growing student financial need, and consumer concerns about rising tuition.

In effort to better understand the ramifications of downloading music on Swiss society, a country where 1 in 3 Swedes participates in this "unauthorized" act, the government conducted a study and recently published the results. The report notes that historically any kind of technology generally gets exploited. It is an inevitable part of progress. In regards to downloading, the report showed that of those who illegally downloaded music, movies, or games, most did not plan on decreasing their budget on media. Rather, they complimented their media consumption and shifted it to media they found worth paying for. Individuals who were heavy downloaders were found to frequent more concerts (thus supporting up-and-coming artists) and as for games, individuals who were heavy downloaders also tend to spend more than average consumers at the store on games. The overarching point of the report was that the potential violation of freedom that anti-piracy laws might spur is not worth it as the evidence shows that piracy is not destructive to an economy, society, or to creators.

The euro has gone into a crisis, that is not a novelty, but what is new in this prolonged troubling issue for the European Union and the euro zone is that now the politics are at a skirmish with the economy market. Many serious decisions and redesigns must be put into place to save the integrity of the European Union in the forthcoming year. On one hand the countries that are big creditors help the countries with weak economies, on the other hand it is not known what will they demand for their help. The market demands for the European Union to make further steps towards federalization, and the politics of the individual countries still fight for their personal interests. To overcome the crises the market demands for a new way of governance of the euro zone, by placing a central organ that will act as a mutual monetary fund for all of the countries, with purpose of both crediting the weak economies and regulating the finances of every individual countries to prevent the abuse of its funds. The politics of each of the country is not ready yet to abandon the autonomy of their finances and money spending and further more this might provoke a power struggle for what organization and which party will be given the power to regulate the states’ finances.

The next time you receive an email from someone, you might want to question it a little bit more instead of taking it as gospel, according to Randy Dotinga from Health. New research suggests that people are more likely to lie to strangers when they’re communicating via email or instant messages rather than when they are talking face-to-face. “It’s not news that we lie. What’s new is that we lie even more online,” said study author Mattitiyahu Zimbler, a graduate student and senior researcher at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In the study which appeared in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, undergraduate students engaged in communication via email, instant messaging, and face-to-face, then analyzed the lies they told (the average was about 1.5 lies per each 15 minutes). When they figured out how often the participants lied based on how many words they spoke to each other, the researchers found that those talking via email lied about five times more than those speaking face-to-face; those speaking via instant message lied about three times more than those talking face-to-face. Note to self: investigate Nigerian dignitary more before wiring lottery-winnings deposit.

What age is considered too young to play with Elmo on dad's iPad? That's the question (and trend) Cecilia Kang addresses for the Washington Post. Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, an explosion of applications and games aimed at children. "Just about every category of learning is covered in Apple’s and Google’s app stores," says Kang. "Get your toddlers to trace letters with their fingers on one of dozens of apps aimed at budding writers. Baby Sign Language teaches infants the signs for cow, foods and other objects. Math Ninja offers drills on multiplication and division." Access to learning technology at an early age may be championed by the Baby Einstein set, but unexpectedly critics voice concerns for developing minds. For children 2 or younger, all those screens can have a negative effect on development, according to a recent statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics. If you really want to help boost brain power, the best solutions can be found with unstructured play, the academy said. “Kids need laps, not apps,” said Frederick Zimmerman, an expert on media and child health and the chairman of the Department of Health Service at UCLA. There is, as of yet, no definitive study on the impact of mobile devices on children.

On a bad day at work, it's tempting to want to strike out on your own via the entrepreneurial path. As Alexandra Levit details for the New York Times, however, the realities of leaving the workplace for your own venture may change the rosy outlook many people romanticize. Politics are unavoidable, either with clients or vendors, and work-life balance may be non-existent for quite some time after launching a venture. Levit highlights other considerations: "First, there’s the sheer difficulty of finding a market niche for your product or service, as well as the proper resources to make a new business happen. Then there are the minutiae. As the founder, you will find that anything and everything is your responsibility. You will oversee production, distribution, marketing, sales and turning a profit." She also discusses the three P's of working for someone else: peace (of mind, which comes from leaving your job at the office and going home), prestige (which may come from being part of an organization that's a know quantity), and perks (health insurance, retirement, vacation). The entrepreneurial world is great for some, but it's important to know what may be waiting for those who take the plunge.

Call it your grandparents' version of 'The Matrix,' but the 1920s and 30s saw an onslaught of robot hysteria - the fear that machines would rise up and control their masters (or at least take their jobs). As Slate's Matt Novak argues, "predictions for the future are always a direct reflection of the times in which they’re created. Just as all politics is local, all futurism is now." The 1920s, mired in the Great Depression, also saw a tremendous growth in technology - and the rise of that great scapegoat, the robot. Worries that jobs would be outsourced and that society was headed for a mechanized dystopia echoed the general sentiment of hopelessness and fear common of the era - boxer Jack Dempsey even proclaimed he could "...whip any mechanical robot in the ring." As economic prosperity increased over subsequent decades, so did people's opinion on robots as benevolent helpers instead of sinister overlords - indicating that technology may be the impartial lens through which we view our own current social situation. "The wheel and the book and the Internet either allow us or force us to become cyborgs," say Novak. "Your belief in this as a good or bad thing likely depends on your economic situation at the moment."

Working in tandem with others isn't just an imagined reality - it's science, a release from Johns Hopkins University indicates. The brain was built for cooperative activity, whether it be dancing on a reality television show, constructing a skyscraper or working in an office, according to a study led by behavioral neuroscientist Eric Fortune and published in the journal Science. “What we learned is that when it comes to the brain and cooperation, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts,” said Fortune, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part.” Fortune's study examined Ecuadorian wrens' song pattern to identify the neural back-and-forth that takes place in that most complex of animals - humans. So whether it's dancing with a partner or passing a basketball to a teammate, the synergy we experience may be actually be the result of ancient precedents hard-wired into our primal brain.

Wouldn't it be nice to take a pill that made you immune to unhealthiness? That's the perception many people adopt according to a recent study, as reported by Christopher Wanjek. Researchers from Taiwan recently published a report in Addiction magazine finding that smokers instructed to take a daily multivitamin smoked more cigarettes than smokers not taking a multivitamin. The study is a follow-up to research published in August in the journal Psychological Science by the same investigators, who reported that subjects thinking they were taking a daily vitamin were less likely to exercise and more likely to eat poorly. Studies on whether such supplements are healthy, however, have produced a mixed bag of results. Several studies have shown that vitamin supplements — in particular, vitamin E and beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A — actually increase cancer risk among smokers. One problem with daily supplements is the high dose. Certain pills come in doses that are 10 times higher or more than the recommended daily dose. Conclusions to the overall health benefit of supplements may remain unclear, but as the article details, they certainly aren't the magic bullet some people imagine them to be.

The pretty people you see aren't real - at least in the magazines and advertisements we read, according to the Economist. A report by Professor Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, PhD student Eric Kee, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes how they use mathematical models along with subjective human responses to produce a score of how radically a person's image has been modified from an original photograph. The researchers' algorithms look at two separate forms of change: geometric, in which retouchers enlarge breasts, trim legs, elongate necks and the like; and photometric alterations, which involve changing skin tone, removing blemishes and wrinkles and smoothing the skin. The results are incredibly modified and distorted images presented to the unknowing public, often depicting bodies which are anatomically impossible, but capitalize on the consumer's gaze. This leads further question to the broader social impact of this fantastical representation. "I would think even the models and actors and actresses would appreciate this. We're distorting what the public thinks of them," Dr Farid says. As the article concludes, however, that may be precisely the point.

By all accords, entrepreneur (and knight) Sir Richard Branson is a wildly successful entrepreneur. Yet surprisingly, one of the advantages he utilizes is inexperience - utilizing energy from new ventures; not following established norms to predicated mediocrity. "The key to turning inexperience into an asset is to pitch what is new about your product or service," say Branson. "How does your approach differ from that of other businesses? How will you reach out to target markets? Why should people choose your products and services over your competitors'?" Bringing a fresh approach to a market established in traditions may be just the shot in the arm of a successful business. Branson highlights how his general lack of business acumen in the airline industry allowed him to focus on building a company - Virgin Atlantic - from a consumer's point of view, especially in the earliest years. In the end, he suggests that it may be less about what someone knows precisely, and more about what they do with what they don't.

1. Beyoncé Reveals Baby Bump 2. FIFA Women’s World Cup 3. Brazil Eliminated From Copa América 4. New Year’s Day, Japan 5. 2011 BET Awards 6. UEFA Champions League (Final) 7. Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami 8. Last Game of the 2011 NBA Finals 9. East Coast Earthquake 10. Osama Bin Laden’s Death -- Ranking Based on Tweets Per Second.

Originally developed by PayPal to help stymie fraudulent monetary transactions, the CIA's "Palantir" system is now used to track minuscule actions that may eventually lead to terrorist activities. Bank withdrawals, rental payments, airport check-ins, uploaded photos to Flickr, and countless other activities are thatched together to unravel a story before it potentially takes place in the future. The system is fueled largely by patterns and attributing present actions, to similar ones that have taken place in the past. In other words, X, Y, and Z items intersected leading up to a terrorist act, if such intersections take place again, a flag is raised. Moving forward, with the added data set (and complications) created by social media, the government and private agencies alike seek not only to prevent acts of tangible destruction, but also financial melt-downs, white collar crimes, and implosions of regimes.

It's no surprise that we can often lose perspective of where our lives are going while we're busy living them. Psychotherapist Kim Schneiderman invites us to imagine picking up a book of our life and asks if we'd feel compassion or criticism for the main character. In a 2005 Columbia University study reported in the Journal of Psychological Science, test subjects who spoke about difficult chapters in their lives in the third person narrative displayed more confidence and optimism than those who recalled bad memories in the first person. By retracing their steps from the perch of the third-person narrative, people were more likely to regard their problems as something outside themselves - challenges they had conquered or adversaries they had defeated - instead of character flaws. Schneiderman details how she uses therapeutic writing in which people write out their own stories and conflicts from the point of view of a narrator. "Being able to see our stories from an unfamiliar perspective can open our eyes to new insights that can transform ingrained behaviors," she says. "From the perch of the third-person narrative, we can step out of our stories, check out the landscape, and determine whether the roads we're taking are navigable or need to be rerouted."

Thanks to new data from the Hubble Space Telescope, it appears that the universe is the ultimate environmentalist, continuously recycling immense volumes of hydrogen gas and heavy elements to build successive generations of stars stretching over billions of years. This ongoing recycling keeps galaxies from emptying their "fuel tanks" and therefore stretches out their star-forming epoch to over 10 billion years, according to NASA. However, galaxies that ignite a rapid firestorm of star birth can blow away their remaining fuel, essentially turning off further star-birth activity. Galaxies contain a gaseous halo around them; researchers examined the star creation process and how it interacts with this cloud composition to regulate and reuse components. "Our results confirm a theoretical suspicion that galaxies expel and can recycle their gas, but they also present a fresh challenge to theoretical models to understand these gas flows and integrate them with the overall picture of galaxy formation," Jason Tumlinson of the Space Telescope Science Institute says. Going green has never been this big.

When the Library of Congress announced they would be archiving all Twitter conversations since 2006, it was met with skepticism - what cultural value do tweets about lunch hold? As Laura Larsell argues, however, "Twitter hosts valuable, communal conversation in real-time. And Twitter trends become more powerful the more users contribute to the dialogue. [It also] allows the chatter of millions to be parsed into channels (hashtags) of real-time conversation that covers widely varying topics." All of the jokes, rants, and updates contribute to something akin to a collective consciousness at a point in time - albeit one of a small slice of the population with internet access and an active Twitter account. The key component to extracting conversation data is the standardized topic indicator - the hashtag. "Any hashtagged tweet is automatically linked to every other tweet that shares the same tag," Larsell say, "this allows for consistent dialogue and measurement." As she notes, there are definite limitations - such as the short-format nature of Twitter conversations - but the implications for both a cross-sectional cultural snapshot as well as hashtag-inspired indexing potential outside of Twitter are worth serious consideration.

If life hands you lemons, just take a pill and bite down. Thanks to a specific West African fruit and company mBerry, you'll be able to do just that. The 'miracle berry,' or more formally Synsepalum dulcificum, contains a glycoprotein – conveniently named miraculin - that temporarily fools taste buds into believing that sour and bitter things taste sweet. mBerry has been distributing a freeze-dried form of the fruit in tablets since the company’s creation in 2008. One of the aims of the company is to help fight diabetes and famine on a global scale by opening up sour and bitter foods safe for human consumption and with nutritional value. Recently, however, the pill is making its way into contemporary gastronomy, thanks to chef Homaro Cantu of Chicago's Moto and iNG restaurants. “All of the plants that we do not consider food that are safe for the human body to digest, we don’t eat because they’re sour and bitter. The reason why you don’t eat Kentucky bluegrass or crabgrass is because it tastes sour and bitter,” says Cantu. He believes the pill could do away with the need for refined sugar, helping diabetics curb their sugar cravings - not to mention broadening the range of ingredients for creative restauranteurs like Cantu.

Couples who are expecting newborns are increasingly looking for unique names for their future children, but they're also using technology to ensure those names don't end up being a burden on their offspring. Because digital profiles are arguably just as important as our "real-life" reputations, parents are googling proposed names to ensure that when people search for their children's name, objectionable, confusing, or common items don't flood the search results. Sometimes, google isn't always effective though in ensuring that a child's proposed name is indeed unique. For example, the name "Kaleya" may not come up at all in Google search results, but that may be because the children named Kaleya haven't grown old enough to build up much of a digital profile. That said, that could have been a very popular name for babies in that year. The overall strategy for leveraging technology for baby naming today is: ensure there are no red-flags, but don't assume the name is as unique as you think.

Amid a struggling US economy, a European sovereign debt crisis and Asian markets often closed to foreigners, a stable country of 70 million in the process of a full-scale deregulation of its energy markets sounds almost like a fantasy. But Turkey is that country, sitting at the crossroads between some of the most energy-rich countries in the world and some of the most energy-hungry. Pataki and Yuksel sat down with AOL Energy to discuss the opportunities in this market More than three years ago the country was so reliant on foreign supplies of natural gas, much of it from Russia, that a cold snap elsewhere could result in supply cuts that, in addition to the security and service concerns, were making it very difficult to plan and grow the economy. The country's huge untapped resources of renewable energy, as well as its access to domestic coal and nuclear generation, alongside new transmission investment in privatized firms, were identified as the answer to the country's energy dependency. The country has a target of 30% power from renewables by 2023.

With so many businesses headquartered in the United States and Europe, it's generally assumed that much of the research and development, driving innovation and corporate direction, is done 'in-house' in these multinationals. R&D units located in India, however, are present in GE, Intel, AstraZeneca, EMC, Microsoft, Philips, Pfizer and Alcatel-Lucent - providing striking evidence that Indians can "do" innovation. But global consumers rarely recognize India as the country of origin because most of this innovation is invisible. How so? The innovation occurring in these Indian captive units is visible only to other business units and is not revealed to end consumers. According to London Business School professors Nirmalya Kumar and Phanish Puranam, the integration of innovation processes should work smoothly for fairly routine, standardized tasks (e.g., booking flights and making restaurant reservations) as well as high-value-added knowledge work or creative work such as R&D because the global delivery model focuses not on the task itself, but whether the subtask links can be managed across distances. With talent in place, they say, India is positioned to be recognized not just for successful offshore services, but as the next global innovation hub.

A problem too complex? Someone else will figure it out - that, according to a new research study. People who know less about challenging social issues, are more likely to want to avoid becoming well-informed about them, according to a new report. The study looked at people’s knowledge and willingness to learn about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, according to a paper published online in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. When levels of information complexity gradually increased in the studies, participants withdrew from engagement and indicated their desire to hand it off to government officials. "This is despite the fact that, all else equal, one should have less trust in someone to effectively manage something that is more complex," said co-author Aaron C. Kay, of Duke University. "Instead, people tend to respond by psychologically 'outsourcing' the issue to the government, which in turn causes them to trust and feel more dependent on the government." The researchers suggest this calls for re-examination of how important information can be presented in simpler format that encourage inquiry instead of disengagement.

The next generation of Indiana Jones is shaping up to look more like Star Trek in the field. Using artificial neural networks (ANNs) — computer networks that imitate the workings of the human brain — researchers at Washington University in Saint Louis and Western Michigan University developed a computer model that can pinpoint productive fossil sites in the Great Divide Basin, a 4,000-square-mile stretch of rocky desert in Wyoming serving as fertile ground for remnant discovery. The software builds on satellite imagery and maps fossil-hunters have used for years to locate the best fossil sites. It just takes the process a step further, paleoanthropologist Glenn Conroy says. With information gathered from maps and satellite imagery — such as elevation, slope, terrain and many other landscape features — the ANN was “trained” to use details of existing fossiliferous areas to accurately predict the locations of other fossil sites elsewhere in the Great Divide Basin. “The beauty and power of neural networks lie in the fact that they are capable of learning,” says Conroy. “You just need to give them a rule to deal with things they don’t know.”

'Work-life balance' looks to be turning into an antiquated term, as the distinction between the two areas have gotten increasingly difficult to discern. According to the third annual Osterman Research Survey, researchers found an increasingly mobile workforce and continued reliance on email connectivity. Among the interesting results: people are finding it necessary to always be connected to their work and personal email, even interrupting meals and daily activities to check email, and workers are willing to drive great distances for connectivity. Eighty-three percent of those surveyed admitted to checking email after work using a smartphone or mobile device. More than half of the respondents brought a work-related device with them on vacation (66 percent), and a similar percentage (68 percent) admitted to driving more than 10 miles to access email. This could demonstrate that the tough global economy requires near-constant productivity, or it could indicate an addiction to email and multitasking anytime, anywhere. Our digital reliance (or addiction?) is real. It informs our behavior. The key step will be mediating it so it becomes supplemental to our lives instead of replacing them.

Some news sources make us less likely to know what’s going on in the world. Results from the most recent Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll show that Sunday morning news shows do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all. People who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news. By contrast, some media sources have a positive effect on political knowledge. For example, people who report reading a national newspaper like The New York Times or USA Today are 12-points more likely to know that Egyptians have overthrown their government than those who have not looked at any news source.

Research shows that gratitude is strongly associated with greater happiness, more positive emotions, greater satisfaction from good experiences, improved health, greater ability to deal with adversity and stronger relationships. Editor in Chief Dr. Michael Miller notes that expressing gratitude forces him to refocus on what he has instead of what he lacks. And while any expression of gratitude is likely to boost morale, like a muscle, this mental state grows stronger with use and practice. People feel and express gratitude in multiple ways. They can apply it to the past (retrieving positive memories and being thankful for elements of childhood or past blessings), the present (not taking good fortune for granted as it comes), and the future (maintaining a hopeful and optimistic attitude). A study of couples found that individuals who took time to express gratitude for their partners not only felt more positive toward the other person but also felt more comfortable expressing concerns about their relationship. Managers who remember to say "thank you" to people who work for them may find that those employees feel motivated to work harder. Read this article from Harvard Health Publications for ways to cultivate gratitude.

Money has gone digital - Google, Visa, PayPal, and American Express all have 'electronic wallets' used to monitor and allocate funds. With more than 100 million users of its virtual purse, PayPal predicts the physical wallet will cease to be carried by the year 2015. And as digital currency transactions begin to proliferate the consumer market, merging opportunities for non-profits to create more successful fundraising campaigns with corporate sponsors are ripe for the taking. The luxury of mobile digital wallets is that they contain all of that information in one protected place, which eliminates any multistep process that may deter prospective charitable gifts. One of the biggest issues a number of fundraising efforts and charities face when it comes to mobile giving is the enormous decrease in attention to a cause as soon as buzz of a tragic incident or big campaign begins to die down. By partnering with mobile digital wallet providers, non-profits could foreseeably seek micro-donations from users on a regular basis. Since a number of people around the world have their checking accounts set up to allocate electronic funds on a monthly basis, why couldn’t the same concept be applied to digital currency for non-profits?

With the recent welcoming of planet Earth's 7 billionth citizen, our world is unequivocally getting bigger. Our social network amongst the seven billion though? That's shrinking. The old adage maintains there are "six degrees of separation" between any two people on Earth, meaning that any two people would know each other through no more than six intermediary contacts. On Facebook, however, the average user is only 4.74 degrees away from any other Facebooker. The Palo Alto, California, company says 99.6% of all Facebook users studied were separated by five degrees or less from any other Facebook user; 92% were separated by only four degrees. "We observed that while the entire world is only a few degrees away, a user's friends are most likely to be of a similar age and come from the same country," the company writes. Not only that - the social world is shrinking fast. "The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74," Facebook says. The distance between you and Kevin Bacon has never been smaller.

For years, it has been the dream of many computer scientists to build a system able to replicate the complexities of the the human brain. MIT researchers have now taken a major step toward that goal by designing a computer chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt in response to new information. This phenomenon, known as plasticity, is believed to underlie many brain functions, including learning and memory. With about 400 transistors, the silicon chip can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse — a connection between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other. The researchers anticipate this chip will help neuroscientists learn much more about how the brain works, and could also be used in neural prosthetic devices such as artificial retinas, says Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. The MIT researchers plan to use their chip to build systems to model specific neural functions, such as the visual processing system. Such systems could be much faster than current digital computers.

It's not all about how you fit into your genes; it's how you can change them. Our lifestyles, as doctors are keen on telling us, are important in increasing or reducing our risk of various diseases. Research in the new field of epigenetics is finding that our lifestyle choices - the foods we put in our bodies, the chemicals we are exposed to, how active we opt to be, even our social environments - can actually alter our health at the level of the gene. These choices can have big effects on our risk for disease, even if our genes seem to be working against us. Two recent studies suggest that we can alter our fundamental makeup - one found that eating well can "turn off" the genes that put one at higher risk for heart problems; the other showed that exercise can persuade stem cells to become bone and blood cells rather than fat cells. Each helps us see just how lifestyle variables work at the genetic level to modify our risk. That our lifestyles can affect our genes in significant ways is both sobering and encouraging; it all depends on what are lifestyles consist of. We are not completely at the mercy of our genes. In many ways, they are at the mercy of our health and lifestyle decisions and habits.

We often confront situations where we have to make a decision without all the information we'd like to have. Do we jump? Or wait and see? Many of us err on the side of "wait and see," using due diligence as a way to put off risk, or to avoid it completely. Most of our decisions have limited risks and rewards. Nevertheless, if we know that with hard work, perseverance and resourcefulness we can make even a bad situation into a success, we can approach any decision we face with that confidence. How? Don't just focus on the downside; understand the opportunity. Keep in mind that it's not easy to look at both sides of a situation. We are wired to value losses higher than equivalent gains. The classic, pros and cons list can be helpful here. Bad things will be easier to think of than good ones – try to come up with an equal number of items in each column. Also, understand that you will shape the outcome. When you make a decision, you don't just sit back and see how things unfold; you will actively engage to help ensure success. Further, know who you can rely on. Who is on your team? Who will help you if things go wrong? Your family, close friends, business partners are all candidates. Finally, stick with the decision, as failure can be an opportunity.

Can classroom furniture be improved? If so how? This was the challenge posed to last year’s eighth grade class at The School at Columbia University, an independent school in New York City. Rinat Aruh, co-founder of design firm aruliden, joined forces with Don Buckley, The School’s director of innovation, to incorporate a full redesign of desks, chairs and lockers across the eighth grade curriculum. Though the stated end goal was to create classroom furniture that better fits the needs of today’s students, the “big idea” was to teach the process of design thinking. Aruliden, together with Bernhardt Design, conceived Tools at Schools as an initiative to teach eighth graders the value of design as a problem-solving tool. Forty-four eighth grade students were immersed in the entire design process, from research to ideation to 3D modeling and ultimately launch. What started as a simple effort to get involved in the community grew into a much larger realization that design has a role in the classroom. Their success was not only in their concepts, but in the awareness each student gained in the process. The result was a collaborative vision of today’s classroom – designed for kids by kids. Click through to see videos of what the children designed.

