todd

"This week's British Medical Journal has a wonderful social network study that examined how happiness moved through social networks. It found that even when friends of friends become happy, the effect can ripple through and boost your own contentment." - todd

My guess would negative energy ripples as well. Otherwise I think happiness would be more common :-) - todd

nadine, of course, hatred is contagious too ... there is a thing called collective consciousness, or group mind, we cannot describe the mechanics yet, but it is a hugely powerful thing .. economies rise and fall on it, ideas, countries, progress, on and on .. - Gregory Lent

"The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social “instincts” underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies." - todd

wondering if their are implications for group consciousness and its evolution through time , better go read it - Gregory Lent

link doesnt work - Gregory Lent

Google reader doesn't seem to be helping the reading process: http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/ant... - todd

"This article discusses the elements of seduction in many products and experiences, and outlines how these elements can be used to create software that is more enticing and valuable for its users." The steps are: enticement, attention, promise, fulfill promise, end the seduction. - todd

thanks, wondering a bit more deeply about the mechanics of the first, enticement .. better go read the linked article - Gregory Lent

link doesnt work - Gregory Lent

Try http://captology.stanford.edu/... - todd

"It was this latter [industrial production outpacing consumption] concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” - todd

imagine everybody happy, the economy would crash .. oh, maybe the opposite is true too - Gregory Lent

Orion is a great magazine - thought provoking - like this article. - TStowers

I hadn't spent any time looking at Orion until you mentioned it. It is an interesting magazine. Lots of cool topics. - todd

"We have learned that centralized planning, with its five-year plans, cannot begin to cope with the variety of conditions on the ground. Also, no control - i.e. the "free market" - is a major cause of our current environmental and financial crises, and applying central regulation or control to this is not likely to help. A more promising alternative is a locally cooperative and self-organizing market based upon principles such as Stafford Beer's Viable System Model. Your headline should really have read: "Local self-organization does better than central planning and control"." - todd

"Psychologists have long been interested in what happens when people's internal drives are replaced by external motivations. A host of experiments have shown that when threats and rewards enter the picture, they tend to destroy the inner drives. Paychecks and pink slips might be powerful reasons to get out of bed each day, but they turn out to be surprisingly ineffective -- and even counterproductive -- in getting people to perform at their best. " - todd

"Once the brain is sufficiently focused on the problem, the cortex needs to relax, to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere that will provide the insight. As Kounios sees it, the insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation transformed by accidental, serendipitous connections." - todd

"Try to pause when you come across a statistic or probability. Think: 'What is the human angle here, how do I appreciate this?' Rather than just taking in the number as you perceive it, stop and reflect on it. Try to re-frame the numbers" - todd

And how were these numbers determined? - Alex Scoble CISSP

From the pamphlet they gave out at the car show :-) We just figured out (guessed) a likely price and the average MPG and divided them. Some cars, like Hybrid turned out not to be as expensive for the MPG value as we thought originally. The Prius was a very good value. Your Mercedes etc not so much, but you aren't buying those for gas mileage. - todd

"The idea is to run a complete game development project in a single day so that the attendees can experience working in a team and discover first hand the trials and tribulations of making a game." - todd

Keep thinking it would be fun to run one of these in the bay area. - todd

"A free series of textbooks on the subjects of electricity and electronics" - todd

UGH - Nadine Schaeffer

136 catalogs so far this xmas season. - todd

yikes - Gregory Lent

"If you're like me, you've got a real problem with forking out the $60-plus for the odd sized piercing tapers / stretchers. Especially since, typically, you only use the thing once, and then toss it. This is even more expensive and frustrating when you are looking for unusual, custom lengths. So here you go... Make it your damn self!" - todd

"Anyway, I think this all comes down to what I’m going to call The Tyranny of Context. When we’re in the context of our lives, using technology to augment our daily activities, we don’t think about it as technology, per se. We see it as a tool to help us do fun things. But when we sit back and look at technology from afar, away from the details of context, well we often have a less positive view of it. This is precisely how the very same person who says that people watch way too much TV are then absolutely captivated when they can see the beads of sweat on Kevin Youkilis’ face when viewing a Red Sox game in HD. (that would be me)" - todd

