Category: interesting

Psychological therapy could be 32 times more cost effective at making you happy than simply obtaining more money.

Chris Boyce of the University of Warwick and Alex Wood of the University of Manchester compared large data sets where 1000s of people had reported on their well-being. They then looked at how well-being changed due to therapy compared to getting sudden increases in income, such as through lottery wins or pay rises.

They found that a 4 month course of psychological therapy had a large effect on well-being. They then showed that the increase in well-being from an $1300 course of therapy was so large that it would take a pay rise of over $40,000 to achieve an equivalent increase in well-being.

Economics has been completely at sea. We lack understanding the reality that economics is supposed to illuminate.

We have known about the endogenous instability of fractional reserve banking for some 200 years.

Dead we do not want:

So we don’t advocate – I wouldn’t advocate medical treatment for grief, even though it is a very disruptive state, I think that it’s interesting in that in the case of grief, there’s not only an internal natural healing response, which I very much think there is, but there’s also a social healing response. So, of course, when we know that someone has lost someone, we naturally – certainly if they’re someone close to us, we’re going to be there for them for quite awhile after the death occurs. But even if they’re not that close, we’ll often go to the funeral. We’ll go and visit them a few times early in their homes, bring them food, take care of them in various ways, certainly not expect them to be taking care of us, even though we might be a guest in their house. All this is very natural. I mean, we don’t really hardly need to be taught. I mean, people do it in all kinds of cultures and it’s just something we do. And that is, I think, the best way for the healing process of grief to be helped along, not by medical treatment.

Alive we will not heal.

“The SWAT team is coming in. They are hammering the hinges off as I type.”

Jon Taplin:

For me the most distressing aspect of American politics over the last 30 years is the realization that the Washington Establishment really does rule the country no matter which party holds the White House or Congressional majorities.

Progressives suffered through 12 years of Republican presidents after Reagan’s election only to realize that the election of Bill Clinton changed nothing. The military budget didn’t shrink, deregulation of business oversight continued apace, alternative energy strategies sat on the shelf. Now we have to suffer through watching Larry Summers and Tim Geithner lead Obama down the primrose path to disaster while the financial elites take home record bonuses.

As some of our correspondents have suggested that the split we may be seeing is not between liberals and conservatives, but between insiders and outsiders–the establishment vs the people.

The Onion:

LOS ANGELES—As the White House considers sweeping strategic shifts in the war in Afghanistan, heroin addicts across the nation called on President Obama Monday to stick with the current U.S. policy, which has flooded the world market with low-price narcotics. “There’s no need to change nothing, Joe Biden,” said addict Reginald ‘Bones’ Dillow, who, when conscious, is an outspoken proponent of the U.S. military strategy that has resulted in a nearly 40-fold increase in Afghan opium production since the end of Taliban rule in 2001. “Everything is so cheap—it’s all totally fine like it is, right? Over there, I mean. Why would you want to…do the…[garbled].” Obama is reportedly looking into economic incentives that would both persuade poor Afghans to cease opium cultivation and benefit chemically dependent Americans, the most promising of which involves constructing facilities in the war-torn country for the manufacture of methadone.

America going broke?

It’s not merely that we’re exploited like a feedlot of demographic cattle, but also our inability to demand much from each other, not unlike fat Britain during the edge of its Empire, where our habits are congratulatory and self-preserving rather than challenging and insistent.

I trust America’s great longing to offer important works. I look for grand change coming through today’s bewilderment and noise. Our new day is not yet. I can barely tolerate the whining or the bravado or how the wicked shift blame and shinny up to whatever is winning at the moment. We might oscillate like crazy for awhile.

For me, change will show itself when, just one example, a firm such as GE is trumpeting truly exciting and life-enhancing and prosperous engineering rather than saving itself by green-toggling our stimulus funds.

Lobbyists are employees, not the leaders that hired them, and we haven’t yet taken these guys to the woodshed for making some of the biggest blunders of all time.

A Womb of One’s Own

Hurricane Katrina: It was not an act of God

Martin Melaver:

Years ago, when we started down the road of our first green mixed-use development (one of only two or three LEED HUD projects in the nation), we felt pretty good about ourselves and spoke in the language of “giving back to the community.” Such hubris. What I realize now is that the community has given back to us in ways almost impossible to enumerate.

We convened and then became enveloped by a vast array of community stakeholders who have taught us, among other things, that our very viability as a business is inextricably linked to the community we’ve helped make more vibrant.

Oh, and by the way, the only real estate stuff really getting funded out there in any substantive way are projects that hit the Venn-diagram intersection of green, job creation, energy efficiency, and affordable housing. It’s a lesson not lost on the very largest companies around, as GE seeks to retool itself by tapping in to federal stimulus funds.