Blame it on the printing press. That's what Brittany Morin does - as she argues, ever since information dissemination began, its impact and relevancy has grown exponentially with its channels. In recent years, platforms like Facebook and Twitter (and even more recently, Google) have begun to attack the problem of information overload by driving social discovery of news and information by focusing on filtering the web through the lens of friends and influencers. On today's web, friend lists are growing into the thousands, including a list of hundreds of brands. With this avalanche of content, users turn increasingly to gatekeepers - as Morin details, now, more than ever, we need two distinct camps of editors and curators. These days, anyone on the web can edit, but not everyone can be both an editor and a curator. Editors refine and improve already-written content to be published. Curators, by modern definition, carefully and decisively choose among the best of all that's available and often create entirely new ideas and perspectives out of that information, all while using their own voice. It's as if the curators define, and the editors refine. Thank Mr. Guttenberg for the mash-up way we consume information today.

Geniuses are those rare individuals who have the fortuitousness of talent meeting opportunity in a way that can change the world as we know it. For years, scholars and researchers have tried to study genius by giving its vital statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminated genius. Academics also tried to measure the links between intelligence and genius. But intelligence is not enough. Michael Michalko outlines specifically what contributes to genius as a concept: it often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has taken. Leonardo da Vinci believed that to gain knowledge about the form of problems, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. Geniuses also can visualize their thoughts, as Einstein did diagrammatically. Other key characteristics Michalko highlights include production (prolific, substantial output), novel combinations, forced relationships, thinking in opposites and metaphors, and preparation for chance. The given is that it is both luck and preparation and the abilities to hold these traits simultaneously that converge in the best and brightest. As Michalko summarizes, creative geniuses are geniuses because they know "how" to think, instead of "what" to think.

They follow indie bands and camp out at Occupy movements. They are gamers and volunteers, savvy entrepreneurs and out-of-work basement dwellers. In case you haven't noticed, hipsters are everywhere, according to this NPR article. And that really galls some hipsters. Peter Furia, a founder of Seedwell Digital Creative Studio in San Francisco, said American society often thinks of hipsters as "posers who appropriate an image of cool individuality but lack authenticity, but we think there may be real substance beneath it all." He points to social waves such as urban farming, the Do It Yourself initiatives and the Occupy movement. "There are lots of hipsters in all of these movements," he says, "who are authentic in their passions." Hipsterdom has entered — and in some cases, dominated — dominant culture. Hipsters, after all, know how to adapt: how to make the cheap chic. A shaky, shabby economy is the perfect breeding ground for them. And now, we are seeing the dawn of a new hipsterdom. Eventually the hip sensibility in trendy city neighborhoods was adopted by bigger and bigger circles until it boomeranged back to the small towns. Everybody hates hipsters - especially hipsters. And hipsters' opposition to pop culture has now become pop culture.

A recent study by University of Pennsylvania economists found that although our lives have improved in the last 35 years, happiness levels have declined. While the culprits are unknown (jobs, spouses, genes?), countless self-help books and life-improvement gurus are charging us to reclaim our bliss. The key to happiness, according them? It’s as simple as one positive thought or five-minute meditation. But if happiness is really as easy to obtain as following a few how-to-be-happy bullet points, we would’ve obtained it by now, said Ezra Bayda, author of Beyond Happiness. Rather than chasing happiness, satisfaction, contentment, what if we’re better off yielding to our blues? Should happiness always be our goal? “If you try too hard to be happy, you can make yourself miserable,” said James Coyne, Ph.D., professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. His advice? It’s better to focus on being authentic rather than trying to be happy even when you’re not. Because we all think it’s not OK to be unhappy, we look to any and all possible ways to get happy. And it’s precisely this kind of aversion to unhappiness that has many of us leading inauthentic lives.

It's not exactly World War Z - yet. Traces of bizarre, bone-eating ‘zombie’ worms have been found on a three million year old fossil whale bone from Tuscany in Italy. The new find, published in the journal Historical Biology, confirms what scientists have long suspected - that the genus Osedax were likely responsible for erasing parts of the fossil record by destroying bones before they could become fossils. These worms do not have a mouth or gut but consume the bone by growing root-like tissues, which dissolve the bone as they grow. Osedax were first discovered alive in 2002 in Monterey Bay, California, where they were living on the bones of a decaying gray whale. The only other known evidence of Osedax from the past is in whale bones from the Pacific coast of Washington State in the US - about as far away as it is possible to get from the Mediterranean in terms of ocean connectedness. It is now almost certain that the Mediterranean is currently host to undiscovered, living Osedax species, according to lead researcher Nicholas Higgs. No word on if the worms in question are partial to brains.

Ever thrown a product out because a single component part of it was broken? 3D printing, as it's called, is a type of DIY-manufacturing process that aims to usher this disposal culture in as a thing of the past. Actual three-dimensional products are printed out layer by layer, using (and reusing) a range of materials such as plastic, powder, metal, and even chocolate, which are then bound together to form solid objects. Originally called rapid prototyping, it has become an essential tool, enabling designers to quickly and easily produce a sample product, which can then be tested, tweaked and re-printed, all within a matter of days. In recent years, the technology has improved and simplified, opening it up to a broader market; an increasing number of manufacturers now 3D printing, as it is now known in the mainstream. Chances are the shoes on your feet, or the coffee pot in your kitchen started life as a 3D printed prototype. Converse has been using 3D printers since 2004, which enables the shoe company to get more products to market more quickly. With this technology becoming increasingly more available to consumers, eventually if you don't like the way something is, you'll be able to make it yourself.

The romantic picture of innovation typically is of a single person, struck by an inspiration of genius. This concept, however beautiful, is almost always a myth. The popular heroic narrative has almost nothing to do with the way modern invention (conceptual creation of a new product or process, sometimes accompanied by a prototypical design) and innovation (large-scale diffusion of commercially viable inventions) work. A closer examination reveals that many award-winning inventions are re-inventions. The dazzling and oversimplified story about electronics goes like this: The transistor was discovered by scientists at Bell Labs in 1947, leading directly to integrated circuits, which in turn led straight to microprocessors whose development brought us microcomputers and ubiquitous cellphones. The real story is much messier, filled with fits and starts that stretches back to the first transistor patent in 1925 through small improvements and tweaks to the modern silicon chip precursors in the 1950's. Eureka moments do exist, and some inventors have made truly spectacular individual contributions. But we pay too much attention to a few individuals and too little attention to the many moments of meaningful innovation that come next.

Bazaars, vendors, and informal markets are everywhere in the developing world, and could encompass two-thirds of the world's workforce within the decade. After several years living in the slums and cities of Brazil, China, and Africa, Robert Neuwirth argues the world’s governments should embrace informal (and mostly legal) markets as an alternative form of economic organization. That’s not just because they improve the lives of millions of entrepreneurs and their customers, creating upward mobility in otherwise dysfunctional systems, but because we have no choice. Either we cooperate with the off-the-books economic activity exploding in the developing world, or we clash counter-productively with them at every turn. Neuwirth describes "the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance." In his book, 'Stealth of Nations,' Neuwirth chronicles the lives of entrepreneurs who turn trash from the landfills of Lagos into businesses, and pirated DVDs on the streets of São Paulo into a better life with a bank account and an apartment. With a sophisticated supply chain and distribution these markets have developed into what he calls "...the Wal-Marts of the developing world"

"There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think the Doors are a hokey caricature of male rock stardom and those who think they’re, you know, shamans." This divide, according to Daniel Nester, reflects what he views as the difference between serious poets and poets who take themselves seriously - like Jim Morrison. He's been called the 'Bozo Dionysus' by Lester Bangs, yet there's no doubt the Doors and Morrison are still commercial giants, forever entrenched in Amazon's best-sellers lists. It's precisely because of this accessibility that Nester argues he deserves to be called Poet, since that what he is to so many. “Morrison was the first human I connected to living poetry (as opposed to dead poetry),” poet and memoirist Peter Conners wrote. “When I looked at his pics, I never thought Rock Star. I thought Poet... and then I thought Dangerous Poet. As a teenager getting intrigued by words, that was an important leap for me.” Daniel Mendelsohn writes in the New Yorker that “the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him.” Nester says the same applies for Morrison, who elicits the same types of “extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay.”

When Groupon, the social coupon site, announced plans for its initial public offering (IPO), the negative media backlash was swift. “Groupon Is a Disaster,” blared a headline on Business Insider. A CNN Money article called the IPO “reminiscent of the dot-com bubble” and quoted an accounting professor saying, “We've seen this game before and we know how it's going to end.” It also didn't help when LinkedIn posted much more modest growth after also exploding on the scene. Yet Will Oremus of Slate argues that media coverage is overly eager to sound the alarms of pending crashes, based upon history. A bubble, Merriam-Webster says, is “a state of booming economic activity (as in a stock market) that often ends in a sudden collapse.” The late-1990s dot-com boom, in which a cavalcade of tech IPOs drove the NASDAQ to quadruple in value in a span of about three years, qualifies. Oremus sees us as within a 'bubble bubble,' where spooked investors react more to unsubstantiated trend-based fears instead of inspecting the social media companies for the individual differences that make the difference. As he concludes, "You could make money, sure, but you could also lose it all. That’s not a bubble, though. That’s the market."

Call it the boomerang effect - more and more young people, often post-college are moving back in with mom and dad, and it's having more of an impact than just less storage space. Under normal circumstances, each time a household is formed it adds about $145,000 to output that year as the spending ripples through the economy, estimates Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. But with the poor job market and uncertain recovery, hundreds of thousands of Americans have tabled their moves. Even before the recession began, young people were leaving home later; now the bad economy has tethered them there indefinitely. Last year, just 950,000 new households were created. By comparison, about 1.3 million new households were formed in 2007, the year the recession began, according to Mr. Zandi. More and more young workers a living with parents not out of necessity, but prudence. “I have it pretty good at home, since it’s so close to my work, and financially I just feel like it’s smarter for the long run to buy,” says Jay Bouvier, 26 and a full-time physical education teacher. He says that living with his parents enables him to set aside about half of each paycheck. “It’s like I pay rent, but to myself."

A recent study examining the relationship between agreeableness, income and gender found that the workplace tends to reward disagreeable behavior. Disagreeable employees earn more than agreeable ones, researchers found. To validate, the article's author conducted her own office experiment. The first step: she eliminated "thank you" and "I'm sorry" in both email and interactions in the office. The effect was immediate: Colleagues began to treat her with more respect. "At first, my new sense of power and its rewards felt thrilling," she said. "I learned to bargain firmly and unapologetically and was paid fairly - and it seemed to me that, when people paid more for my work, they tended to value it (and me) more highly." But there were also times she pushed too hard and lost assignments and began to worry about reputation. In the end, she's sought to find a middle ground and allows the occasional “thank you” to pass and will apologize if it is justified, though not reflexively. That’s the balanced approach the study’s coauthor recommends. “There is a difference between disagreeing and being disagreeable,” he says. “Be firm, logical, assertive, and persistent - but do not ever show hostility, anger, or other negative emotions.”

The next Angry Birds or Call of Duty might come from someplace unexpected - the Southern Hemisphere. "The Argentine video game industry employs some 3,000 people, and we will generate $55 million in revenue this year. And we are growing fast," says Alfredo Cattan, president of game company QB9 and the Argentina Game Developers Association. Until recently, video game developers have been concentrated in the United States, Europe and Asia, but over the past decade Latin American developers have blossomed, attracting millions in venture capital funding while developing games for blue-chip brands like Facebook and MTV. Initially, these big firms were attracted to Latin American game developers because of their low-cost creativity, but that is no longer the only reason. "It has been proven that [the Latin American video game] industry is really up to the standards, and we can compete with good quality works coming from the most important markets abroad. It's not about costs as much as it used to be," says Hernán Rozenwasser, CEO of QB9. "Another thing that sets us apart is our artistic traditions: Argentina has always produced high-quality movies, television and music, and that shows up in our work too."

It happened in Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia and most recently, New York and Chicago: Rock radio met its demise. Its successor? Talk radio. We can't be sure if financial trouble is to blame or technological competition (satellite or iPods). At Emmis Communications, where three stations folded this summer simultaneously (WRXP in New York and The Loop and Q101 in Chicago), the question is not what's to blame, but rather who. Perhaps it's Randy Michaels, the purchaser with deep pockets and a love for the spoken word. Regardless of how it happened, one thing is for sure according to the article's author Christine Pawlak (former Q101 DJ), "Technology will change; the need to connect with each other through stories and songs won't. When it comes to rock radio, I don’t think the preferences of a few should affect the interests of so many." Change is common in the broadcast industry, but what we learn in this Slate article is that the end of rock radio is more than that. The last few weeks on Q101 proved that a strong, passionate community existed - and could easily disband from a choice that wasn't theirs. Many of us grew up with these alternative stations and DJs and while we can always turn to iPods, we can never replace a DJ - or friend - with an MP3.

Suffering from a nasty case of writer's block? Try giving yourself some boundaries. One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it’s often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. A new study led by Janina Marguc at the University of Amsterdam, and published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides an interesting answer. It turns out that the obstacles of form come with an unexpected psychological perk, allowing people to think in a more all-encompassing fashion. These obstacles don’t just increase the possibilities of perception – they also expand our conceptual scope, allowing us to consider a greater range of possibilities and ideas. The larger lesson is that the brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. And this is why constraints are so important: It’s not until we encounter an unexpected hindrance that we gain access to our unconscious brain's potential.

Smart cars? Nope. Mini Coopers? Not even close. European researchers have developed a nano car which consists of just a single molecule and travels on four electrically-driven wheels in an almost straight line over a copper surface. A number of chemists aim to use principles and concepts similar to natural energy consumption to design molecular transport machines, which could then carry out specific tasks on the nano scale. According to an article in the latest edition of science magazine “Nature," scientists at the University of Groningen and at Empa have successfully taken “a decisive step on the road to artificial nano-scale transport systems." They have synthesized a molecule from four rotating motor units, i.e. wheels, which can travel straight ahead in a controlled manner. “To do this, our car needs neither rails nor petrol; it runs on electricity. It must be the smallest electric car in the world – and it even comes with 4-wheel drive,” says Empa researcher Karl-Heinz Ernst. The next step envisioned by Ernst and his colleagues is to develop molecules that can be driven by light, perhaps in the form of UV lasers.

Could alien life be (relatively) in our back yard? A new study suggests the craggy icebergs on Jupiter's moon Europa may conceal subsurface lakes. Such lakes could provide a habitat for life or act as channels for organic compounds on Europa’s surface to be drawn into the moon’s far deeper ocean, said Don Blankenship, a geophysicist at the University of Texas. “Europa has the best chance of having life there today,” said Britney Schmidt, who studies the moon at the University of Texas at Austin and led the new study appearing in the journal Nature. The presence of icebergs may indicate life-harboring waters, and form similar the process Earth, near Iceland. Deep warmth from underwater volcanoes melts the glaciers from below, and lens of water forms under the icy surface and moves upward. Eventually, the warm water breaks through. The surface of Europa is too cold for any liquid water. But as warm water seeps up, heated from the planet’s mantle below, it would break the surface ice into a jumble of miles-long icebergs. The icebergs then flip, float and freeze in place. It is in these waters that life could feasibly exist. “If Europa is habitable, we need to get material from the surface down into the deep interior, down into the ocean,” Schmidt said.

Death by sadness? Females are seven to nine times more likely to suffer “broken heart syndrome,” when sudden or prolonged stress like an emotional breakup or death causes overwhelming heart failure or heart attack-like symptoms, the first nationwide study of this finds. Japanese doctors first recognized this syndrome around 1990 and named it Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (tako tsubo are octopus traps that resemble the unusual pot-like shape of the stricken heart). It happens when a big shock, even a good one like winning the lottery, triggers a rush of adrenaline and other stress hormones that cause the heart’s main pumping chamber to balloon suddenly and not work correctly. Tests show dramatic changes in rhythm and blood substances typical of a heart attack, but no artery blockages that typically cause one. Most victims recover within weeks, but in rare cases it proves fatal. So why is this the only cardiac-related issue that women are more susceptible to than men? One theory is that hormones play a role. Another is that men have more adrenaline receptors on cells in their hearts than women do, “so maybe men are able to handle stress better” and the chemical surge it releases, said Dr. Abhishek Deshmukh of the University of Arkansas.

There is something to be said about “creative pause” – interruption-free space allowing us to recharge our batteries and reach full creative potential. But downtime is becoming extinct due to constant digital distraction, and our imaginations suffer the consequences. So how do we reclaim our sacred spaces? [1] Reserve one day on the weekend where you force yourself to disconnect. [2] Carve out a 1-2 hour block every day for a walk or coffee, allowing time to ponder bigger things. [3] Take a mental escape with meditation or even sleep. [4] During any temporary voids of distraction, our minds return to uncertainty and fear. It is important that we recognize the power of our insecurities and acknowledge where our anxiety comes from. [5] When rushing to a solution, your mind will jump to the easiest and most familiar path. Instead, look out the window for 10 minutes; your brain will start working in a more creative way. We are always surrounded with the temptation to be connected, so we must be proactive in creating these spaces for ourselves. And when we have a precious opportunity to disconnect, we should develop the capacity to use it and protect it.

'Jack and Jill', a movie staring Adam Sandler, is a representative example of a long-standing trope: men playing women in slapstick comedies. It also stands, somewhat improbably, as an intriguing counterpoint to the drama 'Albert Nobbs', which stars Glenn Close as a woman who cross-dresses as a butler in order to survive in 19th-century Ireland. Taken as a whole, these two disparate films are emblematic of a consistent Hollywood trend: When a man plays a woman, it's for comedy. And when a woman plays a man, it's for drama. There's nothing amusing about the plight of Barbra Streisand's Yentl in 'Yentl': She disguises herself as a boy because it's the only way she can receive instruction in the Talmud. Gwyneth Paltrow's Oscar-winning performance in 'Shakespeare in Love' was built around a character who disguises herself as a man to perform on the stage. But as female-to-male roles have embraced nuance and complexity, male-to-female roles have failed to evolve beyond the template set by Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. 'Mrs. Doubtfire', 'Big Momma's House', 'Some Like it Hot' - these men-playing-women roles are primarily within the realm of slapstick. Larger questions, then, are what this means for gender roles and expectations - on the screen and beyond.

Oxford University scientists, facing the glacial pace of text transcription, tried an innovative new solution. They put up a website, called Ancient Lives, with a game that allowed members of the public to help transcribe ancient Greek text at home. In the short time the site has been running, people have contributed 4 million transcriptions. Ancient Lives is part of a new approach to the conduct of modern scholarship, called crowd science or citizen science. The idea is to unlock research projects by tapping the time and enthusiasm of the general public. In just the last few years, crowd science projects have generated notable contributions to fields as disparate as ecology, AIDS research, and astronomy. One reason for the sudden turn to crowd science is that it offers an imaginative answer to a central problem of modern science - too much information. With time, though, one might expect a new type of scientist to emerge: one who is especially adept at recognizing problems, and designing projects, that tap the brilliance of a dispersed and motley team, whoever they may be. Nobody can say where the movement will go, but among the new pioneers of crowd science, there is a sense that they have just happened upon a powerful, poorly understood new resource.

Most parents would be pleasantly surprised to find out their child has been bestowed that rare designation - 'gifted'. There's no doubt exceptional intellect is a positive - the flip side is that genetic advantages don't guarantee success, and in some cases they may even undermine it. What can go wrong for these would-be world changers? Knowledge of genetic prowess can feed a sense of entitlement - "if I am the best, then I should get the best." But even in cases where entitlement doesn't overwhelm its host, it's possible for parents and teachers to damage a child's potential by expecting that he'll do well no matter how good or bad his education and training. Psychologist Richard Nisbett has done a great deal of work in this area and has found compelling evidence that, if anything, environmental influence plays a much larger role in fostering success than the hardware we're born with. When the right elements come together and an exceptionally talented child is provided with solid training and realistic expectations, amazing things can happen. But great things can also come from children without edge-of-the-bell-curve genetics. That's an important point to remember as we march headlong into an age when genetic manipulation is no longer science fiction.

In 2006, the immersive virtual environment Second Life was trumpeted as the the next technological game-changer. Flash forward half a decade - Second Life still exists, but is far from the paradigm shift it was predicted to be. So why the thud instead of an explosion? Clay Christensen, author of 'The Innovator's Solution,' asks us to imagine a group of marketers at a fast-food restaurant who want to sell more shakes. As they comb the customer data for insight, they discover something interesting: Most milkshakes are sold to early-morning commuters who buy a single milkshake and nothing else. Why milkshakes? These commuters, according to Christensen, are “hiring” milkshakes to do a job for them: to supply a breakfast that is filling and non-messy and cupholder-compatible. Most successful innovations perform a clear duty - iPods house our music collection; Google cleans up our searching. But what 'job' did Second Life perform? It was like a job candidate with a fascinating résumé—fluent in Finnish, with stints in spelunking and trapeze—but no actual labor skills. So when evaluating the next big thing, ask the Christensen question: What job is it designed to do?

Sweat Equity Connection, Inc. with its unique Talent Match Technology (TMT) directly addresses two national challenges: the current shortage of financial capital to hire talent and spur new business growth, and the high unemployment keeping many of America’s accomplished executives sidelined or underemployed. The site will open up new opportunities for executives, managers and independent service providers who are unemployed, underutilized or looking for much greater career challenges with the incentive that equity provides. The company continues to build out the site with advice articles, white papers, a moderated discussion board with searchable archives, news, professional service offerings. The founder has proven the sweat equity compensation model to other start-up ventures by creating Sweat Equity Connection last September and using equity in the company to hire both a seasoned, talented management team.

If you thought your undergraduate lecture hall class was large, just imagine sharing one with 160,000 other students. In the late summer, professors leading three traditional Stanford classes—an introduction to artificial intelligence, to databases and to machine learning—decided to offer their classes online for free to anyone in the world. Professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun’s AI class videos are spare and oddly low tech: most are only two or three minutes long and feature a pen scratching out equations on a piece of paper and a voice over talking through the math. That simplicity promises the fewest technical hiccups for students—and the easiest way to record the lectures, Norvig says. Thrun concedes that he may spend seven hours making an hour-long video, just to get every detail right. He had better: "If I make a mistake, I’ll get about a thousand emails about it." Those who successfully pass the class will earn a "statement of accomplishment," autographed by the profs. The final grades of both in-person and online students will include a class ranking, Thrun promises. So far, he’s been impressed that the percentage of top performers in the online contingent is on par with the percentage of top performers at Stanford.

Robots and trees aren't exactly immediately associated together, but a new start-up is hoping they make profitable (if unlikely) companions. Massachusetts-based Harvest Automation is beta testing a small mobile robot that it’s pitching to nurseries as the solution to their most pressing problem: a volatile labor market. The horticulture industry has caught the attention of several robotics industry veterans, including Joe Jones, a co-inventor of iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaning robot. What they see is an opportunity to develop a small, relatively inexpensive, mobile material handling robot. In today’s human-tended nurseries, potted trees and shrubs arrive at nurseries by truck and are offloaded onto the ground. Teams of migrant workers — undocumented for the most part — spread the plants out one by one following markers outlining a grid. When the plants are ready to be shipped out later in the season, workers reverse the process to group the plants for loading onto trucks. Further down the road, Harvest Automation’s robot could also find work in warehousing, construction, mining and manufacturing, said CEO Harvest Grinnell. In the meantime, don’t be surprised if the next time you drive by a tree nursery the shrubs appear to be moving by themselves.