"The textures and colors of my pieces present countless layers of tiny, infinite universes in which viewers can get lost. Both abstract and sometimes hauntingly real, the pieces welcome philosophical thought as well as walking meditation and a chance to merely space out. Whatever is read between the lines is for the beholder to discover -- a full spectrum of what can be imagined." - todd

the astral world in paint and glitter - Gregory Lent

"The device works on the well-known principle of vortex-induced vibrations, which in an ocean setting are known to play havoc with the cylindrical steel risers and mooring lines that anchor offshore oil platforms. As current flows past a cylinder, a thin layer of water gets entrained along each side of the rounded surface until, at some point at the back of the object, the layer of water separates from the surface and swirls into a vortex." - todd

have you heard of the word "vortation"? big among very progressive energy thinkers in the sacred geometry world in the bay area when i was there last year .. - Gregory Lent

"Eventually, D.C.'s memory overwhelmed him. He. struggled with mental tasks normal people find easy. When he read a novel, he would instantly memorize every word by heart, but miss the entire plot. Metaphors and poetry - though they clung to his brain like Velcro - were incomprehensible. He couldn't even use the phone because he found it hard to recognize a person's voice "when it changes its intonation...and it does that 20 or 30 times a day." - todd

so is esp, if you don't know how to turn it off ..people's thoughts are mostly rubbish - Gregory Lent

"Abstract: After sketching the conflict between objectivists and subjectivists on the foundations of statistics, this paper discusses an issue facing statisticians of both schools, namely, model validation. Statistical models originate in the study of games of chance, and have been successfully applied in the physical and life sciences. However, there are basic problems in applying the models to social phenomena; some of the difficulties will be pointed out. Hooke’s law will be contrasted with regression models for salary discrimination, the latter being a fairly typical application in the social sciences." - todd

Unfortunately it can take months of intensive number crunching to get the results from one collision. If you think soccer is slow... :) - mikepk

In my alternate world fantasy we've put the same resources into tech as we do sports and entertainment so it's real time :-) - todd

totally agree, communities don't root for the sport, they root for one team, sad ... and no national anthem either please, - Gregory Lent

". But I do argue that suburbia can realistically provide around 50% of its food, can act as a localized buffer against disruptions, and can provide a high percentage of vitamins, minerals, flavor, and culturally-important foods" - todd

"If our brains are, in fact, becoming rewired, wouldn't it make sense that the way we teach students to learn should adapt, too? Actually, there aren't too many people who think so. Most educators, like Richard Cairns, Headmaster of Brighton College, one of the U.K's top-performing independent schools, believe that core level of knowledge was essential. "It's important that children learn facts. If you have no store of knowledge in your head to draw from, you cannot easily engage in discussions or make informed decisions," he says." - todd

"Using the data, they showed that the growth rates of connectivities between packages are proportional to the degree of connectivity between packages. In addition, they showed empirically that the average growth rate of the total number of links to a given package over a time interval is proportional to that time interval. Further, the variability of the total number of links to a given package increases proportionally to the square-root of time, providing a crucial test of the mechanism of stochastic proportional growth of connectivity between packages. Altogether, these characteristics are responsible for the universal distribution pattern of Zipf’s law. " - todd

Interesting, I will have to look at this closer later. - xero

It's scary how deep these patterns run. They hold across so many radically different domains. - todd

"If you qualify for this job and have all the above, then you are wasting your time as a software developer and should instead be working as a physicist saving the universe from future catastrophe. No joke." - todd

Talk about alphabet soup—In the "Required Skills" list alone 25 out of 26 letters of the English language are utilized (all but "Z" - how could they not require intimate knowledge of the ZFS filesystem!?) - Micah Wittman

" We see a major opportunity for the criminal justice system to take advantage of recent advances in the pharmacological treatment of opioid addiction—in particular by facilitating the use of an injectable drug called naltrexone to prevent relapse by individuals who are under community legal supervision (probation or parole)." - todd

"The Virtual Space Station's depression module will follow the problem-solving treatment (PST) approach to therapy. James Cartreine, the principal investigator on the Virtual Space Station project, says his team chose this form of intervention because it is empirically supported and has high face validity – in other words, it’s immediately apparent to users of the Virtual Space Station how the interactive programme is going to help them." - todd

" Don’t expect Google’s search analytics to get much better as this technology is near the end of its road as well. The reason being is; they are applying analytics to documents … which are really just context-less pixels. Quantum leaps forward in search are going to come from context accumulation." - todd

GROSS! - Mark Wilson

Is that chill or hide Ladybug? :-) - todd

Chill, actually, Todd. The water in there isn't refrigerator-cold, but it's definitely cooler than room temperature. I learned that trick while on travel with a dedicated beer-drinker. - Ladybug Heather

A name change wouldn't hurt either. Plaxico? Sounds like an off-shore oil company. - Derrick

i think it's safe to say i can now drop him from my fantasy team :\ - Matt Musgrave