In the early days of the American republic, a company needed a charter to conduct its business. It was a charter limited both in scope and duration. A business could only continue on to the extent that its practices lent itself to the enhancement of the general polis. My company’s recent experiences in the green affordable housing arena is testament to the rightness of such a charter. It forces us to earn our stripes every day.

Perhaps… we real estate enterprises simply need to mothball our operations for a good long time. Alternatively, rather than wait around for the next wave of high-rollers to come knocking on our doors, we might consider rolling up our sleeves, addressing needs our social order is clamoring for, and make ourselves relevant for a change.

Bush to start a free market think tank.

Anthony Gregory:

So the guy who began the auto bailouts, whose federal “Ownership Society” was key in creating the biggest speculative bubble in memory, who had bragged in 2004 for having “passed the strongest corporate reforms since Franklin Roosevelt”, who trashed the Bill of Rights, inflated the welfare state and expanded government faster and in more directions than any president since Vietnam, if not since World War II — this guy is now promoting free markets and criticizing big government?

Trauma patients without insurance are almost twice as likely to die in the emergency room. [link]

World’s best and most acerbic review of Going Rogue.

Two of the most rational links I’ve found on Obama’s Asia tour.

Already our media is smudging the story. Maybe these two Asia Times summaries will provide a more mature peek into several new and top-notch changes in the American-Asian position.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KK19Ad02.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KK20Ad01.html

The Royal College of Psychiatrists:

To our knowledge, this study is the first to show a brain abnormality in people who lie, cheat and manipulate others.

Liars had increased prefrontal white matter volumes and reduced grey/white ratios compared with normal controls.

The effect size was substantial, with group membership explaining 28.2% of the variance in prefrontal volume.

These findings provide the first evidence of a structural brain deficit in liars, they implicate the prefrontal cortex as an important (but not sole) component in the neural circuitry underlying lying and provide an initial neurobiological correlate of a deceitful personality.

What will the Tea Party do when they discover the firms they defend are the Big Brother they fear?

Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, has co-authored a new report that highlights the potential privacy breaches that could result as we move toward a smart grid infrastructure…

Roughly 54 million people have been bullied at work, primarily having been sabotaged, yelled at, or belittled by their bosses.

When and why do power holders seek to harm other people?

The present research examined the idea that aggression among the powerful is often the result of a threatened ego.

Four studies demonstrated that individuals with power become aggressive when they feel incompetent…

Aggressiveness was eliminated among participants whose sense of self-worth was boosted.

Fact sheet on U.S-China clean energy announcements.

Meeting in Beijing, the two presidents agreed to a seven-point plan designed to speed the development of renewable energy and improve energy efficiency.

1. Establish a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center;
2. U.S.-China Electric Vehicles Initiative – a joint program to develop electric vehicles that will include pilot projects in more than a dozen cities;
3. U.S.-China Energy Efficiency Action Plan – to collaborate on improving the energy efficiency of buildings, factories, and consumer appliances;
4. U.S.-China Renewable Energy Partnership – establish a renewable energy partnership to promote alternative energy technologies, including ‘advanced grid’ and programs to promote cooperation between states and regions in the two countries;
5. 21st Century Coal – joint research into developing methods of capturing CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants as well as storing carbon dioxide underground;
6. Shale Gas Initiative – share U.S. expertise in extracting natural gas from underground shale deposits.
7. U.S.-China Energy Cooperation Program – a private sector project initiative to include collaborative projects on renewable energy, smart grid, clean transportation, green building, clean coal, combined heat and power, and energy efficiency.

Scientific American:

Smaller than a virus and used in more than 200 consumer products, silver nanoparticles can kill and mutate fish embryos, new research shows.

Tiny particles of silver – potent anti-microbial agents that can kill bacteria on contact – are becoming increasingly popular in consumer goods, including washing machines, refrigerators, clothing and toys.

“I think we jumped the gun” by creating such large volumes of nanoparticles, said University of Utah researcher Darin Furgeson. “We should take more time and really look at these new nano-systems before we start to throw them into personal products and shoot them into these ecosystems.”

Wenjuan Yang is studying nanosilver risks:

Food storage material silver nanoparticles interfere with DNA replication fidelity and bind with DNA

Chris Corrigan:

Improv of course is all about living the life of invitation in every second. It is about making offers and accepting offers. It is about building on the best of others and contributing something to help them look good. It is a world that works when generosity and attention are activated.

Malcom Gladwell:

Quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten.

One: Men and women with more testosterone like to be in charge. Indeed, they can find it stressful and uncomfortable when denied the status that they crave.

Two: Similarly, people low in testosterone find it uncomfortable to be placed in positions of authority.

Three: Teams made up of out-of-sync testosterone tend to be less effective.

Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

“We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”