In times of economic uncertainty, arts education and subsidization is often looked at as an extraneous luxury. Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein argue that this is precisely what we need to jump-start innovation, however. They highlight how something as ubiquitous as a cell phone or PDA has component origins solidly within the artistic realm, from the encryption technology (invented by a composer and an actress), to the RGB display (from a painter-scientist) and even the programming which runs on it (originating from a weaver, who developed programmable looms which ran on punch-cards). That's only the beginning. In medicine, the stitches that permit a surgeon to correct an aneurysm or carry out a transplant were invented by American Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel, who took his knowledge of lace making into the operating room. The fact is that the arts foster innovation - almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences actively engage in arts as adults. Many connect their art to their scientific ability with some riff on Nobel prizewinning physicist Max Planck words: "The creative scientist needs an artistic imagination." Bottom line: successful scientists and inventors are artistic people. Arts, science, and innovation go together like stitches and lace.

Considering making a permanent statement of your veganism on your skin? If so, you should probably think ink. The ink and processes at your average tattoo shop contain a veritable buffet of animal detritus: charred bones of dead animals in the ink, fat from once-living things in the glycerin that serves as a carrying agent, enzymes taken from caged sheep that go into making the care products. The result has been an emergence of vegan-friendly parlors. Gristle Tattoo, a new shop in Williamsburg, New York, touts its completely animal-free process. Artist Ashley Thomas uses non-toxic Eternal Ink, which has a plant-based glycerin, and natural after-care products that don't include animal products. Myles Karr, co-owner of Three Kings Tattoo in Williamsburg, said he thinks the animal-free black ink isn't as solid because it's supposed to be carbon-based - which is where the bone comes in. Vegan alternatives sometimes contain plastic, and some clients balk at having plastic under their skin instead of something organic. For those vegan tattoo-seekers, however, a lifetime of conviction is more than skin-deep.

For the millions of Americans who suffer from winter blues — or seasonal affective disorder (S.A.D.) — bright-light therapy is the treatment of choice, with response rates comparable with those of antidepressants. A 2006 trial compared bright-light therapy with the antidepressant Prozac, and according to this article in The New York Times, 96 of the trial's subjects found the two treatments equally effective for alleviating winter depression. However, light produced results faster and with fewer side effects. “Light does more than just enable us to see,” said Dr. Norman Rosenthal, author of “Winter Blues,” who was among the first to identify and describe S.A.D. Light also has an effect on hormones, the body’s chemical messengers, affecting the brain’s hypothalamus, which is involved in regulating mood, energy and appetite. Why, then, do so few doctors prescribe bright-light therapy? Some say their patients don’t have the patience to sit in front of a light for 30 to 45 minutes every morning. Moreover, “Doctors are just more comfortable prescribing medication, because that’s what they do for everything,” said Dr. Alfred Lewy, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University.

The sun's energy, if harvested in space, could provide a cost-effective way to meet global power needs in as little as 30 years according to a study group of the International Academy of Astronautics said that orbiting power plants beaming energy to the Earth could be possible. The study said government funding would be needed to get the concept, known as space solar power, to market as the private sector is unlikely to proceed alone because of the economic uncertainties No price tag for completing the project was given. The idea is to put solar-powered satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the equator. The spacecraft would collect sunlight up to 24 hours a day and the power would be converted to electricity on-board and sent to Earth, then fed into a power grid. Ultimately, tens of billions of dollars would be needed to develop and deploy a sufficiently low-cost fleet of reusable, earth-to-orbit vehicles. International interest in the concept has grown during the past decade, spurred in part by fears that in coming decades global production of petroleum and possibly other fossil fuels will peak and start to decline. In theory this idea could double the amount of solar power collected, compared with the Earth-bound technology.

In his new book Back to Work Bill Clinton can sympathise with Obama. But he produces a long list of 46 recommendations. About a third of his suggestions are to do with clean energy but he does not propose a carbon tax, or a cap-and-trade system, to drive the change. Clinton’s taste for the incremental does not stop at green energy. He recommends negotiating “long-term food contracts with China, Saudi Arabia, and other nations facing food shortages” and even talks about crowdfunding to help small businesses raise capital.There are two sub-themes in the book. The first is Clinton’s proud defense of his own two-term record in office during which median household income grew by almost a fifth. Since then it has lost most of those gains. The second sub-theme he develops is that America’s problems as fixable if only the debate in Washington could be restored to sanity. Unfortunately he has anything new to say about how to remedy America’s trade deficit. Clinton does offer a hint or two of the kind of advice he could give Obama.

Lucas Papademos the former vice president of the European Central Bank (ECB) is heading up an interim government of national unity.He studied at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He became governor of the Bank of Greece, the Greek central bank and played a central role in preparing the accession of Greece into the euro zone.It is a well known that Greece falsified data on the state of the Greek economy and especially of Greek public finances to get into the Euro zone. This inevitably casts a shadow over the career of Papademos. Mario Draghi became earlier this month the head of the ECB. Papademos and Draghi studied together at MIT. Draghi served from 2002-2005 as vice president and general manager of Goldman Sachs International. It was in fact Goldman Sachs that helped Greece hide its bad financial condition. Draghi has always maintained that the transactions were set up by Goldman Sachs in the period before he joined .If Draghi's argument were correct then it means by definition that Goldman Sachs advice dates back to 2002, being the period that Lucas Papademos was the head of the Bank of Greece. Draghi's shaky alibi is an additional burden on the reputation of the new Greek prime minister.

UCLA life scientists have identified a gene that slows the aging process. Working with fruit flies they activated a gene called PGC-1, which increases the activity of mitochondria, the tiny power generators in cells that control cell growth and tell cells when to live. By activating this one gene in this one tissue -- the intestine -- the fly lives longer; we slow aging of the intestine. The biologists delayed the aging of the flies' intestines and extended their lives by as much as 50 percent. This study has implications for human aging as the intestine is essential for the uptake of nutrients that are a vital source of energy and an important barrier that protects us from toxins and pathogens .As we age, our mitochondria become less efficient and less active. The study raises the question of whether increasing mitochondrial activity is an effective strategy to delay aging. If so, increasing the PGC-1 gene may prove key. Aging is the number one risk factor for most cancers, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and many others."

China’s economy is to-day the world’s second largest national economy and several of China’s state‐owned enterprises (SOE’s) are among the world’s largest companies and are potentially formidable competitors. The state sector in China consists of three main components, the state‐owned and controlled portion of the Chinese economy is very large, that the state sector in China will continue to play an important role The ruling party has not expressed an interest in becoming a bastion of free market capitalism but believes in a prominent role for state ownership and has indicated that strategic industries will remain wholly or largely under the government’s control. In other important so‐called pillar industries, the state will remain a major player, with significant, though not majority, ownership. China’s latest five‐year plan indicates it is pursuing a «national champion” strategy for certain industries that the government views as important so that the country relies less on foreign technologies.When it joined the WTO in 2001, China promised that the government would not influence, directly or indirectly, the commercial decisions of SOEs. China does not appear to be keeping this commitment.

A new theory suggests that the wrinkles we develop on our fingers when wet may actually be an evolutionary adaptation to give us better grip in slippery conditions. Scientists have known since the mid-1930s that water wrinkles do not form if the nerves in a finger are severed, implying that they are controlled by the nervous system. Evolutionary neurobiologist, Mark Changizi, takes this idea a step further by proposing that our water wrinkles function like rain treads on tires. In dry conditions, racecars get the most traction with smooth, treadles soles. Treads are needed when the ground becomes more complex, especially when it is wet. Changizi proposes that our fingers create channels that allow water to drain away as we press our fingertips on to wet surfaces. This allows them to make greater contact with a wet surface, giving them a better grip. Our pruney treads appear only when they're needed, dynamically transforming from racecar smooth to wet-conditions wrinkley as the weather conditions warrant. I want that tech on my shoes.

Animals such as bats and dolphins use ultrasonic sonar to navigate unfamiliar landscapes - Daniel Kish is a human who's able to do something remarkably similar. Kish is completely blind - he lost sight in both eyes by age 13 months, yet he uses his ears to see. When he walks around unfamiliar places, he clicks his tongue and then listens as that sound bounces off nearby objects. He says he's trained his brain to turn these sounds into an image of sorts - an auditory map he follows with the help of a cane. "When you send out a sonar call ... you're interrogating the environment," he said. "You're asking, 'Where are you?' and 'What are you?' And the environment answers back." Kish is the founder of a nonprofit called World Access for the Blind. His goal is to teach this technique of "human echolocation" - or seeing the world through sound - to blind people all over the world. The technique has its skeptics, but Kish maintains navigation by sound is a real, valuable tool which helps visually-impaired people live more independent lives. So far, the group has taught at least 500 blind children to see with their ears.

The bird might be the word, but is it safe to eat? Just 20% of Americans say they regularly use a food thermometer to make sure they have cooked food safely, according to a new survey by the American Dietetic Association and ConAgra Foods. And food safety experts say that a fair number of those people were probably fibbing. That's a pity, because a thermometer, used right, is the best indicator of whether food has been cooked enough to kill bugs like Salmonella, Campylobacter, E.Coli and Listeria. Ben Chapman, an assistant professor of food safety at North Carolina State University, cited a study where he asked 41 people prepare raw frozen breaded chicken fingers in a laboratory. He found that they routinely lied about using the food thermometer provided. Just 10 percent actually used it, and only two used it right. Several cooks never took off the thermometer's protective sheath. So what's an amateur chef to do to ensure food's fit for a king AND his court? One key step: Take multiple readings. That's because the various parts of a whole bird like a turkey cook at different rates, and it can be hard to find the deepest or coldest point. The other essential element of the turkey tech arsenal: A food thermometer that reads with pinpoint accuracy.

With the proliferation of online colleges and universities, fundamental questions are being asked about the value of this experience. Since most online education is simply classroom instruction delivered through the Internet, it isn't surprising that the learning outcomes are roughly the same. Most colleges, including online institutions, have yet to find ways to use technology to really transform education. Rather than debating whether classroom education is better than online education, President of Western Governors University Robert Mendenhall argues that we should be looking for ways to use technology to improve the overall quality of higher education. He outlines how online educational programs have structured their outcomes to measure success differently than traditional on-ground campuses. Since online learners tend to be adult students working full- or part-time, the focus is on building competencies driven by the employment marketplace. Mendenhall suggests this kind of learning "becomes the constant and time becomes the variable, rather than holding time constant and letting the learning vary. In an online environment that truly takes advantage of technology, the faculty role may change from delivering content to mentoring students."

A few pig cells, a single surgery and a rigorous daily workout: They’re the three ingredients that patients will need to re-grow functional muscle, courtesy of Pentagon-backed science that’s already being used to rebuild parts of people. The University of Pittsburgh team’s research means that, within this decade, the thousands of soldiers who’ve suffered major muscle loss can overcome devastating impairment — a life sentence of chronic pain, disability and no viable treatment short of amputation — and experience at least a 25 percent improvement in physical function. For civilians, the impact would incalculable. The kinds of trauma and health problems that now cause amputation would no longer cause irreparable damage. The first patient enrolled in their trial, a veteran who lost the majority of the anterior tibial muscle in his lower leg during an IED attack, has today graduated from the requisite six-month rehabilitation program that follows surgery. “He’s doing great,” says Dr. Stephen Badylak, head of the research initiative. “What would have been an amputation is now somebody with a limb that works much, much better than it did after the injury.”

Many are familiar with Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs - the pyramid that predicts we must satisfy the base stages before we can progress through subsequent ones. We need to be safe physiologically before focusing on love and belonging; we need security there before we're able to build esteem. But there’s a problem with Maslow’s hierarchy, according to Pamela Rutledge, Director of the Media Psychology Research Center. None of these needs — starting with basic survival on up — are possible without social connection and collaboration. Connection is a prerequisite for survival, physically and emotionally. Social networks allow us to see, as never before, the interrelated nature of society and the palpable development of social capital from the emerging and intricate patterns of interpersonal relationships and collaboration. The strength of our networks and bonds improve our effectiveness in the environment. Our need for survival through connection plays out through every successful social technology. If we look at the last decade of social technologies, we are not seeing anything new. People have not changed - Facebook may not bear much resemblance to huddling around a campfire, but, in spite of moral panics to the contrary, its function is the same.

The days of pulling a lever or punching a card may be numbered - Oregon has begun pioneering individual electronic voting by developing a program to allow disabled voters to cast their ballot by touch on an iPad. Armed with the tablets and portable printers, county election workers are going to parks, nursing homes, community centers and anywhere else they might find groups of voters who have trouble filling out traditional paper ballots. Using the iPad, disabled voters can call up the right ballot and tap the screen to pick a candidate, with or without the help of election workers. The voters then print the completed ballot and stuff it in an envelope to sign, take with them and drop in the mail or an official ballot box. Officials hope the iPad's portability, simplicity and relatively low cost will make it easier to deploy to more places and reach more voters. People with their own accessibility tools like joysticks and paddles can connect them using Bluetooth wireless technology. "It's a lot simpler for me. I think it's a great setup they got," said Lewis Crews, who has severe arthritis and utilized the iPad voting system, "now that I've seen how it works I'm confident I can do it on my own."

A new study reveals that we may be able to avoid symptoms of aging. The onset of wrinkles, muscle deterioration, and cataracts has been delayed and even eliminated in mice, say researchers at the Mayo Clinic. The study, published in Nature, focused on the flushing out of “senescent cells” from the body. While we acquire these cells naturally throughout life, the body’s ability to clear the cells lessens with age and leads to a buildup. To counteract this, scientists devised a way to kill all senescent cells in genetically engineered mice. Then, researchers examined them for three symptoms of old age: formation of cataracts in the eye, the wasting away of muscle tissue, and the loss elasticity in the skin. Researchers said the onset of these symptoms was "dramatically delayed" when the animals were treated with the cell-killing drug. When given to older mice, there was an improvement in muscle function. The study raises the tantalizing prospect of slowing the signs of aging in humans. Dr Jesus Gil, described the results as “fascinating”, but also warned that the findings need to be taken with caution. “It is only a preliminary study". Have we discovered the Fountain of Youth or are we setting foot into a science fiction horror film?

The show Beavis and Buthead is back on air, but it's representation of the pitfalls in pop-culture fall short and seem irrelevant to today's audience. The author asks "Has the world become too stupid for Beavis and Butt-Head?" And argues, in a world of Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan, that it has. How can Beavis and Butt-Head compete in a world where intelligence is a political negative and the wives of onetime governors appear on television eating tarantulas. Where a person like Kim Kardashian — famous for little more than a graphic sex video — can focus the nation's attention on her wedding, then announce a divorce 72 days later. Beavis and Butthead have been out-dummed, by other media, and by culture itself. There is no more shock left in their actions and the characters on television have become far more ridiculous.

Last week the net and the media were ablaze with the news that Anonymous might be taking on the Zeta drug cartel in Mexico. NYU Professor and Anonymous researcher Biella Coleman compares Anonymous to the trickster god archetype. Mythically, the trickster isn’t the good guy or the bad guy, it’s the character that exposes contradictions and initiates change. One minute, the loving and heroic trickster is saving civilization. A few minutes later the same trickster is cruel, kicking your ass and eating babies as a snack. Anonymous is a nascent and small culture, but one with its own aesthetics and values, art and literature, social norms and ways of production, and even its own dialectic language. Anonymous, the net’s trickster, emerged like supernatural movie monster out of the misty realm of ideas and into the real world. Summed in just a few words Anonymous is ‘Ultra-coordinated mother fuckery’ - the ability to use the technological tools of social coordination so quickly and well that anons working together could collectively attack targets for any perceived slight, or just for fun, without those targets ever having a chance to see it coming or defend themselves.

Time to throw out those mood rings - an app on your smartphone could soon tell you when you're stressed, or worried, or suffering from a more serious mental health problem. Devices like Nike+ or Jawbone's UP bracelet keep a daily, constant record of physical fitness, but the system that Cornell University's Tanzeem Choudhury designed reaches out a step beyond physical fitness to the comparatively untracked terrain of mental health. Choudhury's sensing system uses machinery in a smartphone - mainly the accelerometer and the microphone - to monitor people's movements and speech patterns, respectively. The app has been tested in two very different environments: in a retirement community and among a group of medical interns and residents. The pilots have been a success, Choudhury says, and compare well with the gold standards used to assess mental goodness and depression. "We're latching onto the right behavioral traits," Choudhury says, "But we need to diversify to different scenarios." Her next steps will be to develop the system so that it can be used in any environment, and used by people with different personalities. Your phone may soon end up becoming a better listener than the person with whom you're talking to on it.

Sorry, Einstein - not everyone needs to make a scientific breakthrough in their twenties like you did. Researchers analyzed 525 Nobel Prizes given in physics, chemistry and medicine from 1901 to 2008, and compared how the age of peak creativity, measured by the average age at which laureates did their prize-winning work, varied between fields and changed over time within fields. The result? By the year 2000, great work before age 30 almost never happened in any of the three fields. In physics, great achievements by age 40 occurred in only 19 percent of cases by 2000, and in chemistry, it almost never occurred. The reasons for this age shift might have to do in part with how long it now takes scientists to learn all they need to know to make these breakthroughs. Although the majority of Nobel laureates received their doctoral degrees by age 25 in the early 20th century, all three disciplines showed substantial declines in this tendency over time, with almost no physics or chemistry laureates receiving their degrees that early in life by the end of the 20th century. Rethinking achievement and breakthrough in this sense may have implications on the funding structure in universities and businesses - and it doesn't take a genius to see that.

For a long time, internet users have enjoyed some semblance of anonymity - the chance to be someone you're not has proven irresistible to candid book reviewers and cyber-bullies alike. That blanket unaccountability changed, however, with the arrival of Facebook. To use the social network, you must register with your real name. Once logged in, everything you do - posting messages, sending messages, tagging photos - is attributed to what, for most users, is their actual, offline identity. This has just scratched the surface of where digital accountability may be heading - BlueCava, a fraud-monitoring company, uses software to "fingerprint" any device that someone uses to visit a website. This is made possible by the hundreds of types of data that browsers send when connecting to a website, from the machine's operating system to the time zone in which the device is set to operate. So with the implication this carries on individual liberties, what might be a compromise? Letting users adopt nicknames on social networks might be one answer, combining the civilizing effect of social networks with the ability to adopt different social roles. "Most of the time we want pseudonymity, not anonymity," says Danah Boyd at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Normally the trappist Beer made by the monks of the St Sixtus abbey in Westvleteren , Belgium can only be bought ringing a “beerphone” whereby customers are given a time to pick up a strictly rationed quantity of beer . The abbey was however partly destroyed by fire a few years ago and the monks need to finance the € 8 million rebuilding programme of the Abbey. So what is the solution? They temporarily release two batches of respectively 93000 and 70000 cases. The second batch will certainly be available in France and the USA and probably in China and Japan, pending distribution deals. Once this finished sales of the Westvleteren Trappist beer will again be confined to the St Sixtus walls. The St Sixtus abbey started producing beer to sustain itself since 1831 and they still stick to their original distribution method. According to Joe Tucker of ratebeer.com it is a very special beer especially since the users of this site have rated this beer amongst the world’best

"Would you like to super-size that?" The answer might be linked to another seemingly unrelated question, "How are you doing?" In a new study, people chose jumbo portions of food and drink when they felt they lacked power and status. The researchers became interested in the question when David DuBois, a graduate student at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, noticed that the smoothies at the student union were labeled small, medium and power. DuBois and fellow researcher Derek Rucker asked people to judge a person's status, based on whether he or she picked the largest coffee, smoothie, or pizza offered. The people choosing the biggest portion were judged to have the highest status. Another experiment asked subjects to remember a situation, with half being told to remember being in control and powerful, and half being powerless. They were then asked to pick a smoothie from three different sizes. The powerless students were more likely to choose the largest smoothie, while those with power control were more apt to pick the smallest size. "It's not that we're inherently bound to bigger, but bigger and better seems to be a common way we perceive," Rucker said.

Level-up! A recent research project indicates that kids who play video games are more creative. That finding, thought to be the first demonstration of a relationship between technology use and creativity, comes from a new study of nearly 500 12-year-olds in Michigan, conducted by researchers at Michigan State University's Children and Technology Project. The children were given creative thinking tests – shown a drawing and asked to expand on it or comment on what it means – and then asked about their use of cellphones, computers, the Internet and video games. Only with video games was there a correlation to creativity, the researchers say, and that was true for boys and girls, and across all races. "Not only are (video games) not all bad, there's some 'intellectual' good to be found in playing them," says the project's lead investigator, Linda Jackson, a professor of psychology at Michigan State. "We are the first to look at creativity and technology use, finding that no other technologies except video games was positively related to creativity." Games also are shown to increase visual-spatial skills among the player. No word on if parents are inclined to accept the data as 'homework'.

Just saying something just isn't going to cut it anymore in today's advertising world. Communication and marketing have historically been rooted in dissemination - pushing a message; creating content. Today, we live in a world of engagement. People don’t want to be bludgeoned with broadcasts - they want, and expect, something more sophisticated, more considerate. And they are consuming media everywhere – TV, online, mobile – sometimes simultaneously. As Dennis Woodside details, connectivity has become essentially seamless, and the marketplace has been forever changed by electronic instantaneous payment. With the breakdown of communication walls, however, consumers might feel overwhelmed by the messages, and consequently tune them out. The resulting trend has been a push toward the micro: localized content, both geographically and reliance upon trusted personal networks. Woodside offers four suggestions for modern marketers - be found (hyper-localized advertising), be engaging (example: American Express' live streaming concerts), be relevant (metric-driven real-time targeted ads), and be accountable (online behavior directly correlating to product sales). In advertising, dull is dead - innovation (and personalization) is in.

It's a hard concept to imagine, but could your thermostat actually be something - pun intended - cool? Tony Fadell thinks so; as former Chief of the iPod division at Apple and Fortune magazine's second choice to succeed Steve Jobs in 2008, he's got the credentials to do it. With its Learning Thermostat, his start-up company Nest is going all in and telling the world that a ubiquitous but hard-to-master device that hasn't had a major redesign in decades is due for a shot of iPod and iPhone design magic. Fadell and his team think they've come up with an alternative that's easy to use and that learns from what we do. Along the way, the company thinks it could cut 20 percent to 30 percent off the average household's $1,000 or so in annual energy bills. The new device is small and round and has a bright and simple digital screen and you jog the outer case left or right or push-click the front to make selections. Sound familiar? Plus it works hand in hand with an iOS - and soon an Android - app that lets users control the system from afar. Setting the heat in your home from your phone 500 miles away? Now that's cool.

Blueberries might be tasty and crossword puzzles can be fun, but are they actually the neurological equivalent of pumping iron? Probably not. There's no shortage of the latest cognitive enhancement suggestions, but the practical results of these studies may be cloudy at best - most lack the long-term direct causation needed for definitive proof. The quest for effective ways to boost cognitive capacity is not hopeless, however. The explosion in neuroscience is slowly revealing the mechanisms of cognition. “We have accumulated enough knowledge about the mechanisms and molecular underpinnings of cognitionat the synaptic and circuit levels to say something about which processes contribute,” says James Bibb of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Greater cognitive capacity comes from having more neurons or synapses, higher levels of neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons, especially in the memory-forming hippocampus), and increased production of catalyst compounds. The key to neuroplasticity, or how the brain adapts and grows due to input, may lie in a combination of regular physical exercise, meditation, and simulation training (such as playing video games). Yes - this means less fish oil; more Super Mario Brothers.

Mud, joe, java - whatever you call it, we are a nation of coffee drinkers (fans of tea notwithstanding); we may also be boosting our health along with our caffeine levels without even realizing it. A new study suggests that drinking coffee significantly reduces skin-cancer risk. Drinking more than three cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of basal-cell carcinoma by 20 percent in women and 9 percent in men. Drinking even more coffee even further reduces our risk of getting this common form of skin cancer, according to a report presented last week at an American Association for Cancer Research prevention conference. There’s a raft of other research that’s piling up evidence that regular cups of joe — six-ounce servings packed with antioxidants, polyphenols, and other health-boosting chemicals — can prevent everything from diabetes to depression to cirrhosis of the liver (80% less-likely for those who drink four-plus cups per day) to stroke (one to five cups per day has shown to reduce likelihood by as much as 25%). So the next time you get that venti upgrade, remember - it's to your health.

