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(4) The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken. Marketing. Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis Norton, 362 pp., $28.95 We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become inescapable.

Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind

The findings of social psychology and behavioral economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the products we buy, the cultural and intellectual spheres we inhabit, and the human networks, online and in real life, of which we are a part. Aspects of human societies that were formerly guided by habit and tradition, or spontaneity and whim, are now increasingly the intended or unintended consequences of decisions made on the basis of scientific theories of the human mind and human well-being. The behavioral techniques that are being employed by governments and private corporations do not appeal to our reason; they do not seek to persuade us consciously with information and argument. Many of these heuristics are easy to recognize in ourselves. Nonrational forms of persuasion are clearly nothing new. Blue light has a dark side - Harvard Health.

Exposure to blue light at night, emitted by electronics and energy-efficient lightbulbs, harmful to your health.

Blue light has a dark side - Harvard Health

Until the advent of artificial lighting, the sun was the major source of lighting, and people spent their evenings in (relative) darkness. Now, in much of the world, evenings are illuminated, and we take our easy access to all those lumens pretty much for granted. But we may be paying a price for basking in all that light. At night, light throws the body's biological clock—the circadian rhythm—out of whack.

Sleep suffers. But not all colors of light have the same effect. Daily rhythms influenced by light Everyone has slightly different circadian rhythms, but the average length is 24 and one-quarter hours. The health risks of nighttime light. Rue89. Some Strange Things Are Happening To Astronauts Returning To Earth. The Cloud Will Cure Cancer. Editor’s note: Mark Kaganovich is founder of SolveBio and a doctoral candidate in genetics at Stanford University.

The Cloud Will Cure Cancer

Follow him on Twitter @markkaganovich. Much ink has been spilled on the huge leaps in communications, social networking, and commerce that have resulted from impressive gains in IT and processing power over the last 30 years. However, relatively little has been said about how computing power is about to impact our lives in the biggest way yet: Health. CAN MACHINES THINK? WHEN GARRY KASPAROV FACED OFF AGAINST AN IBM COMPUTER in last month's celebrated chess match, he wasn't just after more fame and money.

CAN MACHINES THINK?

By his own account, the world chess champion was playing for you, me, the whole human species. He was trying, as he put it shortly before the match, to "help defend our dignity. " Nice of him to offer. 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. Swarm Theory. I used to think ants knew what they were doing.

Swarm Theory

The ones marching across my kitchen counter looked so confident, I just figured they had a plan, knew where they were going and what needed to be done. How else could ants organize highways, build elaborate nests, stage epic raids, and do all the other things ants do? Turns out I was wrong. Ants aren't clever little engineers, architects, or warriors after all—at least not as individuals. RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism.

RSA Animate - The Secret Powers of Time. Social Cognition, From Defrag. [These are the notes I used to prepare for a talk at Defrag, November 17 2010, formerly titled Social Cognition, From Defrag.

Social Cognition, From Defrag

Now heavily modified and extended.] It probably is no surprise to you that all known human cultures have language, music, and dance.

Statistiques

Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years : Krulwich Wonders... Genetics. STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine. By STEPHEN HAWKING Created: 18:47 GMT, 27 April 2010 All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast 'Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago.

STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine

But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, just as accurate. There's a significant controversy over the value of games that are designed to improve people's mental faculties, as some studies have indicated that brain training only helps prepare you for similar tasks, while others indicate that general improvements are possible.

Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, just as accurate

But there turns out to be a type of game that is known to boost a variety of skills, from decision making to tracking multiple objects: standard action games. A study, released today by Current Biology attempts to explain how these video games can produce such wide-ranging improvements. The authors of the study argue that the root of all these tasks involves making a probabilistic inference, where complete information is missing, so people have to make a best guess based on known odds. Video gaming, in their view, increases the efficiency at which people can process the odds and make an accurate decision—gamers simply can do more with less.

Op-Ed Contributor - Mind Over Mass Media.