Bittman argues that "local food" shouldn't be a trend or method of differentiation, it should be the standard. Currently, many of our government policies favor subsidizing foods (like corn) that we sell outside the U.S while fresh fruits and vegetables are often shipped here from outside the country even though we have the capability of growing them here. Although maximizing efficiency is the argument for focusing our farmers on a few specific crops, many argue that when transportation costs are factored into the overall equation, the economic and environmental savings isn't very high. Because of this long-term behavior, our culture has become used to the idea of eating any type of food at any time, but historically local and seasonal food was the standard. Bittman believes it is in the interest of our country to return to that reality. Especially if the food we're importing some day goes away because other countries either can't grow it, or don't have enough to sell to the rest of the world.

Once the Dewey Decimal system of Twitter, hashtags are being embraced by the political class as an ideal way to snark. Originating as a way to provide a common topical thread for users to interact, the hashtag is a hallmark of tweets. Political usage found favor in the the symbol when the White House encouraged people to use #immigration to discuss a major Obama immigration speech and #AskObama to group together questions for the president for an online forum hosted by Twitter's Jack Dorsey. But having pointed fun with the hashtag is newer. "Until a couple years ago, anytime you used a hashtag, it was to group a conversation," says Democratic consultant Matt Ortega. "But within the last year and a half or so, it's become a way to kind of use a subliminal message in a larger tweet." The New Yorker's Susan Orlean describes the result as sounding "like it's being muttered into a handkerchief." In an era of Stewart/Colbert-influenced snark, we have common tags such as #PerryHistory (detailing purposefully ludicrous and erroneous factoids purportedly from candidate Rick Perry) and #HermanCainPizzaJams (for Godfather's pizza mogul-cum-presidential candidate Herman Cain). Political leverage and comedic social commentary are strange (and funny) bedfellows indeed.

'You are what you eat' now includes '...and purchase repeatedly, thanks to brand loyalty.' Tiffany Barnett White, a professor of business administration at the University of Illinois, says consumers with a high self-brand connection maintained favorable evaluations even when presented with negative information about the product. This suggests that the reluctance of brand-conscious consumers to lower their opinion of a brand might be driven more by a motivation to protect the self. "When companies get consumers motivated about their products, they are just as motivated to protect the brand as they are themselves," White said. "So it's really more about the self than the brand. When people can self-affirm through other means and activities, they're not defensive at all." The result? Many people look for any way to overlook negative elements to maintain this anchored sense of self. "Consumers are highly resistant to brand failure to the point that they're willing to rewrite history," said White, "It not only explains why so many Toyota customers ignored the negative brand information in the aftermath of the highly publicized recalls, it also accounts for why they're quick to defend company and why they would want to re-write history in a more positive way."

With the launch of Apple's most recent addition to the iPhone canon, the 4S, the phone's owner interacts with a digital personal assistant named Siri. Siri highlights a new level of interactivity, but what might this mean for our own cognitive developmental abilities? Research on technological tools suggests that offloading mental functions to these electronic devices could cause our brains to go soft. A 2010 study by neuroscientist Veronique Bohbot at McGill University examined GPS users and brain activity relating to memory/spatial orientation. Participants used to getting around on the basis of their own wits had higher activity and a greater volume in the hippocampus than the older adults using a GPS. What's more, when it came to their actual performance, the non-GPS users performed better on a memory test. More research supports the accessibility to great swaths of data as opposed to intrinsic knowledge may inhibit cognitive function when the sole source of thinking. The problem is not the use of the smartphone itself; the problem comes when the smartphone takes over a function that the brain is perfectly capable of performing. It's like taking the elevator instead of the stairs; the ride may be quicker but your muscles won't get a workout.

We love our memes -- chances are good you've seen the Numa-Numa dancer, followed the saga of LonelyGirl, or been tearfully asked to 'Leave Britney alone!' Creating a video that attracts millions of viewers and becomes a pop culture phenomenon involves an unpredictable cocktail of luck and timing. A dash of cute babies or people acting like idiots can only help. But once a video goes viral, making some cold cash depends on quick action. Claire Cain Miller outlines the steps to take to capitalize on a viral success -- the first, and not surprisingly hardest, is to create an outstanding video. There's no sure formula for this; sharing the clip on social networks with popular search terms ('kitten', 'babies', etc.) only help increasing visibility. Miller then highlights the ability to make money from ads by becoming a YouTube partner -- if permission is granted, the site will run ads alongside the video and share more than half the revenue, sending a check each month. Other steps include appearing on media outlets (essentially "striking while the iron is hot" to ride the buzz), and capitalizing by selling merchandise. Recognizing the potential wave of interest can be lucrative -- if the 'Dave After Dentist' dad can make $100,000 from a clip, so can your cat.

Academia: Coming soon to a storefront near you. With the economy's recovery sputtering, more and more university personnel are seeing opportunities for commercial growth and fast-tracking their innovations to the consumer marketplace. At Stanford University, a group of academic researchers from all over the country gathered to take a crash course in how to turn their projects into start-up companies. The National Science Foundation screened applicants for this Innovation Corps program and awarded each research team $50,000. They'll be mentored by entrepreneurs familiar with bringing a new technology to market, and ongoing growth opportunities. But whether large numbers of researchers who've spent most of their professional lives in academic labs will be able to start companies is far from certain. Still, venture capitalist Jon Feiber, who's been part of the teaching team, predicts the government's investment will pay off. "If we look at the core strength of the United States over a long period of time, it's great universities, it's funded research — and it's what comes out of that commercially that employs people and creates great businesses," Feiber says. "So that's the long-term strategic opportunity for us as a country."

While wind energy is helping to mitigate the environ-mental concerns related to fossil fuels, wind farms as such present problems of wildlife conservation, such as habitat loss or increased mortality of birds and of bats. However, according to a study published in the online edition of "PLoS ONE" on 26 October, it is said that with better regional planning and an improved fit, the wind power could meet environmental concerns while reaching the development goals of the wind. The work done by "The Nature Conservancy" are an analysis of impacts on wildlife of Kansas, describing how wind development could be extended. Researchers have identified areas that should be "sanctified" to protect certain wildlife populations and habitats (eg grasslands housing poultry and whooping cranes). They also quantified the level of "offset projects" that would be required to accept the ecological effects on the remaining spaces. The proposal suggests that an area of about 10 million hectares (about 50% of the State of Texas) could be devoted to the development of wind energy, which would lead to an installed capacity of up to 478 gigawatts of energy, while respecting the objectives of environmental conservation.

Europe is looking to emerging economies to provide the extra financial firepower to strengthen the fund four- to five-fold, to about 1 trillion euros but the response so far from China on strengthening the fund has been very cautiousThe economic outlook is heavily hedged with warnings about what could yet go wrong.Europe probably is already in recession,U.S. consumers are too heavily indebted to support strong growth next year and looming in the background are the U.S. budget deficit talks.The European Central Bank is widely expected to lay the foundation for an interest rate cut at its meeting on Thursday but analysts doubt Italian Mario Draghi will embark on bolder action at his first meeting as ECB president, although there is an outside chance for a rate cut.US Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke at his news conference on Wednesday is likely to repeat his disappointment at the pace of recovery and explore further options for supporting growth in face of the considerable risks ahead.Europe in recessionary territory and an impaired U.S. consumer also point to a deceleration in exports from China when its manufacturing index is released on Tuesday, rounding out a picture of a vulnerable world economy.

The findings, which focused on more than 1,000 women and were published in the American Journal of Cardiology, add to mounting evidence that alcohol, regardless of the type of drink, can be good for the heart. One drink a day is a really good target, assuming that a person can be disciplined about that. Researchers surveyed more than 1,200 women hospitalized for a heart attack. In an earlier study including men and women researchers found that people who continued to drink moderately after having a heart attack had better health than those who abstained.

The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries.

The collaborative �Smart 4G Tablet� project objective is to suppress the "last wire" that connects the equipment to the electric grid. These tablets will approach the goal of power supply autonomy by using a transparent photovoltaic film integrated into the screen of the tablet and associated with advanced economic and energy management solutions.

Augmented Reality Enterprises are beginning to include augmented reality and context aware computing in their strategies and enriching their products or enhancing their business processes with contextual information. Enterprises use context information in business applications to identify the appropriate resources for specific tasks and the best channel on which to contact them, or to proactively serve up the information that associates need to make the best decisions in the course of their work.

Wicked Start Web-based tools are becoming nearly essential to many aspects of running a business, so why not bring them into the process of creating and executing a business plan? That’s the idea behind Wicked Start A Start-Up That Automates the Process of Starting Up

Want more infrmation , just scan me Skanz the company owned by QR Media Group develops and markets QR codes bracelets packed with data about products and people When scanned ( compare it to vertical zebra stripe used in supermarkets ) a QR code can pull up a web page, text or geographic coordinates. QR codes connect in fcat the physical and online worlds.

Once you can easily scan a check and deposit it, do you really need to stick with a bank just because it has a branch in your neighborhood? The technological advance of smartphone scanning will help upstarts cutting into the deposits of major banks. Who likes going to branches? It's much more convenient to either mail checks or use cutting-edge mobile deposit technology,"ecurity experts say there is no particular concern to making deposits via a smart phone app. The main issue is being sure to take basic precautions with your phone, says Joseph Steinberg, CEO of the IT firm Green Armor Solutions.

Going green has literally gotten cool for Facebook -- the company has begun building a data center in Lulea, Sweden, where it will benefit from cheap electricity and year-round free air cooling, the company announced Thursday. Lulea is on the edge of the Arctic Circle, and has a mean annual temperature of around 1 C (34 F), with average summer highs of around 20 C (68 F), allowing Facebook to save money by cooling its data center with fresh air rather than air conditioning. Using free air cooling will help Facebook increase a key measure of data center efficiency, its PUE (power usage effectiveness). The less power wasted on ancillary functions such as cooling and lighting, the more energy-efficient the data center becomes. The servers there will run primarily on hydroelectric power from the nearby Lule river, Facebook said. Lulea is now hoping to make a name for itself as a cool place to build a network node. With two neighboring cities, it is branding itself as the "Node Pole." No direct comment from Mr. S. Clause, but according to a recent status update, he's "jolly with the news."

Wine tasting is a big deal to a lot of people. It can even be a professional career. ine tasters will mention all sorts of things they can taste in a fine wine as if they were a human spectrograph with the ability to sense the molecular makeup of their beverage. Research shows, however, this perception can be hijacked, fooled, and might just be completely wrong. Researchers in different experiments at the University of Bordeaux and Cal Tech measured subjects' response to the same wine presented in different formats (white wines dyed red; cheap wines in expensive bottles). The results showed that expectation and context heavily influenced testers when describing different 'notes'/flavors and overall quality. Expectation, as it turns out, is just as important as raw sensation. The build up to an experience can completely change how you interpret the information reaching your brain from your otherwise objective senses. This isn't to say 'expertise' is without its merits -- simply not the end-all when it comes to wine. All things equal, people refer back to the advertising or the packaging or conformity with your friends and family. Presentation is (almost) everything -- no sour grapes.

Oh great another new plane. Actually, according to experts, the arrival of the new Boeing 787 is something to celebrate. While a number of technical setbacks delayed its debut by about three years, the Boeing 787 finally made its maiden voyage with a flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong. So what makes this plane a Dreamliner? The wings are no longer rigid but change shape during the flight for optimal aerodynamic efficiency. Also, it is the first airliner to be made of plastic, instead of the traditional aluminum. The new combination of materials and features make the 787 stronger, lighter, and more economical to fly. In terms of passenger comforts, Boeing got rid of the usual window shades and added dimmers to each window. There will be more humidity circulating on flights, lessening passenger dizziness and fatigue. Boeing believes it has created the future in flying and the 787 is expected to be around for at least another 50 years.

Sustaining students with addictions is a "paradigm shift," said the U.S. Department of Education, in a May report, calling recovery programs "critical to preventing relapse as well as supporting student success in education." For years, school officials have focused on prevention, with scant attention paid to addicts who face a daunting challenge: How to to avoid relapse in an environment where the weekend starts on Thursday and where drinking often dominates the social scene? "Probably the worst place to send someone in recovery is a campus," said Kitty Harris, director of Texas Tech's initiative, the Center for the Study of Addiction and Recovery, where requirements include a wellness class and community service. The model has been well-received, and spawned similar programs at various universities across the country; substance-free housing has also opened in New York and Chicago to support student recovery. Many resource-strapped campuses haven't followed suit - but that may be changing. "This is a relatively new trend, and whenever something new comes along, most schools will sit on the sidelines and wait to see if it's effective," said Eric Davidson, of the Illinois Higher Education Center. "But I think we'll see more institutions going this way."

Everybody dreams, whether we remember them or not. When we do, the results can be so bizarre, exciting, or disturbing that we naturally try to explain their meaning and where they come from. Psychoanalysis would have us believe that dreams are an access point to our unconscious desires, unleashed while executive control snoozes. On the other hand, researchers who study sleep and dreaming have proposed that dreams are just noise, a by-product of the firing of neural pathways as the brain runs nightly maintenance. Surprisingly, EEG activity during REM sleep (when dreaming primarily takes place) is virtually indistinguishable from readings taken while awake. During dreaming, your brain's metaphorical conductor, responsible for monitoring, evaluation, and planning, is basically on a lunch break. This is where the bizarre scenarios arise, but what might they mean? The neurobiology of dreaming points to a surprising parallel with core ideas of psychoanalysis: the virtual absence of self-monitoring in dreams, combined with the apparent trait-like aspects of their content, indicates a world in which our dreams represent an experience of our more uninhibited concerns and emotions. Ultimately, though, we still lack the definitive key to unlock the world of dreams.

In a culture where over 80 percent of the population identifies itself as Christian, people’s beliefs about the nature of the divine can have significant ramifications on mental health — particularly in times of great uncertainty. Yet, despite this critical role, there has been a kind of “church and state” separation regarding spirituality in clinical theory and practice. A recent study led by Harvard Medical School’s David Rosmarin was undertaken to close this gap between the sacred and the profane in clinical practice. Studying hundreds of devoutly religious Jews and Christians, the researchers explored what religious cognitions can lead to more or less worry. Mistrust in God led to less tolerance of uncertainty (e.g., feeling upset when stuck with ambiguous information), which in turn led to increased levels of worry. Increasing trust in God, however, led to more tolerance of uncertainty, decreasing levels of worry. The implications here go beyond just the therapeutic level - it marks one of the first times explicitly spiritual beliefs have been implemented into psychological research methodology. Heaven only knows what future studies hold from an applied, scientific perspective.

One of the most talked-about features of the iPhone 4S is the digital personal assistant software, Siri, whose 'voice' is female. Siri, along with GPS navigational systems and other technology lent a human voice tends to be female as well - but why is this so? Research suggests this preference starts as early as the womb, author Steve Nass said. He cites a study in which fetuses were found to react to the sound of their mother's voice but not to other female voices. The fetuses showed no distinct reaction to their father's voice, however. Another answer lies in history. According to some sources, the use of female voices in navigation devices dates back to World War II, when women's voices were employed in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male pilots. And telephone operators have traditionally been female, making people accustomed to getting assistance from a disembodied woman's voice. Beyond just history may lie the subliminal impressions made by different ranges. Voices of authority or menace tend to be male: the homicidal HAL 9000 computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey," or Auto, the spaceship's autopilot function in "Wall-E." More subservient talking machines, such as the onboard computer from the "Star Trek" TV series, skew female.

What if your action-based reputation preceded you digitally? In one sense, brands have lived with this type of situation since the late ‘60s, with the advent of corporate social responsibility. Today, social media’s focus on transparency has changed the attitudes of consumers and employees regarding the modern corporation. People won’t buy products from or work for organizations that aren’t actively trying to change the world for good. This responsibility has moved beyond a simple event or job title - it's now an active strategy employed by businesses, and has made the jump to the level of the individual. New research from LinkedIn shows that one out of every five hiring managers in the U.S. hired a candidate because of her volunteer work experience. Giving back can be the determining factor between two similar candidates. A person can volunteer for organizations that reflect their overall passions as a way to get experience for a future career. “Volunteering used to only be about give, give, give,” says LinkedIn Director of Connections Nicole Williams. “Now it’s more cyclical – people are thinking about where they can contribute that’s also in the best interest of their careers, so they don’t get burned out.”

We've all heard the rumors - 9/11 was an inside job; the government is covering up alien encounters; Osama bin Laden is not dead (for that matter, neither is Elvis). Conspiracy theories are nothing new; opposing views to the official line given by authorities are in fact crucial in exposing deceptions. However, independent think tank Demos says that young people do not know how to navigate this information when it appears on the Internet. Pupils in London classrooms were asked to rate various sources of information (the government, Twitter, the newspaper, their family, and others) according to how much they trusted it. The results were telling - closest to the heading 'Trust' the pupils placed YouTube; somewhere near the heading 'Distrust', they placed the government. Educators are also shifting to improve students' digital literacy - learning how to navigate information and fact-check, instead of trusting packaged Wikipedia entries or Google search results. The Demos study looked also at students' sense of historical revisionism, and the impact new media has had. "Why should we trust the government when everything that is being broadcast on TV could be misleading us as well?" said Reema Begum, 16. "What are we supposed to believe?"

The Erie County prison system in upstate New York is taking a controversial new approach to generating revenue. Working with a local advertising company, the plan is to display ads for local attorneys on a high-definition plasma television displayed outside of the initial holding cell. The key to effective advertising is to reach consumers at the moment they make their purchasing decision, said Anthony N. Diina, the head of Metrodata, a company offering digital advertising services to Erie County government. “What do people want when they are in the Holding Center?” Diina asked. “They want to get out. And they don’t want to get convicted. So they want bail. And an attorney." Not surprisingly, the plan has its share of detractors as well, such as James Auricchio, a former prosecutor now doing criminal defense work. “It’s just poor taste, in my mind. It strikes me as inserting a commercial aspect into something when I don’t feel there is any place for it. Maybe that advertising does provide a good service,” he said later. “But keep in mind, it is advertising just like other advertising. The value that is given by any given attorney varies dramatically.” Talk about a captive audience.

It's official -- social media is no longer seen as a 'bell and whistle' for colleges and universities, but rather an integral part of recruitment and retention practices. In a recent study, 100% of universities surveyed use social media to communicate with students, up from 61% in 2007-08. The study found that 98% of the responding colleges have a Facebook page and 84% have a Twitter account. "Social media is past the fad phase," said Nora Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. "The numbers speak for themselves. Many students can't afford to visit the campus, so they are depending on the podcasts and blogs to get answers." That's good -- but just having a presence is no longer good enough. Many schools will only post on outlets a handful of times per term, so there's less student incentive for student investment and involvement. "It's not enough to be satisfied that your school is on Facebook," Barnes said. "Students will make a judgment about the university if it is not current and responsive online. When their post doesn't get answered, they are not interested anymore."

Even in a time of economic slowdown, the United States holds true to its history of housing great start-up locales -- one needs only look to Silicon Valley (or further back, the Midwestern industrial giants). What gives some cities and regions such extraordinary creative and entrepreneurial vitality, though -- and what holds others back? Start-ups are fragile things by their very nature -- few succeed even under the best of circumstances. "The problem is not that most towns kill start-ups," says venture capitalist Paul Graham, "It's that death is the default for startups, and most towns don't save them." Richard Florida argues in this piece that we're in the process of transcending geographic boundaries which have traditionally localized innovation and finance. The result has been that venture capitalists are investing in high-tech start-ups across the South and revitalized Midwest centers. In addition to knowledge access (many times in the form of research universities), these locations often have a culture that rewards risk-taking behavior. As technology shrinks the geographic limitations of innovation, the start-up of the future is as likely to be housed in Savannah, Georgia as Silicon Valley.

Muammar Gaddafi was killed by Libyan fighters he once scorned as "rats," cornered, beaten and then shot in the head after his chaotic capture by fighters who overran his last redoubt on Thursday in his hometown of Sirte.

The link between the silver screen and the small screen looks to get a lot more seamless thanks to Mozilla's new HTML5 toolkit. Popcorn.js, which few outside the web-development world have ever heard of, could be the next big thing in internet video. It’s a simple — for coders, at least — framework that allows filmmakers to supplement their movies with news feeds, Twitter posts, informational windows or even other videos, which show up picture-in-picture style. Exploring how to use this new interface was the focus for a two day 'hackathon' in San Francisco involving developers and filmmakers. The resulting collaboration provided in new ways to integrate real-time information access while experiencing media. For example, if a subject in a film mentions a place, a link can pop up within the video or alongside it, directing the viewer to a Google Map of the location. The tools the Popcorn coders are creating could lead to far more interactive online experiences, not just for movies and documentaries but for all videos. Want to make a cat video replete with recent updates from Fluffy’s Facebook page and all the latest tweets tagged #cats? There could soon be an app for that.

Is your start-up starting to feel like a frat house? New research suggests that having more women at your company, and increasing diversity in general, can improve your chances of success. In 2010, MBA researchers from Carnegie Mellon released one of the most comprehensive research reports to date on the state of women in venture-backed start-ups. The report concluded, “Women-led high-tech start-ups generate higher revenues per dollar of invested capital and have lower failure rates than those led by men. Data clearly shows that high-tech venture-backed companies founded by women do as well as those led by men despite often being capital-constrained. Portfolios that lack this diversity are likely to suffer over time.” In a related study, Thomas Malone, a management professor at MIT, created teams of people aged 18 to 60, had them take IQ tests, and then issued them a series of problem sets. Surprisingly, those with the highest IQs did not perform the best—but the teams with the most women, did. This Inc. Magazine article goes on to discus the advantages of taking down that “No Girls Allowed!” sign and how to get women involved in your start-up.

Anyone who's been a teenager themselves know that those years are often characterized by impulsive, risk-taking behavior -- though there may now be more scientific evidence to support why. Neuroscientists confirm that teenagers do have brains, but they're wired differently from those of adults. Why many teenagers seek thrills, break rules and seem nonchalant about their own safety has been a question brain scientists have worked to answer in the last two decades. Research from the National Institutes of Health has shown, the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain associated with inhibition of risky behavior, doesn't fully develop until age 25. The connections between the prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain are also developing in teenagers. And a number of deep structures in the brain are influenced by changes in hormones, which may lead to heightened emotions. "It's not that adolescents don't understand risk. They understand it perfectly well," says Beatriz Luna, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. "It's just that they find it more rewarding to impress their peers, and things of that sort, than the risk that's involved to their actual survival; it's just what they value at that point."

Parasites that prey on insects are nothing new -- but Xenos vesparum stands out for its weirdness in how it infiltrates hosts' bodies and radically reconfigures them for parasitic reproduction. Infected European paper wasps reject their genetically preordained roles, abandon their hives and embark on a long, macabre journey during which a few live for a time as queens, albeit murderous queens. Early in summer, when a hive is busiest, the infected wasp leaves and travels, as if under command, to some unknown but predetermined place. Other parasitized wasps converge there, too. When enough have gathered, mating begins — not for wasps, which now have shrunken and non-functional ovaries, but the parasites. After reproduction, surviving infected wasps return to their home hives, mimicking queen-like behavior. “After that, they start wandering among the colonies,” spreading their deadly larval load, said entomologist Alfred Manfredini. “They don’t lay eggs. They don’t build colonies. They’re completely anarchic.” Though not the only case of parasitic alteration, few are this complex. Researchers are keeping a close eye to prevent the parasite from spreading to other stinging insect populations and containing the anticipated 'killer zom-bees' puns as a result.

Munster, Indiana students no longer are being asked to take out their books and turn to a page -- they have made the leap from textbooks to interactive electronic programs. Unlike the tentative, incremental steps of digital initiatives at many schools nationwide, Munster made an all-in leap in a few frenetic months — removing all math and science textbooks for its 2,600 students in grades 5 to 12, and providing a window into the hurdles and hiccups of such an overhaul. “The material we’re teaching is old but everything around it is brand-new,” said Pat Premetz, chairwoman of the math department at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Munster. “This isn’t stressing out students,” Ms. Premetz added. “It’s stressing out teachers because of some of the technological problems, and parents who are wondering why their kids are on the computer so much.” Many find advantages in software recording children's performance in a file that the teacher reviews that night. “Last year I’d have to walk around and ask every kid how it’s going, and I’d be grading sheets, that kind of thing,” sixth grade teacher Angela Bartolomeo said. “This way I can give my time to the kids who really need it. And it’s a lot more engaging for the kids. They’re actually doing their homework now.”

Most of us use the Internet for work, recreation and taking care of regular tasks like checking the bank account and paying bills. At some point, however, use can become compulsive and begin to interfere with optimal functioning in other areas of life such as work, social interactions and general health. John Cline details how internet addiction can cross the line to result in sleep-deprivation, resembling other more easily identified scourges, such as substance abuse or pathological gambling. Socially isolated people may seek a virtual community which supplants their real-world relationships, and others may develop a lower tolerance for boredom with the vastness of the internet only a few clicks away. Cline even suggests that surfing may be a trigger mechanism for those suffering from ADD/ADHD, with lack of sleep causing or antagonizing these kinds of symptoms. The article suggests the most important thing people that are noticing signs of internet addiction can do is simply to disconnect; for those who cannot, addiction specialists can propose strategies to help treat compulsive behaviors. One of the most important ways to use technology then, as Cline indicates, is to know how not to as well.

In "The Valley of Fear", Sherlock Holmes adopts an unusual tactic: he returns to the scene of a crime, and attempts to think like a criminal. Beyond just motive, Holmes pays attention to the tiny details -- visual cues, sounds, smells, to understand how a perpetrator's thoughts unfolded. Perspective-taking is an essential part of interacting with the world: we need to be able to see things from others’ perspectives in order to understand them and interact with them. But it goes beyond the fundamental ability to realize that others don’t always see the same thing we ourselves see–even though unfortunately, for many people, it stops there. Once we reach a satisfactory-sounding answer, we stop thinking and consider the problem resolved. That tendency is known as satisficing: we’ve successfully captured a required point of view. What this lacks is context -- similar to the way we retrace our steps if we, say, lose our keys. Sherlock Holmes invokes this contextual memory principle except instead of using context to cue memory, he uses it to cue perspective-taking and imagination. Given this specific room, at this specific time of day, what would someone who had just committed the crime in question be most likely to do? The answer, it seems, may be elementary.

If you have a shaky sense of comic timing (and you're a little immature), there’s good news for you. Researchers have developed a computer program that helps you identify the perfect opening for a "that's what she said" joke. Computer scientists Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun are interested in how humans recognize double entendres and whether machines can learn to do the same. Spotting double entendres requires "both deep semantic and cultural understanding.” As Kiddon explained in an interview, a double entendre is really a type of metaphor that brings together two conceptual realms: one straight-laced and one raunchy. So "that's what she said" jokes are a fertile testing ground for whether computers can be trained to "think" metaphorically about language the way humans do. To train their computer program, DEviaNT (Double Entendre via Noun Transfer), they gathered 1.5 million sentences from erotic literature and 57,000 from more mainstream texts. By analyzing big swathes of lexical content, DEviaNT can began to learn which terms frequently appear together in risqué contexts thus indicating a potential TWSS. At the moment, the program can pick out TWSS setups with about 70% accuracy- about the same as the dirty joke telling ability of a 12-year-old boy.

Physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." But why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? A new study led by Jason Moser is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes. The first is called error-related negativity (ERN). This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any screw-up. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. Moser extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these error-related signals in the brain. Moser’s experiments compared people who believed “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” with people with a growth mindset, who believe that they can improve at almost anything if they invest the necessary time and energy. He found that subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. Those subjects generated a much larger Pe signal and showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. By thinking about what they got wrong, the subjects learned how to get it right.

You probably wouldn't expect someone with a PhD in Art History to teach formal geometry to college students, but at St. John's College that's exactly the kind of unexpected 'non-expertise' embraced. As St. John's president, Chris Nelson, details: “Every member of the faculty who comes here gets thrown in the deep end. I think the faculty members, if they were cubbyholed into a specialization, they’d think that they know more than they do. That usually is an impediment to learning. Learning is born of ignorance.” The St. John's college experience is unlike just about any other -- there are no majors; every student takes the same 16 yearlong courses, which generally feature about 15 students discussing Sophocles or Homer, and the professor acting more as catalyst than connoisseur. Instructors attend a week-long orientation to acquaint themselves with the historically-rooted subject matter they will teach, along with the St. John's method; there are also continued weekly discussions with more seasoned tutors to reflect and learn best practices. Defying the conventional approach to education and expertise, St. John's believes it's not what people know, but rather what they don't that matters.

Have you ever felt like someone is watching you? Or heard a faint noise that left you feeling frightened? Engineer Vic Tandy may have an answer for you. While working alone one night, Tandy began to feel anxious and distinctly uncomfortable. The next day, Tandy searched for the cause for his unease. He found that a newly installed extractor fan was producing a standing sound wave that sent vibrations bouncing around the walls of the laboratory. He calculated that the frequency of the wave was about 19hz (cycles per second). When the fan was turned off, the sound wave disappeared. The key here is frequency: 19hz is in the range known as infrasound, below the range of human hearing, which begins at 20hz. Tandy learned that low frequencies in this region can affect humans and animals in several ways, causing discomfort, dizziness, blurred vision (by vibrating your eyeballs), hyperventilation and fear, possibly leading to panic attacks. Further investigations at other “haunted” locations yielded similar results. In an interesting parallel, researchers have recorded that, prior to an attack, a tiger's roar contains frequencies of about 18hz, which might disorientate and paralyze their intended prey. Is this the sound of fear itself?

Conventional talk on the topic of education likes to focus on comparing the US system to our overseas counterparts in Asia. Most notably, the push has been on STEM-fields -- science, technology, engineering, and math. As Anya Kamenetz argues, however, focusing solely on these areas is not nearly enough. She highlights Phaneesh Murthy, CEO of a top-ten Indian outsourcing company: "The U.S. education system is much more geared to innovation and practical application," he says, "It's really good from high school onward." Rote memorization is predicted to be replaced by creative brainstorming and collaboration, along with ongoing technical training to assist with job mobility -- a hybrid East/West model of professional development. This is proposed to address the shift from mid-skilled workers to coveted high-skilled managerial and professional positions. According to Kamenetz, workers at every level, however, benefit from an education that emphasizes creative thinking, communication, and teamwork--the very kind of excellence already offered at top American colleges.

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy -- it's an adage that may be more factual than originally imagined. An article in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Play details not only how much children's play time has declined, but how this lack of play affects emotional development, leading to the rise of anxiety, depression, and problems of attention and self control. "Since about 1955 ... children's free play has been continually declining, at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children's activities," says the author Peter Gray, Professor of Psychology at Boston College. Gray defines "free play" as play a child undertakes him- or her-self and which is self-directed and an end in itself, rather than part of some organized activity. Gray describes this kind of freely-chosen play as a testing ground for life. It provides critical life experiences without which young children cannot develop into confident and competent adults. As they play, they discover self-guided interests, learn decision-making and self-control, begin to handle emotions (including anger), helps them make friends, and most importantly is a source of happiness. It turns out some of the best parenting advice is as easy as child's play.

In a word: yes. The practice of book-destruction is not that simple and straightforward, however. This article details how space and economic limitations challenge libraries to determine a book's value. Betsy Simpson from the American Library Association assures that libraries are dedicated to preserving cultural records, but have faced challenges with their shifting roles as community centers and growing number of total publications in existence. "The space issue is a concern," Simpson says, "because more and more, there's a realization that our users need space to interact and collaborate and space to contemplate." Though their hands are forced, there are ways other than destroying books to deal with space limitations, and libraries typically try those first. Some locations host book sales or coordinate resale shops (such as the University of Florida's library system); on top of that, there are growing initiatives to create "shared print repositories," where books can be stored offsite and remain available for retrieval when they're needed. Digitization of books and catalogs help to ensure there is less of permanent loss of culture. For absolutists, though, this might only soften the fact that yes -- sometimes books are destroyed.

That’s right mom! A new study reveals swearing serves an important function in relieving pain, and that bad language can actually be good for you. So put down that soap! The study, published in NeuroReport, measured how long college students could keep their hands immersed in cold water. During the chilly exercise, they could repeat an expletive of their choice or chant a neutral word. When swearing, the student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer. "Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it," says psychologist Richard Stephens. How swearing achieves its physical effects is unclear, but the researchers speculate that brain circuitry linked to emotion is involved. Earlier studies have shown that unlike normal language, which relies on the outer few millimeters in the left hemisphere of the brain, expletives hinge on evolutionarily ancient structures buried deep inside the right half. There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become. And without emotion, all that is left of a swear word is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone's pain.

Once the realm of science fiction, researchers are mining the virtual past trying to predict the future of reality. The tweets and (semi)public information we post every day are fodder for these researchers — enabling them to predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability, just as physicists and chemists can predict natural phenomena. Given the very real implications of this, the government is launching a three-year experimental data-gathering project as part of its Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity. The automated data collection system is to focus on patterns of communication, consumption and movement of populations. It will use publicly accessible data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flow, financial market indicators, traffic webcams and changes in Wikipedia entries. It is intended to be an entirely automated system, a “data eye in the sky” without human intervention, according to the program proposal. The research would not be limited to political and economic events, but would also explore the ability to predict pandemics and other types of widespread contagion, something that has been pursued independently by civilian researchers and by companies like Google.

"The" is the most commonly used word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In Silicon Valley, however, dropping "the" before product names has become an article of faith. "When you can drop an article, the brand takes on a more iconic feel," argues Allen Adamson, managing director of WPP Group PLC's branding agency, Landor Associates. There are increasingly more reports of how "Kindle is succeeding," or describing "what Wii is all about," when discussing the popular products from Amazon and Nintendo. The idea is to create a more human, personal perception of a product, though some outlets remain staunchly opposed -- the Wall Street Journal, for example, inserts the "the" article even if companies omit it. The trend doesn't seem to be slowing anytime with wildly successful companies adopting the approach -- remember TheFacebook.com? "When somebody says 'the Nook,' I wince," says Glen Kaplan, creative director at Barnes & Noble. "When a brand evokes something bigger than just a little object, it doesn't want to have 'the' in front of it."

Science is lending support to the old belief that married couples eventually begin to look alike. According to a study by psychologist Robert Zajonc, couples who originally bore no particular resemblance to one another when first married had, after 25 years of marriage, come to resemble each other. In the study, people were presented a random array of photographs of faces, and were instructed to match the men with the women who most closely resembled them. Half of the photographs were of couples when first married; and the other half of the same couples 25 years later. While the resemblances were not dramatic - some involving subtle shifts in wrinkles or facial contours - they were marked enough that the judges were able to match husbands and wives far more often when the couples were older than when they were younger. Zajonc proposes that people, often unconsciously, mimic the facial expressions of their spouses in a silent empathy. Over the years, sharing the same expressions shapes the face similarly. Moreover, the more marital happiness a couple reported, the greater their increase in facial resemblance. So much for opposites attract!

Ever wanted to think like Einstein? Certain that you should be the next Heisenberg? The key to individual genius may rest more with who you surround yourself with than personal work. Physicist David Bohm made a discovery when researching the lives of these and other scientific luminaries: their big breakthroughs were found through simple, open conversations with colleagues. Much of contemporary research science is plagued by competition and status-seeking; Bohm suggests that researchers are better served by looking back to a strategy originating with the ancient Greeks. Socrates introduced the concept of 'koinonia', which means 'spirit of fellowship'. The three main tenets of koinonia are 1.) establishing dialogue (open conversation without argument or interruption), 2.) clarified thinking (suspending personal assumptions and allowing thought to flow freely), and 3.) honesty (even if controversial). Koinonia differs from traditional brainstorming in that the group subscribes to the ongoing practice and continued withholding of judgment -- there is less a sense of right/wrong, and a more inclusive process of dialogue. So the next time you're faced with a difficult group discussion, try to remember you may be (or be sitting next to) the next Einstein.

Meet the future of organization: Google Wallet. Google's product manager, Marc Freed-Finnegan, recently introduced the company's next concept of combining credit cards, licenses, and keys into one smartphone app. While the idea may sound far-fetched, a Google Wallet prototype has already been introduced in some smartphones. Certain Mastercard users for example, can simply tap their phones on the "paypass" box at the checkout counter, enter a pin for secure payment, and can be on their merry way out. So far however, the issues that stand in the way of Google mass-marketing its smart wallet are that not all stores have a "paypass" easy pay box and that not all credit cards are applicable. Yet. Google is very optimistic that it will develop its app for various smart phones and with time the handheld leather wallet will be eradicated altogether.

With the new iPhone available for pre-order with only a few major carriers, many Americans are wondering the same thing: How much would it really cost to end my contract so I can finally get that 4S? Yahoo's tech bloggers have compiled all the necessary information for consumers who want to terminate their cell-phone contract early. If you've had your contract for more than 30 days, most companies will charge between $50 to $350 for early termination. If you've had your contract for less than a month however most companies will let you get out of the deal without an extra fee. Read the full article to find out how much your carrier will charge you for early termination of your contract.

With the explosion of smartphones, social media, and electronic communication over the past decade, the way we make decisions has undoubtedly changed significantly. Given this influx of information, however, how do we make the best decisions? Ed Chi, a research scientist at Google, examines the ongoing evolution of how people interact with data. The result, he claims, has been a movement away from an avalanche of information toward one which is more customized to the individual -- say, looking for a trusted source when browsing restaurant recommendations. Chi notes that we process information in the tiny pockets of time divided up throughout the day. "These are ‘micro-waiting’ moments – a flea market information experience," he says, "where that experience used to be a dedicated, focused period of the day, it is now opportunistic, serendipitous, and targeted." He predicts this next generation of information sifting will continue building upon the brain's natural flexibility to process the best choice among many available.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the animal rights group known for its controversial ads featuring nearly naked starlets, is taking their “I’d rather be naked than wear fur” idea to a new level by launching their own XXX porn site. The X-rated site will show pornographic content and images from PETA's more risqué ads. Those images will be interspersed with pictures and videos showing animals being mistreated—and links to vegan and vegetarian "starter kits" and recipes. With the launch of their new website, PETA hopes to reach a whole new audience. "When people first visit the site, it will be very enticing and once they go just a little bit deeper, that's when they'll be confronted with images that we hope will make them stop and think and get them talking and hopefully encourage them to make a lifestyle change to a plant-based diet," said Lindsay Rajt, PETA's associate director of campaigns. Other animal rights activists are skeptical about the idea. "It's like promoting robberies as an alternative to assaults," said Brian Messenheimer, an Army veteran who does animal rescue work. This article raises the question: is pornography a valid way to promote animal rights?

'So, what do you want to be when you grow up?' It's a question we've all no doubt been asked (and likely have asked others) at some point in our younger years. Emilie Wapnick, however, argues that this seemingly innocuous question has some pretty strong implications about being only one thing. This is reinforced by normality -- and may cause anxiety when people think about being more than one thing outside of their designated/selected role. Wapnick discusses the concept of multipotentialities -- having separate, seemingly unconnected interests that can each be developed. She highlights the stories of professionals such as Tyler Tervooren, who can write about business, mountain climbing and dating on one platform, as they’re all linked through the overarching theme of risk taking. "An overarching theme is the force that drives you," Wapnick writes, "it’s the motivation or philosophy that runs through everything you do and it bridges the gaps between your interests."

A new study published in the American Journal of Sociology suggests that men with "gay resumes" are 40% less likely to get called back for a job interview. In the study, Harvard University researcher Andras Tilcsik sent two realistic but fictitious resumes to 1,700 white collar job openings. One version of the resume suggested that the applicant was gay. The other did not. Otherwise, they were all but identical. One resume mentioned relevant experience in a university gay society as a treasurer, while the other listed experience in the ‘Progressive and Socialist Alliance’. Tilcsik said that since employers are likely to associate both groups with left-leaning political views, this would separate any ‘gay penalty’ from the effects of political discrimination. The apparently heterosexual lefty was contacted 11.5% of the time; the gay treasurer was called back only 7.2% of the time — a 40% difference. The study also found that, across the board, the gay applicant was less likely to get a nibble for jobs requiring "assertive," "aggressive," or "decisive" behavior. Suggesting the discrimination "is partly rooted in specific stereotypes and cannot be completely reduced to a general antipathy against gay employees."

Denmark is not the first country to impose tariffs on food and drink considered unhealthy, but it is definitely taking the "fat tax" to a whole new level. In an effort to reduce obesity related illnesses, a new tax targets saturated fats – the fats found most commonly in animal products like meat and dairy. The tax was approved by nearly 90% of the Danish parliament. But few outside the government seem to think it's a good idea — or even a healthy one. The tax applies to all saturated fats equally, regardless of whether they are contained in a McDonald's burger or milk from grassfed cows. This provision is especially frustrating for the country’s dairy farmers whose products are considered “unhealthy” under the new law. Price increases are also a concern. "Organic is already more expensive than industrially produced food, and the tax will just make it more so,” says restaurant chef Christian Puglisi. Even medical professionals doubt the salutary effects of the law. "You can't predict the health effect of a food by looking at a single nutrient in it," says Dr. Arne Astrup, professor of human nutrition. “This fat tax was created wholly within the Tax Ministry …They didn't do it to cut down on cardiovascular disease, they did it to close a budget gap."

How close are we to controlling computers with our thoughts? The answer, according to this article by Pagan Kennedy, is much closer than you might imagine. Research originally intended to treat severe epilepsy differs from previous electronic/neurological fusions (such as cochlear implants for hearing or deep-brain stimulation for Parkinson's patients). Kennedy details how Gerwin Schalk, an Albany-based computer engineer is utilizing electrocorticographic (ECoG) implants to observe clusters of neurons in the brain. When a person thinks of a specific item -- say, a tomato -- the neurons behave in a particular manner. This is recorded by the ECoG implant, and recorded for future retrieval. The result? Test subjects can 'think' of a person to automatically dial on their smartphones, or control ship movements in the video game Galaga. Though immediate application will focus on rehabilitating patients with severe disabilities, Schalk envisions eventually we will be able to apply this technology to our everyday communication. If this happens, reading someone's mind will be as easy as reading their most recent status update.

IT departments at various businesses are seen less as innovators and more as service delivery to individuals. As the slow economy has stalled the traditional 'top-down' approach to tech implementation, Chief Information Officers have started rethinking ways of streamlining this process. Dion Hinchcliffe for ZDNet proposes five different ways IT departments can break the logjam. First, the ever-increasing popularity of personal smartphones and tablets lends itself well to work-based integration; secondly, IT departments will likely need to work closer with social media to embrace an overall 'social enterprise' beyond just the installation and maintenance of the networks on which it runs. Other areas he highlights include the integration of secure cloud-computing, drawing inspiration/strategies from the consumer (personal and commercial) markets, and being smart about utilizing the ever-increasing mountains of data in contemporary business. As Hinchcliffe notes, "the deeply transformational nature of most of the Big Five means IT must either start leading the business models and evolution of the organization, or become a commoditized utility while the business figures out the moves on their own."

Cosmology has advanced to such an extent that we now can say with confidence that the universe appeared 13.7 billion years ago and that it has been expanding at an accelerated rate ever since, fueled by energy and matter content. More remarkably, there are three main ingredients to the cosmic recipe: ordinary matter, the atoms you and stars are made off, makes up only 4 percent of the total. 23 percent comes in the form of dark matter, probably made of small particles that only interact with ordinary matter via gravity — we can "see" dark matter by the way it makes galaxies spin and how it bends light as it travels through space, but we still don't know what it is. Finally, the rest, 73 percent of the stuff in the universe, is attributed to dark energy, the cause of baffling cosmic accelerated expansion. The most recent Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to astronomers Adam Reiss, Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Schmidt, whose work observed distant supernovae moving an accelerated rate and and exhibiting the equivalent of the 'Doppler Effect', similar to the change of an ambulance's pitch as it drives by. Dark energy is the term attributed for this observed increase in the universe's rate of expansion.

Can you imagine studying so much that the only way to get you to stop is to make it illegal? In South Korea, it has actually come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a 10pm curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators. South Korea’s hagowan crackdown is part of a larger effort to tame the country's culture of educational extremism. Politicians are changing school testing and university admission policies to reduce stress for the student and reward other qualities such as creativity and resourcefulness. Still, progress is slow. Cramming is deeply embedded in South Korean culture, where top grades — and often nothing else — have long been prized as essential for professional success. In 2010, 74% of all students engaged in some kind of private after-school instruction. The typical academic schedule begins at 8 a.m. and ends sometime from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., depending on the ambition of the student. One high school student interviewed said, “All we do is study, except when we sleep.”

You may have heard of some of the outrageous "perks" of being a Google employee: swimming pools, funky offices, and company wide games. But is fun and games really the secret to Google's success? Laszlo Bock, Google's SVP of People Operations explains how it's passion, not perks that motivate and inspire the innovative thinkers behind Google. For a company to foster creative, committed, and innovative teams you need these three things: mission, transparency, and voice. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This mission statement excites “Googlers” by letting them know their work will be interesting and useful, making it much more fulfilling. Google also encourages a strong sense of community with weekly all-hands meetings called TGIFs and regular meetings with employees and the company chairman. Google believes that it is important for people to know what is happening in their environment and feel they have the ability to help shape it. “We spend more time working than we do on almost any other activity in our lives,” says Bock. “People want all that time to mean something.”

Researchers from the University of Dallas in Texas have used the natural occurring properties of a mirage to make an invisibility cloak. The mirage effect, frequently observed in deserts or on long roads in the summer, is an optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky. Nanotechnicians at the University of Dallas have developed a device which makes use of sheets of carbon nanotubes (CNT) – one-molecule-thick sheets of carbon wrapped up into cylindrical tubes. Through electrical stimulation, the transparent sheet of highly aligned CNTs can be easily heated to high temperatures. They then have the ability to transfer that heat to its surrounding areas, causing a steep temperature gradient. Just like a mirage, this steep temperature gradient causes the light rays to bend away from the object concealed behind the device, making it appear invisible. Harry Potter enthusiasts take note, however -- the device is in its early stages of development and is best demonstrated underwater and in controlled environments.

Professional athletes work with coaches throughout their career -- why have we been slow to adopt this strategy across other professions? Atul Guwande is a surgeon who asked this question after noticing that he'd hit a plateau after years of continually improving his practice. The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction. They graduate. They're done. In contrast, coaches provide continual and immediate feedback; they also are employed by the person being coached, so there's less of an arbitrary sense to their authority. Guwande examined the approach of coaching as utilized by professional musicians, educators, and by hiring a coach himself (his old medical school mentor). The positive results are often noticeable and immediate as coaches utilize videotaped performance and active listening to assist the individual. This does not come without challenges, however -- as Guwande noted, individuals are defensive by nature when confronted by critical feedback. The question then shifts to how individuals can put aside pride to employee coaching across many disciplines.

X-men may not have it totally wrong. Even though there is no hope of human beings developing wings any time soon, recent studies show that people are still evolving. For years, scientists believed that human beings hadn't significantly changed their DNA since the ancient Greeks. However, new evidence shows that Tibetans in the Himalayas have adapted to comfortably to taking in less oxygen over several generations. More recently, researchers in Canada have concluded that on a tiny island northeast of Quebec, women are now giving birth at much younger ages in comparison to 150 years ago. Scientists are convinced that this is a result of genetic changes that have thrived due to natural selection. One theory is that women on the island evolved to give birth sooner due to medicine and vaccines that allow more infants to survive. These studies show that humans have always been able to adapt to a changing environment.

The term 'community' is used regularly in everything from marketing to anthropology, but is it correct? Meg Pickard, Head of Digital Engagement at the UK’s Guardian News and Media, suggests that without regular interaction and relationships, what we refer to as 'community' may actually be an audience or demographic. She argues that companies often end up broadcasting to a group without directly interacting. Pickard states that her motto is "...embrace, don’t replace. Don’t bend a service such as Twitter to your will, or treat it as an extension of your own site. Be aware of the norms and etiquette of the communities you are engaging with. Listen more than you talk, be prepared to learn from your community members – and let that change what you do in future. That’s a truly social media approach."

A new study reveals that people love music for much the same reason they’re attracted to sex, drugs, gambling, and delicious food - and it can be just as addicting. When you listen to music that moves you, your brain releases dopamine, a chemical involved in both motivation and addiction. Even just anticipating the sounds of your favorite musical composition can get the feel-good chemical flowing. "You're following these tunes and anticipating what's going to come next and whether it's going to confirm or surprise you. All of these little cognitive nuances are what's giving you this amazing pleasure," said neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor. "The reinforcement or reward happens almost entirely because of dopamine…It is amazing that we can release dopamine in anticipation of something abstract, complex and not concrete." The findings offer a biological explanation for why music has played such a major role in cultures around the world since the beginning of human history. Through music, the study also offers new insights into how the human pleasure system works. “Music is going to be a useful tool in trying to explain all sorts of aspects of pleasure, addiction and maladaptive behaviors.”

The United Kingdom has introduced a law which would require data tracking networks like Facebook to supply users with all data (on a CD) that has been captured about that user within 40 days of a request for that information being made. These types of "free" sites earn part of their revenue by serving users highly relevant ads which are filtered based on demographic data and user behavior. While the debate rages on over whether this system is the best one, and many agree this freemium model for so many of the web's biggest platforms isn't going away,, users are getting more privy to the fact that that their web behaviors are being tracked and they're demanding more insight and control into what exactly that monitoring looks like.

The brain needs constant stimulation, which is why we daydream when placed in boring situations. Unfortunately, daydreaming is rather cognitively demanding. Doodling provides just enough mental stimulation without taxing our mental resources.

Colleges and universities have been tweeting for a while now, but until now it's mainly been driven by recruitment and marketing departments or specialized social-media courses. A few enterprising instructors from Boston College have started launching class-specific hashtags to continue the conversations that begin in the classroom as part of an ongoing, seamless module, however. “There’s a huge upside to teaching students on Twitter,” said John Gallaugher, a professor of Information Systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Gallaugher mandates his students tweet at least once a week. He, himself, tweets from @gallaugher, which helps him create a relationship with his students outside of the classroom. Their class hashtag is #cs021, and through that, students have been able to contribute news, ask questions and share their own work.Many of the guest speakers who visit Gallaugher classes have a large presence on Twitter -- because of that, students can not only get more background information on the speakers, but they can also communicate with the speakers after their lecture is over, allowing for a stronger, more long-term interaction.

It’s easy being green for Elysia chlorotica, a leaf-shaped sea slug that has become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant. The green sea slug already has a reputation for its ability to kidnap photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from the algae it eats. Now, scientist Sidney K. Pierce says the slug has acquired enough stolen genes to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body. The slugs are able to manufacture their own chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight. Scientists have shown that once a young slug has slurped its first chloroplast meal from algae, the slug does not have to eat again for the rest of its life. All it has to due is catch the sun’s rays. Recent studies suggest this ability can be transferred genetically as well. Even unhatched sea slugs, which have never encountered algae, carry “algal” photosynthetic genes. While there is still more research to be done, invertebrate zoologist John Zardus sums up the findings best when he says, “This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — and that’s just cool.”

The physical state of our bodies can either serve or subvert the quest to create genius. Choosing art over health rather than art fueled by health kills you faster; it also makes the process more miserable and leads to poorer, less innovative, and shallower creative output. As Dr. John Ratey notes in Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, exercise isn't just about physical health and appearance; it also has a profound effect on your brain chemistry, physiology, and neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to literally rewire itself). Studies now prove that aerobic exercise both increases the size of the prefrontal cortex and facilitates interaction between it and the amygdala. This is vitally important to creators, as these are the brain function that moderates fear and anxiety signals. For artists, entrepreneurs, and any other driven creators, exercise can then be a powerful tool in the quest to help transform the persistent uncertainty and anxiety that accompanies the quest to create from a source of suffering into something less toxic, then potentially even into fuel.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that however improbable such an occurrence might be, it is virtually certain that one monkey (or a group of monkeys) will eventually produce a Shakespearean work if it (they) type random characters on a keyboard for a very, very, very long time. Computer Programmer Jesse Anderson took a bit of a different approach when testing cloud computing software. These short programs produced random 9-character sequences uploaded to a central cloud repository, and were highlighted when a string produced text found in the Bard's work. The result? The longest randomly-generated sequence of Shakespearian characters, to date, is the one found by The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator website. After a mere 2,737,850 million billion billion billion (simulated) monkey-years the pinnacle of its literary output was 24 characters from Henry IV, Part 2: RUMOUR. Open your ears; (the 24th character is a space). No word on yet how many virtual bananas will be required to make it all the way through King Lear.

For the past three decades the US government has been providing select patients with some of the highest-grade marijuana around. In 1976, a federal judge ruled that the FDA must provide Robert Randall marijuana after ruling no other drug could effectively combat his glaucoma. In 1978, long before a single state passed a medical marijuana law, the government created its program as part of a compromise over Randall’s care. A series of petitions from others wanting to join the relatively unknown program immediately followed. The George H.W. Bush administration, getting tough on drugs, stopped accepting new patients to the program in 1992. The program once provided 14 people government pot. Now, there are four left. Data shows the government distributed more than 100 pounds of high-grade marijuana to patients from 2005 – 2011. The four patients remaining in the program estimate they have received a total of 584 pounds over the years. On the street, that would be worth over $500,000. "The people in the program range in ages and doses of marijuana provided to them, but all consider themselves an endangered species that, once extinct, can be brushed aside by a federal government that pretends they don't exist.”

Georgia company Remantix says it has overcome a major roadblock in turning agricultural waste into vehicle fuel and other useful chemicals by experimenting with a technology that treats the waste with compressed water heated to very high temperatures. The process developed by Renmatix involves putting hardwoods into a small pressurized chamber. A class of sugars is then broken off and harvested with superheated water to be converted into feedstock chemicals and motorfuels.If it works, the technology could reduce the nation’s reliance on oil imports for gasoline in favor of a cleaner-burning and less expensive source of energy. A company with a workable technology would have a guaranteed market, given that Congress has set quotas for the consumption of cellulosic fuel but so far, hardly any is being produced.

For ten years now, any schools that did not pass standard acheivement tests were considered "failing" by the No Child Left Behind act. The White House now sees No Child Left Behind as a "broken law" in need of a major facelift. The proposed reforms would do away with using only one test-score to determine if a school is succesful. Power and funding would be allocated to the states to come up with ways to bring failing schools and students up to par. Basically, the White House is trying to ease the pressure on schools who spend all of their resources trying to teach the test. As one teacher in the article put it, No Child Left Behind didn't work so it is time to move on to the next phase.

By royal decree of King Abdullah, women in Saudi Arabia have finally begun to gain equal status as men in the realm of political participation. For the first time in history, women will be allowed to participate in the King's political advisory council, known as the Shura. Women will be able to nominate and vote for themselves in the council, beginning in the next voting session in 18 months time. While some critics are condemning King Abdullah for not allowing women to vote in the current municipal elections, others admit that the important thing is that women are finally being given a political voice. Most are praising King Abdullah for taking a good step in the right direction. In a recent speech the King stated that women had given "opinions and advice since the era of the Prophet Muhammad." The time has come for Saudi women to take their advice to the political platform.

A poll for NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health finds retirement is proving more difficult than expected for many Americans, in large part because they haven't saved enough. So how much do you need? The biggest threat comes from outliving your savings -- an ever-increasing reality as the future on insurance coverage and government subsidies remain murky at best. "I use something that I call the rule of 33," says Dallas Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute. "You need 33 times what you want to spend in your first year of retirement." Other strategies include not prematurely cashing out retirement plans (regardless of how little may be in them), and delaying Social Security benefits for as long as possible.

Would you drink clean, pure, recycled…sewage water? For water scientists and engineers, this kind of water reuse is a no brainer. The benefits are clear: water can be cleaned and redistributed locally, it could help solve chronic water shortages, and scientific evidence suggests the water is often safer and cleaner than pure “spring” water. The general public however, isn’t sold on the idea. To most Americans, despite the scientific, economic, and ecological benefits, reusing former sewage water is just plain gross. Psychologist Carol Nemeroff says it’s a psychological contagion. “It is quite difficult to get the cognitive sewage out of the water, even after the real sewage is gone.” You need to break the association in your mind with the water you’re drinking and the raw sewage going in. Studies show one of the best ways to do that is to have people cognitively co-mingle the water with nature. Apparently, if you have people imagine the water going into an underground aquifer, for example, and then sitting there for 10 years, the water becomes much more palatable. It’s an interesting twist that in the USA we spend millions and millions of dollars for water that is cognitively, if not actually, free of contamination.

Jack Horner wants to make a dinosaur. Not from scratch—he says he’s going to do it by reverse-evolving a chicken. “It’s crazy,” Horner says. “But it’s also possible.” Over the past several decades, paleontologists have found ample evidence to prove that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, everything from the way they lay eggs in nests to the details of their bone anatomy. In fact, there are so many similarities that most scientists now agree that birds actually are dinosaurs, most closely related to two-legged meat-eating theropods like Tyrannosaurus rex and velociraptor. All Horner needed to make it happen, he told his TED audience, was a few breakthroughs in developmental biology and genetics and all the chicken eggs he could get his hands on. “What we’re trying to do is take our chicken, modify it, and make,” he said, “a chickenosaurus.”

iPads and similar tablet devices have recently been touted for their innovative possibilities within classroom application. Yet their use has had unexpected and unintended things to say about class division and perception. Professor Doug Ward, at the University of Kansas, made a key observation of students distributed iPads as part of his graduate new media class: "...something odd happened: The students, all in their mid- to late 20s, became self-conscious about carrying iPads. They refused to use them in public. They felt elitist. In their eyes, the iPad represented snobbery, a technological tool that no one needed and whose utility was far from apparent."

The Extreme Couponers TV show might be making it harder for regular couponers to coupon because stores are tighting up on their policies. Leamy suggests for shoppers to consider using a strategy with no coupons. She recommends Price Matching. To price match, you have to find stores that do it. Many stores do not advertise that they do, so you might want to call beforehand to check their policies. She tells her readers to scan the store circulars and find the best deals. Stores will match or beat their competitors' prices if you can prove to them that a competitor is selling a particular item for a lower price. The mother of all price matchers is Walmart, with Target right behind. She ends the article by telling us how she was able to save $89 dollars on a bill that should have been $200.

You may think you're doing a good job of shielding your kids from your anxiety and stress. But research shows that your children are probably picking up on it anyway—and it's affecting them, physically and emotionally, more than you could imagine. "Parental stress can weaken the development of a child's brain or immune system, increasing the risk of allergies, obesity, or mental disorders," says David Code, author of Kids Pick Up on Everything. Research shows that kids can "catch" their parents' stress, overloading their systems until they act out or exhibit mental and physical illness. "Stress is highly contagious between parent and child, even if the parent is unaware of his or her own anxiety." But how do kids know that something's wrong, even when we keep telling them—and ourselves—that everything is fine? Neuroscientists call it attunement, and it may have to do with our ability to feel empathy. "Attunement is basically a fancy word for what we used to call the mother-infant bond, where parent and child are so attuned to each other that the child can pick up on a parent's stress and absorb it almost by osmosis," explains Code. “We simply cannot fake being calm to our kids."

Looking to document every million-dollar stroke of inspiration to your phone's voice recorder AND have the transcript emailed to you for when you roll into your office? Or receive a text every time your psycho ex checks into the pet groomer's via Foursquare so you're not left making small talk over tick shampoo? Enter Ifttt (pseudo-acronym for 'If this, then that'), a third-party utility that links your favorite apps and mobile channels. As this article details, Ifttt provides users the ability to generate macros to automate various tasks across utilities so they learn to play nice together.

If you've ever been asked to type out a distorted word before gaining access to your email – a security test known as a reCAPTCHA - you've proven that you're a better reader than your computer. You’ve also helped digitize old, printed texts a computer couldn’t read. The CAPTCHA security test, originally invented to keep out spam and bots, now also helps digitize old books and manuscripts. First, old texts are scanned using Optical Character Recognition software and turned into digital files. However, due to the poor quality of the original documents, the OCR is unable to read about 1 in 10 words. The only reliable way to decode them is for a human to examine them individually. These words are put into reCAPTCHAs and distributed to websites around the world. When visitors decipher the reCAPTCHAs to gain access to the web site, the answers - the results of humans examining the images - are sent back to CMU. Every time an Internet user deciphers a reCAPTCHA, a new word is digitized. With your help, the reCAPTCHA system is deciphering over one million words every day.

Would you believe that the best marriages are the ones that bring satisfaction to the individual? After all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first? Not anymore. In modern relationships, people are looking for a partner who can make their lives more interesting. Psychology professor Arthur Aron has studied how individuals use a relationship to accumulate knowledge and experiences, through a process called “self-expansion.” Research shows that the more self-expansion people gain from their partner, the more committed and satisfied they are in the relationship. While this notion may sound inherently self-serving, it can lead to stronger, more sustainable relationships. “If you’re seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position. And being able to help your partner’s self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself.” This concept explains why people are delighted when dates treat them to new experiences like a weekend away, introduce them to new friends, or casually talk about a new restaurant or movie. Additional research suggests that over time spouses eventually adopt the traits of the other and become slower to distinguish differences between them.

While many people may assume the answer to that provocative and unsettling question is zero, the creators of a new Web site, www.slaveryfootprint.org, want to demonstrate how forced labor, especially overseas, is tantamount to slavery. Today, millions of slaves make your clothes, food and electronics, but they are hidden halfway around the world. The website is meant to act as a wakeup call for consumers unknowingly complicit in slavery. Slavery Footprint asks you questions about your lifestyle and consumer habits. The app contains information on over 400 products broken down into their raw materials. Then, based on the vetted data from numerous reports, it assigns each product with a score — in essence, the number of slave workers involved in obtaining the materials. Some of the results are surprising. Ibuprofen pills carry a score of 1.2. Sadly, even a simple martini is a 0.9. Version 1.0 of slavery footprint is brand agnostic, but future updates will incorporate brand-specific scores. For now, it’s more focused on consumers than companies. “That’s why we’d like to help you understand your influence on slavery. Not so you can feel bad. Not so you’ll stop buying stuff…so you will ask the brands you like to find out where the materials are coming from.”

In 2012 a Washington based company named Pegasus will start building a 20 square mile city in the New Mexico dessert that is populated entirely by robots. The "center" will essentially be a laboratory for government agencies, universities, and more that seek to test infrastructure technology pertinent to urban areas. In reality, the town won't be completely free of humans as a small group of scientists and engineers will be offsite helping monitor and ensure every aspect of the town is operating correctly. The overall goal for this city slated to be done in 2014 is to have a tool that provides scientists with accurate data around human behavior in urban environments while also being able to manipulate and test it safely. Many are still skeptical that this city will be able to replicate a human city due to the unpredictability of people, however thanks to learnings from past attempts at such an entity, and advances in robotics, the hope is that this robot-populated town will provide our actual cities with an incredible resource of learnings to make our true urban environments safer, more efficient, and peaceful.

The "like" on Facebook just took a backseat to real utility. As this article says, "The change will require new thinking from marketers who had merely tried to accumulate as many fans and “Likes” as possible." If you're a marketer and you've been dabbling on Facebook, then yesterday's keynote speech from Mark Zuckerberg at the F8 conference should have you reviewing your strategy for engagement. Good marketing and advertising has always been about storytelling and since Facebook has made a deliberate move to becoming your digital autobiography, a brand is going to have to work harder to be part of your story, wrapping itself around real experiences that people will naturally want to broadcast.

With airlines constantly in the news for adding more costs that will ultimately make passengers shake their fists at them, Travel and Leisure magazine chose to remind passengers of the positive side of flying. The magazine lists its top ten airlines based on passenger reviews of cabin comfort, in-flight service, customer service, food, and overall value. Asian and Middle Eastern airlines ranked highest on the list, but one American carrier managed to make the top ten. Virgin America ranked at number five on the list based on its combination of flier-friendly fares and technological perks. Flying in the near future? Read the whole article to find the best airline for your needs.

Illinois is eating its problems for dinner. Well, sort of. Officials hope serving Asian carp on a plate is the creative solution to two big problems: controlling the invasive fish and helping record numbers of hungry citizens. The idea is modeled after an existing state program that lets hunters donate deer meat to be ground and distributed to food pantries. “Why remove them and put them into a landfill when you can take them and use them for good?” asks Illinois DNR spokesman Chris Mcloud. “We can prove this is going to be a highly nutritious, cheap meal.” The bighead carp can grow to be over 4 feet long and weigh 100 pounds and silver carp are famous for leaping from the water when startled, slamming into boaters with bone shattering force. If Asian carp ever reached the Great Lakes, they could decimate food supplies and starve out native species, disrupting a $7 billion fishing industry. So, the first step to putting carp on the plates of the American masses is countering the yuck factor. "You hear about it so much on the news as a nuisance, a problem. People don't associate nuisances with a good dinner."

“There is no such thing as a low interest category, just low interest brands.” So says Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, founders of Method, a successful trendsetter in the cleaning supply industry. In Fast Company’s Expert Blog, Ryan and Lowry discuss how anyone can generate excitement over beer or a new cell phone, but attracting attention in a traditionally low-interest category (like soap) takes a bit more thought. It takes something they like to call a “belief brand.” Belief brands go beyond the emotional engagement created by sharing similar beliefs and values with their advocates; they have a philosophy, an attitude, and a story to tell. Their personalities aren't created in some office on Madison Avenue; they're woven into the very fabric of the organization. This article examines how brands like Method, Joe Boxer, Dyson, and Swingline became high-interest brands in low-interest categories.

From placing fresh flowers at a supermarket entrance, to scrawling prices on a chalkboard, brand futurist Martin Lindstrom looks at how retail chains like Whole Foods use a psychological method called “priming” to influence our perceptions of a products’s freshness - and ultimately, our buying behaviour.

From bathrobes and treadmills to grilled New York sirloin and Rolls Royce chauffeuring, pets can now indulge in the luxuries of their human counterparts at 5 star hotels. Despite a down economy, pet owners are still willing to shell out the extra cash to pamper their beloved pets with the most extravagant experiences. Pet expert for The Today Show, Andrea Arden, explains "For many, indulging their pet is more rewarding than indulging themselves." Read about the pet services offered at nearly a dozen high-end hotels around the country.

According to a study of 1,000 adults over the age of 60, researchers found that participants were twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's Disease within 15 years. Insulin resistance and high blood sugar, along with high cholesterol, can contribute to dementia in several ways.

Do you ever wake up suddenly to a falling sensation and a strong muscle twitch shortly after falling asleep? You’re not alone. This strange falling sensation is known as a “hypnic jerk.” A 2006 study by the Mayo Clinic revealed close to 70% of all people experience this phenomenon just after nodding off. Experts believe that your muscles begin to slack and go into a restful state as you are falling asleep. Your brain senses these relaxation signals and misinterprets them, thinking you are falling down. The brain then sends signals to the muscles in your body attempting to jerk you back upright. This brain misinterpretation may also be responsible for the “falling” dreams that sometimes accompany the sensation. These “dreams” are unlike normal dreams because they are not produced from R.E.M sleep, but are instead a response to the body’s sensations and are actually more similar to a daydream or hallucination. While hypnic jerks are considered a natural part of the sleeping process, studies show the phenomenon occurs more often in people who suffer from sleep anxiety, fatigue, or discomfort. It is especially common with people who are trying to fight falling asleep or who haven’t slept in over 24 hours.

Seven people in Italy have been charged with manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake that killed more than 300 people in 2009. The Italian city of L’Aquila is seeking 50 million euros ($68 million) in compensation. Six days before a 6.3 magnatude earthquake struck the city, seven members of a “major risks” panel reassured the community that recent and ongoing seismic activity in the area posed no immediate threat to the population. The trial has now attracted national attention and many in the science world have challenged the accusations as unwarranted. The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) has defended the accused calling the charges against the scientists as “both unfair and naïve”. The next trial session is scheduled for October 1, 2011.

Ever listened to a song so moving it gives you goose bumps? In this article, musicologist David Huron explains the science behind the shivers that run down our spine when we listen to our favorite music. Goose bumps originally evolved to regulate body temperature by standing on end when you feel cold. This physical reaction is also evoked by fear and used in displays of aggression. Why then, is this sensation involved in such a pleasurable feeling when we listen to music? Huron refers to this sensation as “music-evoked frisson.” Huron theorizes that frisson, and other pleasurable feelings like it, occur in an area of the brain that responds to “fear-inducing stimuli.” Research shows that things inducing frisson in music listeners are often fear related, correlating with a crescendo in the music, abrupt rhythm and tempo changes or an increase in the number of sound sources. These “low probability musical events” surprise and startle us. Huron theorizes when a listener experiences a frisson, they first experience fear towards the stimulus, then come to enjoy it by consciously recognizing that the stimulus is actually harmless. Talk about music that moves you!

The average staying period for new teachers in the field today is 4.5 years. A common complaint, “issues with parents,” drives them out of that particular work-force. Parents these days are more prone to make excuses for their children rather than admit they have done something wrong. Teachers are walking on eggshells since the slightest mistake can cost them their job. When one student wrote on himself in permanent marker, his teacher lost her job for using a washcloth too vigorously on his face to clean him off. The child went home with a red mark on his face, causing the parents to call the media, and resulting in that teacher being fired. This CNN editorial is a plea for parents to give teachers some leeway to do their jobs properly so that their children can receive the best education possible.

Following in the footsteps of companies like Apple, more and more businesses are using digital e-receipts to connect with their customers. Retailers aim to make the process “more convenient and streamlined for customers and also a little bit green.” For consumers, this means no more wallets stuffed with crumpled bits of paper and simpler returns. For companies, it’s an opportunity to connect with their customers, participate on the social networks, review their products, and read their news. Sometimes users have to opt-in for such marketing programs. But with e-receipts, that can be as easy, or accidental, as clicking on a graphic in the receipt. At some stores, after shoppers give sales clerks their e-mail addresses they are automatically enrolled. It is up to them to opt out later. This NPR article discusses the pros and cons of digital e-receipts for both retailers and consumers.

Netflix CEO Reed Hasting made an apology to his customers for the recent price hike and announced that Netflix would no longer be handling the DVD-by-mail business. This will now be handled by a new company, Qwister, which will be run by Andy Rendich, a company veteran. Qwister will also include the video game rentals. The two companies will be run as two separate businesses. Customers quickly responded to the company blog post on which the news was announced. Of the 4,000 comments, most were negative. Titlow quotes several of the negative sentiments that several customers expressed and ends the article with a positive point made by Mark Suster, a venture capitalist.

Using politics, the financial markets, and recent rioting across the world, author Bill Davidow is arguing that the internet is becoming a tool of reinforcement for extremism. He stresses that "positive feedback" on the internet causes problems to escalate because they appear to be worse than they actually are. And with the concept of "self-fulfilling prophecy" perceived problems become real problems.

In a debate hosted by sports icon Bob Costas, six sports experts participated. Three who would allow use of steroids , and three who would oppose. On the side of accepting steroid use were Senior Editor of Reason magazine, Randy Balko. U of Wisconsin Professor Norman Fost, and U of Oxford Professor Julian Savelescu. Debating against the use of steroids: George Michael, sportscaster and creator of 'The Sports Machine' , accomplished baseball pro Dale Murphy, and Richard Pound, chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency. The debate, held Jan 15 2008, was held at The Asia Society and Museum in New York City. Balko suggests the debate centers on paternalism and control. Fost asks the audience to name a single player who had a stroke or heart attack while on the field, and Savelescu compared steroid use in sport to alchohol use at parties.Michael allegorizes a trip to the cemetery to inform stricken players that more of their friends will be there soon. Murphy would like to see the same punishment for steroid use as there is for gambling.Pound decries the objective of steroid users to gain an unfair advantage. Before the debate, 18% of the audience supported the use of steroids, and after the debate the percentage grew to 37.

A new study reveals testosterone levels in men decreases dramatically after fatherhood. The study measured testosterone levels in 600 men when they were 21 and single and again nearly five years later. Although testosterone naturally decreases with age, men who became fathers showed a decrease double to that of their childless peers. Men who spent over three hours a day feeding, bathing, dressing or playing with their children had the lowest testosterone levels. The study suggests men’s bodies evolved hormonal systems to help them adapt to family life after children were born. Interestingly enough, it’s actually the men with higher levels of testosterone to start with who were more likely to become fathers. Scientists say this suggests a biological trade-off where high testosterone helps to secure a mate, but reduced testosterone is better for sustaining family life. Lee Gettler, an anthropologist at Northwestern University and co-author of the study, hopes these findings will show “women aren’t the only ones biologically adapted to be parents.”

The fact that Twain loved his days as a Steamboat Pilot cannot be denied. Clemens tells a story of how he stowed away on a steamboat leaving Hannibal as a small boy. After leaving home at the age of 17 and finding printing jobs from Iowa to points East, Clemens returned to the Midwest to take passage on a steamboat to embark on a voyage which was to ultimately deliver him to the Amazon. While aboard the 'Paul Jones', Clemens pays the Pilot , Horace Bixby, $100 in advance for the privilege to be a Cub Pilot before the trip to New Orleans ends. Clemens tells of the undertaking by saying if he knew beforehand what was in store, he never would have wanted the job. He makes up for his lack of knowledge with a superior memory. Persevering as a Cub Pilot, even through the loss of his brother Henry in a steamboat explosion on a boat Clemens had just disembarked. Clemens becomes a Pilot in 1859. He enjoys a salary of $150-$250 per month, and also has a reputation as a safe helmsman,Clemens' new career ends abruptly in April 1961, due to the Civil War. Clemens: 'I loved the profession far better than any I followed since'. Third person accounts as recently as 1940 tell of Clemens as a first rate pilot, who could have been one of the greatest all time.

Danah Boyd uses a hypothetical example of a young arab boy searching for his name on Google and instant search prompting the next word to be "terrorist." The example goes on to describe further potential elements such as friends/family seeing the same results and even ads being served to the boy based on an algorithm which isn't accurately depicting that specific person. While the example is completely made-up, it is used by Boyd to illustrate that algorithms on the web are meant to create more relevant experiences, but in many cases can harm us and to a lesser degree provide completely non-useful information. To some degree Boyd is arguing that these algorithms are creating slanderous data points, and while not overly making claims, these utilities are creating false assumptions in others because of how many users trust them as reliable sources. No solution is offered in this piece, but important questions of risk and accountability are raised.

Liebling explores the current state of "Transmedia" and the concept's underwhelming description of how consumers are interacting with media today. Transmedia, while focusing on telling a story across multiple channels online and/or offline is still a generally one-way broadcast style form communication. It is essentially a creative form of syndicating a storm through various channels in which one channel can often operate without the others. Intermedia, a term that Liebling has re-appropriated, argues that consumers and media are now working closely together so that the story isn't told just by the storyteller, but by all of us. Strong examples of this are when news programs like CNN take questions live from Twitter, or when American Idol selections are made via fans voting through their mobile devices. These types of scenarios are the modern reality of media, and Liebling believes that marketing agencies will strong benefit from this with clients demanding content producers and media experts guiding brands through this complex, but lucrative model for engaging customers.

Like a lot of web-designers and developers, I’m quite excited about responsive web-design. It seems to be the answer to a lot of the problems we’ve been facing in terms of transforming our websites that were built for the desktop to work and look great on mobile devices and tablets. Say goodbye to fixed-width layouts.

This Wired article by Chris Colin discusses the proliferation of reviews and review features on the Internet, and raises questions about whether all of this critique is actually helpful or useful to anyone. Just as there are benefits to knowing about things and places before we visit or engage with them, there are also benefits to knowing nothing at all about them; for example, without excessive guidance or input from others we can formulate our own opinions. Today we confronted with seemingly endless opportunities to rate everything from meals to packaging to phone calls; having so many people rating and reviewing such things and then sharing their opinions in public (on websites like Yelp, for example) "will eventually serve to curtail serendipity, adventure, and idiotic floundering," Colin says. "But more immediate is the simple problem of contamination." If we've already received 100 opinions about a place, our own opinion might become based on those opinions. "Too much charting becomes an unnecessary handrail," he concludes.

This Wall Street Journal article by Nassir Ghaemi, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University, explores the possibility that people who suffer from depression might make the best leaders when the going gets tough. "When times are good and the ship of state only needs to sail straight, mentally healthy people function well as political leaders," he writes. "But in times of crisis and tumult, those who are mentally abnormal, even ill, become the greatest leaders. We might call this the Inverse Law of Sanity." Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi as just a few historically significant leaders who suffered from depression and even suicidal ideation. Their vision and strength, Ghaemi suggests, might have been abetted by depression's alleged tendency to foster empathy, realism, and perceptiveness. Contrary to stereotypes, depressives aren't always pessimistic and hopeless, Ghaemi reiterates; they often use their unique insights to formulate new ideas and identify problems in order to make situations better for all parties involved. "They are realistic enough to see painful truths, and when calamity occurs, they can lift up the rest of us," he writes.

Calls for restrictions on internet anonymity across the globe are growing, although several cases have taken place showing that there's a strong reason for the opposite reality to be popular. Identity theft and protection from unjust corporate and government entities are the most commonly used examples for proponents of anonymity. On the opposite end are those who want to stop terrorists from hiding their online conversations and consumer protection agencies who want to ensure false endorsements don't get out of control. There are also smaller benefits of an identified internet like reduced cases of cyber bulling, or even trivial items like spelling and grammar improvements. The reality right now and likely in the near future is that nothing will change. Enforcement is very difficult, and despite many evil-doers efforts to stay private, the government still has countless tools at their disposal to root out real identities.

Jasper Rushing, an inmate at the Buckley Unit at the Arizona State Prison-Lewis Complex in Buckeye, Arizona, "pummeled, slashed, and mutilated" Shannon Palmer, his seriously mentally ill cellmate, "to death" on September 10, 2010. Phoenix New Times reporter Paul Rubin explores why the Arizona Department of Corrections housed Rushing and Palmer together in the first place, considering that Rushing was a convicted murderer and Palmer was a nonviolent paranoid schizophrenic in prison for damaging a utility pole. "Palmer's fragile mental state was such that he had spent time earlier in 2010 in a Phoenix prison ward reserved for only the most seriously mentally ill inmates," Rubin writes. Despite screening procedures that are meant to match cellmates for compatibility, Palmer and Rushing were placed in a cramped isolation unit together due to overcrowding. Palmer had been incarcerated several times before his final stint, and medical professionals had recommended that he be civilly committed--but he always ended up behind bars. A witness says Palmer warned guards he was in danger before his murder; officials now say they can't find the note. Palmer's mother has filed a wrongful death suit against the department of corrections and several prison officials.

This Village Voice cover story by Graham Rayman examines the many types of people and institutions--including politicians,private individuals, real estate developers, and nonprofit organizations--who have benefited financially from the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in some way. Some examples: The NYC Port Authority, which owns the WTC site, will benefit from an increase on public transit fees to make up for cost overruns associated with reconstruction; Goldman Sachs received $1 billion from former governor George Pataki for its new building in Lower Manhattan; former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who frequently invokes 9/11 in public, has earned millions as a speaker; and 9/11 nonprofit executives' salaries are sometimes quite high. Nonprofits also divert 9/11 funds to other purposes, and people sell memorabilia on Ebay--in short, many have made some (or a lot of) money on this national tragedy. The NY Attorney General's Office is investigating some of the questionable charities set up after the attacks.

IDEO: Openness and interdisciplinary sharing help ensure that employees are constantly exposed to new ideas and opportunities to remix and reinvent. PIXAR: Purposeful collisions (meetings) some spontaneous, some designed to partner seemingly unrelated experts to discover new intersections. GOOGLE: Encouraging employees to create their own spaces to nurture whatever environment helps them be more productive and creative as well as empower them to contribute to their local community despite being part of a global organization.

For this June 2010 article, New Yorker writer Raffi Khatchadourian traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland to spend time with Julian Assange and other members of WikiLeaks--the outfit that collects confidential government and institutional information and publishes it online. At the time Khatchadourian was doing his reporting and research, WikiLeaks was preparing to release a lengthy video showing American soldiers killing "at least 18 people"; the writer uses this project to provides glimpses into how group members worked together, strategized, and divided labor. In addition to describing the process by which Project B evolved into a released WikiLeak, the article also provides biographical information on the idiosyncratic Assange and focuses on his motivations for what he does. "I want to set up a new standard: 'scientific journalism,'" he tells Khatchadourian. "If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well."

Rebecca Mead profiles Timothy Ferriss, author of "The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman,” "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich," and the upcoming "The 4-Hour Chef." Mead portrays Ferriss as "Silicon Valley's Self-Help Guru"--the latest in a long line of wealth- and success-focused writers that includes Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, and Stephen Covey. His general message is to "hack yourself"--i.e., work with what you've got, and be your own "laboratory," coach, and guide--and to liberate one's self from the workplace as much as possible, even though his friends say he works far more than four hours a week. The article provides a chronology of Ferriss's life (childhood in the Hamptons, college at Princeton, twentysomething Silicon Valley denizen, thirtysomething "guru") and characterizes his current mindset as being based upon this quote from Bobby Flay, a chef: "Take the risks and you’ll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple." But is it really that simple?

In this article for the Nieman Journalism Lab, writer Maria Popova makes the case for "information curators": People who help the rest of us deal with the avalanche of content available on the Internet by framing, highlighting, and interpreting all that information. "Historically speaking, Popova writes, the two primary obstacles to information discovery have been "barriers of awareness" (we don't know about the information's existence) and barriers of accessibility (we know the information exists, but we can't reach it). Digitization, she continues, has made information more accessible to more people but has also resulted in information overload "and added a third barrier—a barrier of motivation." While computers and the Internet have put more information at our disposal, we "fail to spend time with it," she asserts. Content curators and digital archivists can't resolve all the problems presented by information overabundance, she says, but they can help save valuable info from obscurity.

The UK's "Technology Strategy Board" has put together a 59 page report on the future of the internet. Among the concepts covered are: The internet is shifting from primarily a communication device to one that provides services. Data will continue to come from many different sources, and filtering will be extremely important. Applications will become more aware of context and provide us (humans) with more support in making decisions. Lowering costs of technology, a reliable cloud-based infrastructure, secure mobile payments, among other things will shape how this future unfolds. More businesses will be birthed from the provision of integrated digital services. There will be an exponential growth of web-connected objects between 2010 and 2020 by about 11 fold. Data will overlap between public, personal, and real-time sensory data.

In Britain, school curriculums are being augmented to included more focus on the use of modern technology. The problem that the author points out is this education is appearing to be more about training. Instead of teaching children to manipulate and create software, lessons are being produced that emphasize the understanding of common tools like Microsoft Excel. The intentions of putting more focus on technology are in the right place, but the author believes they are anachronistic due to politicians having a false sense of understanding of what technology really is today. The author believes that in some sense, the educational programs focused on training students in long-established software is going to disable them in their future growth rather than enable. The solution is to allow students to tinker with established and emerging tools. Not all of them will be valuable in the future, but it will teach our youth the logic of using technology for positive disruption, and not how to simply remember a set of processes.

Georgia and several other southern U.S. states have passed tough anti-immigration laws that, writer Paul Harris asserts, "represent the toughest crackdown on illegal immigrants--the vast majority of whom are Hispanics--in America." Supporters of the new laws argue that they are only trying to penalize people who enter the U.S. illegally. But opponents--including representatives of the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center--say the rules segregate and marginalize illegal immigrants. Some immigrants have responded to the new laws by returning to Mexico; others have remained in their adopted hometowns, despite the threat of arrest. As Harris notes, large swathes of the U.S. economy--from agriculture to construction--have become dependent upon illegal immigrant laborers. Without their work, crops go unharvested, restaurants face drastically limited hiring pools, and construction firms fail to find enough workers to complete building projects. One gets the sense that, without substantial wage increases in sectors of the economy traditionally filled by illegal immigrant laborers, these new laws won't be sustainable in the long-term.

John Tierney discusses "decision fatigue," by which people gradually become worn out from having to make decisions. "The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts," he writes. People typically respond to decision fatigue either by becoming reckless or by doing nothing. Research indicates that people have a limited supply of willpower; executing decisions saps that willpower by requiring people to expend mental energy. When people experience decision fatigue, they become more likely to give in to impulse and vulnerable to pushy salespeople. Decision fatigue is a factor keeping people trapped in poverty, Tierney writes, because poor people constantly have to make choices based upon their limited financial resources; this steals energy and focus away from long-term goal-setting. It can also lead to poor choices in terms of diet and behavior.

As gesture-based controls become the standard form of interfacing with technology like smartphones and computers, there is a growing challenge in which competitive technology producers push to make their own unique "touch" gestures the norm. There are no standards or regulations or even a collective set of best practices. Rather, there are simply large organizations segmenting users into several standards. Of all the forms of manipulation, "scrolling" is the most hotly debated. The logic of scrolling has shifted since we've moved from moving a screen based on a scroll bar to actually touch the screen itself. Apple was a major player in reversing a habit that users had spent decades getting used to. And this issue will only get more complex as scrolling becomes just one of many directional manipulations users will be able to make. The author believes that standards are necessary in the future, especially in the U.S. where patent laws have huge impacts on products. On top of that, too much of interface design is currently based on marketing gimmicks and not about the "best" thing for the consumer. As all our devices become gesture-based in the near future, the control of devices may gain more attention that what appears on the screens.

Author Maria Bustillos read through David Foster Wallace's papers and books, housed at the University of Texas at Austin's Ransom Center, to produce this thoughtful examination of the late writer's notes on self-help literature and thoughts about depression. Wallace himself suffered from depression and eventually took his own life; he also dealt with addiction. Bustillos' article devotes particular attention to Wallace's reading and re-reading of psychologist Alice Miller's "The Drama of the Gifted Child," which asserts that very successful people come to value themselves only in terms of their achievements because of their mothers' influence. Wallace strove to be a person who was more than just a series of achievements--he tried not to lose sight of his ordinariness, as his book annotations and notes show. But these efforts also brought him substantial pain. "It must have been incredibly frustrating to be paralyzed with self-criticism and self-loathing, and have people telling you that you're a genius all the livelong day and forking over Genius Grants and things," Bustillos writes.

Are Texas courts refusing to reconsider scientific evidence that could exonerate the convicted? Austin Chronicle investigative reporter Jordan Smith examines the case of Larry Swearingen, a Texas man convicted in 2000 of murdering a female college student in 1998 based on circumstantial evidence, not direct evidence (DNA samples, for example). Swearingen been on death row ever since. As Smith reports, scientists who have examined the victim's cell tissue believe it's impossible for Swearingen to have murdered her--yet Texas courts have not budged from their position that Swearingen is guilty. His case "renews questions about the intersection of and tension between science and law–how courts and law enforcement professionals view and understand science, and how decisions are made about what kind of science is 'good enough' to be deemed more telling or important than other compelling but decidedly nonscientific evidence," Smith writes.

In the past few years, New York City has installed bicycle lanes across the city in an effort to become more “bike-friendly.” But how devoted is the city when it comes to investing in resources necessary to investigate crimes perpetrated against the city’s biking population? Not very, as the case of Brooklyn bicyclist Michelle Matson illusttrates. In October 2010, Matson was biking with her boyfriend when she was hit from behind by a four-door sedan. The driver fled the scene, and Matson was left immobile in the street; she spent the next few months recuperating from a broken leg and other serious injuries. Even though police found the hit-and-run vehicle, and Matson cooperated with police, no one has been arrested. The article provides other examples of bicycle accidents in which the perpetrators were never brought to justice, suggesting that cases like Matson’s are fairly common.

This biographical article by author and critic Daniel Mendelsohn describes the life of the late 19th-century French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, who became known as "a founder of modern European poetry" even though his career as a poet was "remarkably short-lived." Rimbaud composed most of his major works between the ages of 16 and 20, Mendelsohn writes; he then gave up poetry and ended up in East Africa, where he became a trader and businessman. The article touches upon the many contradictions that characterized Rimbaud's short life (he died from cancer at age 37), from his interests in both anarchism and money-making to his love-hate relationships with small town living.

Google+ offers video chat facility with up to 10 person at one time. Facebook and Skype offer one-to-one video chat. The latest addition is from GroupChat.tv where the free application can accommodate 50 participants. Imagine a teacher can now give tuition to 50 learners from home? Let's explore it.

A new sheen of oil appeared in the Golf of Mexico, near the sight of the Macondo well that created the spill in April 2010. Exams of the pipeline are in progress but BP denies that they are responsible for any leaks. Shell also has some steak in the Gulf but have not made a statement about the glaze. They are most recently at fault for a spill in the North Sea

This tool lets you see who facebook thinks you're searching for. It's mostly accurate but not entirely in my personal opinion. At the very least, interesting.

Even though networks and devices are transitioning to 4G speeds mobile providers are implementing data consumption caps. All the major domestic wireless carriers, save for Sprint, have instituted new monthly plans with set data thresholds. The move is spurred by the need to find new revenue streams as voice minutes decline. Additionally, the carriers claim that the move is aimed to fight overconsumption by some users who take advantage of unlimited data plans. Consumers and developers have responded to the move with concern. While the carriers contend that most customers will not face overage penalties, users feel that they will lose the ability to stream multimedia. The developer community worries that data restrictions will prevent consumers from discovering and using new applications while curbing future innovation of data intensive features. Developers also worry that users may not understand the data cost associated with operations such as streaming a video, leaving consumers frustrated with applications and not mobile providers. Ultimately, while some believe that unlimited data plans may appear periodically as promotions, but the transition toward data limits is a permanent.

Warren Buffet professes that taxation on income earned from investing or as he puts it, "make money with money" is far too low compared to income taxes coming from salaries. Buffet believes the wealthiest individuals are being given a break because the government fears that taxing their investments will scare them into not doing so, and thus slowing economic growth. However in the past, when taxes on investments were higher, data shows that the "super-rich" do not get scared off. Buffet expreses the best course to correct our economic is to make minor tax reductions for the lower and middle class, and elevate the taxation levels of those households in this country making over $1,000,000 per year in income, which happens to just over 236,000.

Neil Gabler argues that culture and technology have created an atmosphere where big ideas no longer have an audience or environment to grow. On the surface he makes a compelling argument, helped by solid writing and the platform of the The New York Times. But do his arguments go beyond, "things were better in the past" and the tired "the Internet is ruining everything"? It's worth reading, but more importantly it's worth thinking about. Do we really live in a post-idea world?

The latest figures from PRS for Music report that licensing was the only growth area in the entire music industry in 2010. At the same time, it took Spotify almost 2 years to get through the music licensing process in the US. Negotiations for releasing tracks need to happen with both the labels, who own rights to the recordings and the publishing houses who own rights to the songs. In many cases, these are separate entities – making a messy process even more complex. Something has to be done. One solution on the table is a digital copyright exchange. This exchange would use technology to bring together rights holders with business interests. The idea is fairly vague right now and there are many hurdles to leap that include demonstrating enough value to all parties, ensuring payment, ensuring proper usage and defining the technology and process needed to operate. Also, Does the music industry or someone outside own this effort? The challenge and the opportunity are there, but whoever is responsible for this exchange has a tough job ahead of them.

An excerpt of Barbara Ehrenreich's afterward to her 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America." In the past few years, the author has tried to find out what was happening to the working poor in this economy — cutting back on health care, food expenditures, suicide. If she had conducted her 2001 experiment now, she would never have found a job. She also goes in depth how society treats the poor/homeless and the institutions that are created to help these individuals treat them all like up and coming criminals. Solution? Stop underpaying people for their jobs, stop treating these people like criminals, and stop institutional harrassment. "Stop kicking people when they are down."

Kickstarter has been around for nearly 2 years and has been host to 10,626 projects which have been backed by over 800,000 people pledging to help make ideas a reality. In many ways this platform has become the quintessential example of democratization of technology and art. The founders believed this model could work profitably because the internet could, at volume, support the people who traditionally would not be able to attain funding for their creativity. It forces constraints and a mutual exchange of rewards so that backers and project hosts are both benefiting. Kickstarter is open, but it's also very cautious about what qualifies and gets the green light. In doing so, the community does not get overrun by projects that are simply looking for a handout, don't fit the interests of backers, or is potentially taking advantage of people's generosity. Above all else, Kickstarter encourages individuals to start and finish projects, that otherwise would have just remained an idea in someone's mind.

The current user-interface of internet search may be a detriment to its evolution. The first evolution of search, and some companies have tried this approach, will be spoken words or even typed answers, but with the meteoric rise in smart devices, search may focus less words, and more on visual information and environmental analysis.

Pedigree wants you to help find a home for a dog in need by adopting a dog through the Pedigree Adoption Drive. Pedigree has developed Doggelganger, a space age, human to canine recommendation engine. By uploading a photo, the web-based tool automagically matches you with a dog that looks like you. Each match comes with a complete canine dossier and adoption information. While the adoption drive is currently only available in New Zealand, it's still a fun way to kill some time at work.

Ray Kurzweil is becoming THE voice when it comes to the fusion of humanity and technology. He predicts that the fusion of man and machine is inevitable, relatively upcoming, and something that will be able to prolong our existence indefinitely. Kurzweil has grown the polarizing conversation of what it means to be "human" and as the implications of the "singularity" (the merging of humanity and technology) become more realistic, the fervor on both ends of the argument is exploding. Per Kurzweil, our technological advancements will continue to grow at an exponential rate, and that will include the need for more efficient use of energy (which our species relies on as we develop faster). Although many people doubt Kurzweil's optimistic view of our near future as being "one with machines," he is confident that it is inevitable and that fighting it will be the far more dangerous alternative.

Google+ is being called a Facebook killer, but Google has eyes on a bigger prize, looking across a multitude of online touchpoints.

The Boston Red Sox, Dallas Cowboys and the Miami Heat are working with technology developer and integrator ANC Sports Enterprises to upgrade their stadiums with 64-bit digital signage. The move will integrate ANC's new VisionSOFT software package to bring higher definition to the overhead LED screens. This means increased detail and clarity for game play-by-play. Additionally, ANC's VisionSOFT brings with it the ability to interface with apps. Mark Stross, CTO for ANC Sports, says of the upgrades "What it means, in essence, is that you won’t miss a detail."

The advances in digital mapping have led to an academic field know as "spatial huanities." Academics are using software to analyze geographic locations to reexamine historical events and locations. Unlike a static map, digital mapping allows for a deeper look at possible patterns and other invisible information that only a layer map can reveal. One of the most notable studies is the review of the Civil War and the battle at Gettysburg. Revelations from computer-assisted analysis may help reveal even the emotions and specific decisions that the military generals were faced with. Ultimately, this technology will play a pivotal role in prompting new questions, and pushing scholars to connect dots they didn't know existed before.

The interstate system of roadways in America is one of the most expansive and expensive public works projects the country has ever built. It covers over 48,000 miles - more than the amount of roads in the entire European Union. But a panel of experts judged that the $30 billion/year in funding to maintain roads at their current levels is $100 BILLION SHORT of the needed spend each year. On top of that, many roads were built to last about 20 years but in several cases they're pushing 50. At issue is the trust fund dedicated to taking gas tax money and allocating it to highway projects. Three problems: 1) The tax on gas hasn't kept up with inflation 2) More gas-efficient vehicles have meant less money spent on gas-- and less tax collected. 3) Construction costs have risen over time (and will keep rising) So the trust is running out of money. Leaders close to the government have offered two options 1) Raise the gas tax (good luck with that) 2) increase the amount of tollroads The author suggests that now is the time to have hard, important conversations about the role roads play in a future USA but offers little else. Still - a good reason to ponder another one of America's "freedoms" that isn't free.

Would you pass a social background check? A new company, Social Intelligence, aims to make that a standard question for any job applicant. Recruiters work with Social Intelligence to define the criteria and types of information that the company would like to know. SI then conducts a search going back seven years to find illegal acts or photos, aggressive words or behavior and sexually explicit activity. The sources of the social background check include websites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Craigslist and Yahoo message boards. According to Max Drucker, co-founder and CEO of Social Intelligence "All we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet today." Social Intelligence Corp. is a subsidiary of Riv Data, a private data company based in Santa Barbara, CA. A list of FAQs, including data collection policies can be found here http://www.socialintelligencehr.com/faqs

A phenomena that psychologists often refer to as "deindividualism" is a common occurrence on the internet because the concealment of identity often can push away certain social norms. It's a feeling that many often get when behind the steering wheel of a car, or dressed up in a costume for Halloween. It augments are standards of acceptable public behavior. And on the web, much like any situation, there will be a wide range boundaries that some will be willing to test. This has been a part of the web since its inception, but it has evolved because of social media and in many ways, "trolling" or negative communication has become similar to graffiti. The most notable have developed their own styles and signatures and often continue the behavior because they're reward with a certain sense of fame. And because online commenting can often follow a "pack mentality," if a notable negative commenter contributes to a conversation, the entire mood will shift with subsequent contributions from the larger group. While there are certainly endless benefits that come from a libertarian internet, many psychologists are trying to develop systems which protect an open web, but slowly reduce the ease of unproductive negativity caused by deindividualism.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch appeared in front of the British Parliament in a hearing held due to reporters at one of his newspapers allegedly hacking people's cellphones. He claims to be unaware of any activities indicating such behaviors and he seemed to look to his son James, and wife Wendi Deng for answers. The proceedings were cut short due to a protestor attacking Murdoch with what seemed to be a pie tray filled with what appeared to be shaving cream. When asked if he would resign his answer was no, and he's "the best person to clean this up."

A judge ruled today that the Moghul Express restaurant in Edison, New Jersey, can be sued by a group of strictly vegetarian Hindus after the restaurant accidentally served them meat-filled samosas. It looks like the 16 afflicted non-meat eaters are going to get a free trip for their troubles.

What is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics — anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people — people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.

Fast fashion companies such as Zara and forever 21, can get a new product to market in under 15 days - making the flow of information on trends the most important factor to the business. They've mastered the supply chain and time to market through somewhat questionable labor practices. These companies do not adopt brand strategies nor do they target a specific lifestyle as a GAP or Urban Outfitters might. Consumers become the meaning makers of these post-brand, preference based suppliers. Facebook and other social media companies do the same thing, allowing consumers make meaning through their actions. Information is taken and re-purposed to generate revenue. Like fashion, social media allows us to shape our identity and change it fast, catering to the fantasy of being a celebrity - the impossible dream of a mass audience for everyone. The ability to self-brand so often, offered by social and fast-fashion makes it harder for our friends and ourselves to figure out what really matters.

The impact of "design thinkers," those who are prone to creative problem-solving and being "makers" are still not being seen as valuable as a traditional MBA student in secondary education. Their impact remains inconclusive as of right now and educational programs are generally not designed to reward those who pursue this particular path. Compounding the issue is that businesses are generally not equipped for "design thinking." There's not a clear solution just yet, but it seems that both universities and corporations need to start pushing students to take the risk of pursuing a secondary education which teaches fundamentals that may radically redefine how our country conducts business.

Financial trades are now taking place so fast and in such numbers that the speed of light itself presents limits to the efficiency of the global market. To maximise efficiency it is thus in traders' direct financial interest to install themselves at specific points on the Earth's surface—a kind of light-speed financial acupuncture—to take advantage both of the planet's geometry and of the networks along which trades are ordered and filled.

Alternative medicine can be a lonely experience for most practitioners. There is a lot of research going against the practice and it's seen by many as a waste of time. Despite the lack of evidence, there is some benefit, in particular, the placebo effect. The placebo effect, considered a sham in medicine is a sugar pill, or something pretend - often used in clinical trials as a baseline. However, in tests, when measured against no treatment as a baseline, there is measurable results. Patients taking sugar pills labeled as pain killers will actually feel better. Fake surgeries have also showed measurable improvements. The placebo effect is the place where alternative medicine doctors excel. They believe passionately in their treatments, which are often delivered with great and reassuring ceremony. That alone can be enough to do good, even though the magnets, crystals and ultra-dilute solutions applied to the patients are, by themselves, completely useless.

Item 1 Glibness/superficial charm Item 2 Grandiose sense of self-worth Item 3 Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom Item 4 Pathological lying Item 5 Cunning/manipulative Item 6 Lack of remorse or guilt Item 7 Shallow affect Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy Item 9 Parasitic lifestyle Item 10 Poor behavioural controls Item 11 Promiscuous sexual behaviour Item 12 Early behaviour problems Item 13 Lack of realistic long-term goals Item 14 Impulsivity Item 15 Irresponsibility Item 16 Failure to accept responsibility for own actions Item 17 Many short-term marital relationships Item 18 Juvenile delinquency Item 19 Revocation of conditional release Item 20 Criminal versatility

The Jan Lokpal Bill has been finally passed to fight against corruption.It makes sure unbiased jurisdiction is put into place and needful actions taken.Though it includes the Prime Minister under its ambit,it takes complaints referred only by the presiding officers of both Parliament houses.Also the Bill's recommendations are merely advisory.The Bill covers a vast jurisdiction including ministers, MP's,administrations,etc.But would it be able to deal corruption on such a vast area? The Bill also proposes to dismantle the CVC body formed to fight corruption in central government. But with CVC having a history of 47 years , wouldn't it be better if the jurisdiction would be split between the Lokpal and CVC accordingly keeping in mind the vast area the Bill has to keep in vigil.The wide ambit of the bill has many powers including police,seizure,confiscations and quasi judicial powers making it a supercop.Anna Hazare's fast for anticorruption should ring alarm bells in us. The Bill also proposes transferring Special Police Establishment of CBI under it but again the chief justices recommend that both bodies be preserved as separate organisations.All in all Lokpal's powers has to be rationalized to achieve the right proportion.

There is good news for tomato farmers and patients suffering from blood pressure and cholesterol as cooked tomatoes are good for battling the conditions. It can have the same benefits as having statins drugs and so save money on drugs. The secret lies in the compound lycopene which gives ripe tomatoes their bright red color is a powerful anti-oxidant too and can lower risk of heart attacks and strokes. 50gms of tomato paste in the daily diet would be adequate to replace the drug in most of the patients. The ingredient is also found in papaya, grapefruit, watermelon, guava and some other fruits in lower concentration.

Global warming is causing a major problem to our universe. Because of recent industry expansion and civilization, the issue of global warming is reaching its peak day by day. Improper and unlimited usage of fuels, improper filtration of industry garbage and drainage, poor laws are the major cause for this. This can be reduced to a minimum if we together plan certain things. There must be a serious cap for using fuels, the toxic concentration coming out of industry garbage/gases/drainage to keep global warming to a minimum level. Without such caps it is impossible to stop global warming and the serious rise in the increasing global temperature.

Instagram, the popular photo sharing (and manipulation) application has become a tool for idolizing that which is not an idol, nor very interesting at all. In a positive sense, the app has helped us create beauty from the mundane, and has pushed us to pay attention to our surroundings more closely. But this minor addiction to sharing these snippets of distorted reality may be binding us a world that isn't real. The question is, is the false reality (idol) bad for us?

Assumptions propel a project forward, however they can also often stymy that same project later on in the process. Assumptions can be contagious and dangerous in that many team members will quickly grasp them. It is important to question these assumptions early, even when it may appear that it is derailing a powerful wave of enthusiasm and effort.

This post likens current changes in the media landscape to chemistry - in particular the distribution of molecules and what happens when a variable temperature is applied. Everything used to be in a solid state. The 'molecules of media' were clumped into sell-able buckets including television, newspapers, magazines and more. This was a cool state. People's behavior has changed and now they can dig into these clumps of media, extracting what they want and stirring the manageable solid state. This started to warm things up. Additionally more molecules have been added to the mix. Media owners attempt to cool their media matter into a solid state by creating things like pay-walls, but it's a Sisyphean. The world warms fast and more media is gas. It's everywhere and there's no incentive to pay for it.The solution. Don't sell gas, sell something that makes the gas useful. Allow people to use it, see it differently, or turn the gas into something useful.

Animals & plants can only survive in the specific zones of atmosphere. If the climate of a specific region crosses the level of their tolerance, they migrate to other zones. Nature scientists have classified the geographical regions by vegetation & animal life they support.. Now the climates of all the geographical regions are rapidly changing due to global warming. So, the maps of the geographical should be redrawn. According to a survey by NASA Goddard Institute, only 33% of the earth was hot region in1980, but now 75% region has been marked as sufficient hot region, . The global warming has become a threat to our eco-system. Human beings are trying to adjust themselves by many artificial systems. This is creating a problem to other species & they cannot survive in the extreme climate. Many species are in extinct. As the survival of the human is interrelated with the plants & animals of the earth, so the survival of human civilization is also facing danger.

Trading on the stock markets happens in a matter of milliseconds. Deals that used to be struck on the trading floor now take place via matching engines.Human beings account for less the half of US share trading. One big problem with the automated model is that big orders can be executed straight away. This causes enough of a lag to impact price. Many organizations have taken advantage of this lag by writing competing algorithms to optimize their trading. These algorithms effectively prey on other algorithms and how they prey can cause a range of controversies - Some sniff for the electronic signature of other trading institutional, effectively identifying their competitors current scheme and buying shares faster where optimal. Everyone's goal is to make more money. Because the timescales of trading have changed, the significance of space has also altered. Trading has become a system. As the system becomes more complex, it will not be able to be managed centrally. As the system evolves, expect to see new crashes and crisis.

Post-PC is not a new concept, but one that is starting to become a reality with the growth of mobile computing. The four trends covered in the article are: 1) Computer moving from being stationary appliances, to everywhere we go, whether it be in a smart-phone, etc. Work can be done everywhere. 2) The experience is becoming more casual. It's not about turning your computer on and off. Computing is "instantly on." 3) Computers are always within arms length of us, particularly the phone which usually never gets outside of a 3-4 foot parameter of us, even when we sleep or are in the rest room. 4) Interactions with computers are becoming less abstract. The mouse and keyboard is being replaced with our fingers on the actual screen. Wi-Fi, Cloud Computing, and the evolution of processors (faster and smaller) is allowing all this to take shape. The term "PC-Forward" is considered my many to be the new classification for the Post-PC era.

Although crowds can produce intelligent data through the canceling out of extreme biases, “Even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect." In other words, if the individuals aren't coming to conclusions independently...if they are being swayed by others within that crowd, the resulting data isn't necessarily accurate. “The truth becomes less central if social influence is allowed."

As he is sworn in as Chicago's 46th mayor today, Rahm Emanuel is expected to lay out the challenges the city faces. "New times demand new answers. Old problems cry out for better results. This morning, we leave behind the old ways and old divisions and begin a new day for Chicago. I am proud to lead a city united in common purpose and driven by a common thirst for change," he said.

Academics are increasingly trying to understand what makes things "funny." The endeavor is of course a major challenge because languages and meanings vary around the world. Some claim that removing stress from a situation triggers laughter. Peter McGraw, a professor at the University of Colorado has applied science and testing to countless individuals to try and understand what "tickles" them into laughter. The Theory: Humor can often come from violating our morals, at least hypothetically, which creates a feeling of catharsis through the misfortune of others, or relaxation through the realization that we are not in danger. Ultimately there is no single theory that explains it all humor, as McGraw knows this, but he does believe the above concept applies to much of the humorous content we're exposed to, and laugh at. Humor may in fact be an evolutionary function which signals that something that something that is threatening us, is actually a false alarm. The potential violation isn't something that can hurt us, thus we laugh.

The author describes his very "necessary" re-employment (after being laid off) as soul-crushing. Specifically because it requires him to drive to work vs. walking, as he used to in previous jobs. The idea of commuting, and general driving is tied to displeasure and boredom in life. The author likes "living in the moment." Noticing the little joys of life and your surroundings when strolling down the street. Whether going slowly through traffic, or zooming by on a highway, it's difficult to appreciate the wonders around us.

Minimalist advertising has been a long-time staple of Google's search and E-Mail service and an element that arguably led to some of its success. Google's approach to ads is that less ads means that each one will be considered more relevant and users will happier without the bombardment of ads. The author seems to believe that Google specifically is reverting to a less effective advertising system by introducing display ads into their "Gmail" network all while not improving the relevance of the text-ads that are meant to serve ads based on the content of your emails. The author did not offer a major recommendation on how to address the issue, though he did urge Google and other similar companies to maintain clean interfaces and leverage smarter and more relevant ads.

Computer programs have given traders a sense of invulnerability and prompted somewhat riskier decision making. However when large market swings take place, these algorithmically placed trades may devastate the market when more and more individuals are engaging in this kind of behavior. Many traders crave the perfect "quantitative" means for predicting market fluctuations, but the harsh reality of the situation is that if such an environment ever develops, and everyone has access to the perfect trading method, it is the qualitative traders who will have an advantage. The question is though, with thousands of trading methodologies floating around, will ONE ever prevail, and convince ever trader that is the best possible avenue? (Thus leveling the playing field?) The government is considering stepping in and regulating how much quantitative tools traders can use, though enforcement of such a practice seems impossible.

Many of us grew up listening to our parents discuss the dream of higher education. The classroom was the path to a better life. But, were our parents just fooled by adverting copy? The path to higher education almost always comes with loan forms. There's an financial bubble out there in the higher education space, and it looks a lot like the 2008 housing crisis. Couple of stats: 1.)The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. 2.) Since 1978 the cost of college has increases 900 percent (650 over inflation). 3.) The 2008 housing bubble only increased 50 points above the consumer index. Yet still, nobody out there calls this a bad investment.Tuition has increased and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen. The value of a degree is simply no longer what it used to be. When the housing bubble collapsed, the results (relatively good for most investors, bad for the government, worse for homeowners) were predictable but not foreordained. With the student-loan bubble, the resolution is much the same, and it’s decided in advance.

Mac security is back in the spotlight this week as new Mac malware was spotted in the wild. But, with everyone out there crying wolf, should Mac users really be worried? Yes, and no. Because OS X is built on Unix, it is by nature more secure due to built-in user access restrictions unlike Windows. Windows Vista and Windows 7 drastically improved the protection from malware. That said, both Windows and Mac users can still fall prey to phishing schemes and downloading seemingly harmless software that includes something nefarious. So, should Mac users all run out and buy anti-virus and anti-malware software? Probably not. Should they continue to be vigilant about what they and install and what they click on in emails? Absolutely.

It's time to stop arguing about whether Lance doped and start figuring out what it means. Reporter Bill Strickland, once among Lance's advocates, is convinced and convincing that Lance is a long time doper. A recap of all the evidence. Includes 10 strong case arguments. http://www.bicycling.com/news/pro-cycling/you-jury

In the overlap of the medical / science / technology community they speak of the “singularity” – when exponentially accelerating technological progress will lead to the creation of superintelligence; and that a post-singularity world would be unpredictable to humans due to an inability of human beings to imagine the intentions or capabilities of superintelligent entities. That’s a lot to wrap your head around, but the idea of the singularity, when everything comes together and the world is no longer predictable, has parallels for the marketing industry. I believe a cultural singularity has occurred and that is what is causing the tumult within brands and the agencies they work with. This cultural singularity has taken shape over the last 25 years across all aspects of culture with the result being that, despite an abundance of available information, marketers are finding it more difficult than ever to see cultural shifts before they occur. In fact, this problem is a result of the abundance of information available

Everyone is now in the business of minimizing risk – and the most common approach seems to be to believe that if we’re all holding hands when we jump off the cliff, then we’ll somehow all survive the fall. So we buy in to ‘an insight’, and then we start circling the wagons. I’ve been asked by clients in the past to come up with a model that will indicate how many people I think will see all the parts of the campaign – which isn’t unusual – but then to somehow work some analytics hoodoo and tell them at what level of spend, and in which combination of channels, the campaign will ‘work’. Despite not being an analytics jockey or a media planner, I can get a group of people together to guess about reach and frequency and clicks and CTRs and even guess about likelihood of repeat visits or time on site, if they have enough analogous historical data and a person who has enough free time that we can justify torturing them with such a futile task.

Obsession with legally owning your knowledge pays off only if you can monitor and enforce the IPR. As this becomes less tenable, what ultimately drives competitive performance is your possession of deep, tacit knowledge. Strategic knowledge mapping enables strategists to explicitly identify, construct and exploit valuable knowledge networks that generate rents from insightfully combining your tacit assets with knowledge that is more structured and diffused.

"Absent minded meat muncher John Richardson" of Cheney, Washington was arrested for maybe forgetting to pay for a 99 cent "bronze" German sausage. At the check-out line, he paid for all of his groceries except for the sausage, which then led to some 'hard-ass' managers following him and calling the cops. Richardson tried to pay for his sausage but was charged with shoplifting anyhow. He protested, got arrested, and dinner was on the taxpayers. Forgetfulness is not a crime and John Richardson is not in jail.

A short post that Malbon pulled together called "Do We Really Need 'Chief Innovation Officers' in Ad Agencies? Four of them tell us what they do'" composed of 4 tweets caused some debate and prompted this article - a further expansion on the topic. Perspectives were pulled together from a mix of industry leaders into a list of 10 things: 1. Only The Innovative Survive 2. Forget the Title, Focus on the Remit. 3. If Everyone's Responsible, No One is Responsible 4. Innovation Does NOT Equal 'Digital' 5. Hold Both Maps AND Bayonets 6. Be A Revenue Center, Not a Cost Center 7. CIOs Are Not the Same As CEOs 8. Not All CIOs are Created Equal 9. A CIOs job is Never Done 10. Everything Changes, So Just Start

AOL created a parallel and private online experience that provided just about everything it's customers might have wanted or needed, sanitized for their protection. They 'spoon fed' the best parts of the internet, at the time, to their customers including news, weather, and chat. People never had to leave AOL to feel connected. The author argues that facebook is doing the same thing, pushing their own parallel web experience. This time facebook have more data through it's open graph. This time facebook didn't have to send out $300 million dollars worth of CDs to get that data. This time will they succeed in infiltrating our digital lives? Look forward to seeing how far they get.

The world of Brain to Computer interface("BCI") is remarkable allowing humans to interact with computers using their thoughts. BrainGate, a leader in the field has gone through a mix of tests on both monkeys and humans. In one example, a paralyzed woman with a chip implanted in her head uses her thoughts to control a robotic arm. In another example, a patient is able to control a cursor with their thoughts. Put simply, BrainGate plugs into the brain, picks up the right neural signals and beams them into a computer where they are translated into moving a cursor or controlling a computer keyboard. Both the medical community and the military have an interest in BCI, and there are a number of programs and companies outside of BrainGate in the space. Measuring and interpreting billings of neuron signals is hard, but it may one day lead to mind reading. This may seem extreme now, but in 100 years having these implants may be commonplace and another layer which we interact with the world. If I can survive long enough, some part of me might be around to observe it.

In the long run (next 10-20 years) we won't pay for individual books any more than we'll pay for individual songs or movies. All will be streamed in paid subscription services; you'll just "borrow" what you want. That defuses the current anxiety to produce a container for ebooks that can be owned. Ebooks won't be owned. They'll be accessed. The real challenge ahead is finding a display device that will focus the attention a book needs. An invention that encourages you onward to the next paragraph before the next distraction. I guess that this will be a combination of software prompts, highly evolved reader interfaces, and hardware optimized for reading. And books written with these devices in mind.

A long time ago, the movie poster was an important piece of marketing. One image was enough to generate excitement. Now, an image does not have the same impact as it once did. The iconic 1950's poster created for 'The Day The Earth Stood Still' worked to tell the story of the movie in one shot. In the poster, you see frightened humans, a giant robot, a hand holding the earth. It was a beautiful narrative. Take that and compare it to the Keanu Reeves version of the movie poster - which focuses on the actor and one beautiful image. This is generic and does not tell the story.. Studios are marketing to the lowest common denominator these days. It's important to note the the art of the poster is not lost. Designers like Chris Ware of Chicago are still pay attention to the details and still know how to tell a story graphically.

Al Borges states that he has instituted 60%-70% of his offense and while the process has been much slower than Borges is used to, he promises the "bells and whistles" will come later. The good news is that the players are responding well to the first year couch, despite being recruited to run a completely different offensive scheme -- Rich Rod's famed spread option. Now, what everyone wants to know... DENARD ROBINSON UPDATE!!!! Borges is pleased with how Shoelace is responding. While Denard still needs some work on his foot mechanics and timing, Borges is quick to point out that the new system isn't completely new for his young quarterback as he played in an under center offensive scheme while attending Pohokee High School (Pohokee, FL). Borges also comments on Denard's deadly accuracy, saying, "The kid is an accurate passer. That's the first thing that jumps out at me; when the guy's open he's going to hit him more often than not." Other Spring Standouts that drew acclaim included another Pohokee HS Alum,RB Vincent Smith (Jr), and an Ohio native, WR Roy Roundtree (Jr).

This article identifies a simple hack that very few people ever notice. It's an almost invisible way to solve the problem of multiple required receipts that come with credit card payments at restaurants. Sometimes when you're out at a restaurant you receive a stack of receipts, it's unclear which one to sign. The problem of a poor experience and confusion is solved by simply wrapping the extra receipt around the credit card. What's important to note is that the interface is invisible...as it should be.

America's wealth gap continues to grow. Today, the top 1% of wealthiest American's control 25% of the income and 40% of the wealth. The U.S. has joined the likes of Russia and Iran as counterparts in inequality. This inequality is a problem for three reasons: 1. Growing inequality = diminishing opportunity. 2. Distortions that lead to inequality undermine the efficiency of our economy. 3. Modern economy requires collective action. With a more divided society, the wealthy are less reluctant to provide for common need. "Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them."

The way that "average" brand websites connect themselves to Twitter, Facebook and other social properties is wrong. A simple link to the brand's page on the said network is not enough. Consider instead, a site that bubbles up user content – comments, photos, videos, blog posts—to the home page where it sits alongside similar editorial content. We currently have the technology to do that: to take a piece from the brand about how green the new Kitchen Sponge line is and combine that with user input around environmental issues in housecleaning, going “green” and kitchen sponges. Basically, this turns the entire domain into a community site.There's wide ranging benefits into what this actually does for the brand - most importantly demonstrating how the brand actually connects to it's customers.

We may need to make choices in order to be satisfied, even if those choices lead to less than satisfying experiences. But of course this would be less than optimal satisfaction. Thus, there may be a psychological dilemma or paradox that ultimate satisfaction may ultimately be unsatisfying. This is the psychological problem of dealing with abundance rather than scarcity. It is not quite the same problem of abundance articulated by the Paradox of Choice, the theory that we find too many choices paralyzing. That if we are given 57 different mustards to choose from at the supermarket, we often leave without choosing any.

"The European Commission on Monday unveiled a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050. The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail. Top of the EU’s list to cut climate change emissions is a target of “zero” for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU’s future cities. Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, insisted that Brussels directives and new taxation of fuel would be used to force people out of their cars and onto “alternative” means of transport."