Skip to main content

Home/ sharingknowledge/ Group items tagged wellness

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Innovation Blues

Economics: An ordinary Joe | The Economist - 0 views

  • o Mr Stiglitz, this inequality is the result of public policy being captured by a
  • To Mr Stiglitz, this inequality is the result of public policy being captured by an elite who have feathered their own nests at the expense of the rest. They have used their power to distort political debate, pushing through tax cuts to favour the rich and adjusting monetary policy to favour the banks. Many of the new rich are not entrepreneurs but “rent-seekers”, he says, who use monopoly power to boost profits. Mr Stiglitz's views are representative of clever, leftish America and Mr Stiglitz is (mostly) skilled at making his argument. Imagine, he says, what it would be like if the world had free movement of labour, but not of capital. “Countries would compete to attract workers. They would promise good schools and a good environment, as well as low taxes on workers. This could be financed by high taxes on capital.” The result would be a much more equal society. Mr Stiglitz's argument would benefit, however, from a better sense of history and geography. He points to the period between 1950 and 1980 as one where inequality was much reduced. But that was a highly unusual time. For much of recorded history there has been a huge gap between a wealthy landowning class and the rest; the Rockefellers and Carnegies were much richer (in real terms) than any modern plutocrat. Mr Stiglitz also views the housing boom and bust as another result of misguided American policy, but Spain and Ireland had property bubbles too—and they are much more equal societies.
  • When it comes to solutions to the inequality problem, Mr Stiglitz wants a top income tax rate of “well in excess of” 50%, targeted fiscal stimulus and greater bank regulation. Here, perhaps, he might have been more open about the trade-offs. Controls on bank leverage, caps on interest rates and greater protection for bankrupts are all likely to reduce bank lending at a time when there already is a credit squeeze. He admits that the 2009 fiscal stimulus was “not as well designed as it could have been”, but blithely hopes that the convoluted American budget-setting process will result in much better stimulus packages in future. Whether or not he has the right answers, Mr Stiglitz is surely right to focus on the issue. Across the developed world, the average worker is suffering a squeeze in living standards while bankers and chief executives are still doing very nicely. This dichotomy is bound to have social and political consequences.
Innovation Blues

Iceland's Economy Is Mending Amid Europe's Malaise - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Iceland seems to be doing surprisingly well.
  • It has repaid, early, many of the international loans that kept it afloat. Unemployment is hovering around 6 percent, and falling. And while much of Europe is struggling to pull itself out of the recessionary swamp, Iceland’s economy is expected to grow by 2.8 percent this year.
  •  
    Iceland seems to be doing surprisingly well. It has repaid, early, many of the international loans that kept it afloat. Unemployment is hovering around 6 percent, and falling. And while much of Europe is struggling to pull itself out of the recessionary swamp, Iceland's economy is expected to grow by 2.8 percent this year.
Innovation Blues

Comments on Economics: An ordinary Joe | The Economist - 0 views

  • Finally, countless Americans are, by world standards, vastly over-paid and have been found out. There is nothing a laborer in Manhattan can do that someone just as competent but living in El Salvador cannot do for perhaps one-fifth the price. It should be no surprise that 6% of the world's population can no longer enjoy 25% of the world's output -- there was no place to go but down.
  • Normally, the lack of a middle class would preclude a nation from being a world power, but the Anglo-American establishment was able to pay for American industrialization by borrowing British capital; from America’s inception until World War I, it was a debtor nation.
  • Unlike England, which prior to the welfare state of 1909, really did have a large middle class (roughly 40% of the population) America never did; for most of its history the middle class have never been more than 6% of Americans (probably less the 3% today). Middle Class values were the preserve of the WASP establishment, a small elite of German Jews, an even smaller elite of African-Americansand an assortment of assimilated white “ethnics”, but for the most part the American population was working class; focused on today, consuming all they produced.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • When Pat gets old he can retire comfortably and leave his widow comfortable as well, again was this because of savings, no; Pat got a company pension (inflation adjusted) and health care for the rest of his life with right of survivorship. All of this sounds great, but it wasn’t real; it was all a result of America ability to overcharge the world for capital goods; the costs of all these benefits were passed on to the rest of the world in higher priced capital good and dollar inflation. These programs allowed people to live middle class lives they never earned and could never keep (absent the programs). In fact, by 1970 it cost an American producer more in labor cost per ton of steel than what he could get for it on the world market. The fantasy world America has built post-World War 2 has been falling apart since the 1980s and the last leg, the dollars reserve currency status, is about to go. The disappearance of the American Dream is simply America reverting back to where its populations core values and behavior patterns would naturally take it.
  • The American Dream is rapidly fading because it was never real or at least never genuinely earned by Americans. When I speak of the “Middle Class”, I don’t simply mean possessing a middle class income, but rather having middle class patterns of behavior and world views. To be middle class is to be future time preference oriented; to accept short term pain for long term gain; to always be looking to get ahead and to plan ahead. Simply put, to be middle class is to consume less than what you produce, reinvesting the excess to produce more in the future.
  • America was the only large industrial power left standing after World War 2 and because it could charge the rest of the world what it wanted for capital goods, it could extract “rents” to support the fantasy of the American Dream. Consider the 1950s, the beginning of universal White middle-classdom and take a typical Irish guy; Pat. Pat grew up in an ethnic Irish slum like his father and grandfather, but he now can afford to buy a house; is it because he diligently saved his money and stayed focused, no; it is because he can get a VA loan or an FHA loan with no money down and easy payments. Pat dropped out of school at 16 and is not too interested in expanding his skills, is he on the streets, no; because of unions he can get an assembly line job. Moreover, because the NLR act effectively unionized every major industrial company and industry, Pat can look forward to annual raises (regardless of productivity) for his entire working life. When his children are old enough, Pat can afford to send them to college, is it because he saved before each child was born and spaced his children accordingly, no; they can get government loans , grants, and go to a subsides state college. When Pats parents get old they are not a burden, is it because they learned middleclass values and started to save, no; his parents rely on social security and Medicare (after 1965).
  • Europe is on the verge of a complete and total economic collapse...why?...because for decades their government has used force to take money from those who work hard and then give that money to those who don't work hard.
  • The capitalist equivalent of a socialist revolution is a Great Depression that wipes out the value of the paper assets the wealthy had accumulated, leaving the government to reallocate the real assets more equally. We almost had this happen in 2008, but the 1 percent blackmailed the rest with fear of collateral damage.
Innovation Blues

Science of morality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Even the Buddhist ideal of having no desires, and hence no unsatisfied desires, is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain for a whole society – not least of all for younger people (who, Daleiden says, have less self control). Science of morality could never yield a utopia. Nevertheless, science of morality could greatly increase well-being for very many people.[54]
  • Daleiden's last factor in prosocial training, mental associations, is quite familiar: he says it has been traditionally understood as the conscience – where the student learns to feel empathy, and to feel regret for harming others. Unless an individual can, and begins to feel empathy, it may be unlikely that any amount of reasoning, or any coherent moral system will motivate them to behave very altruistically.
  • it should be the intention of adults to shape children, or presumably "indoctrinate" them, to think critically. He adds that the focus is on especially socially relevant values (e.g. kindness, sharing, reasoning) and not the more personal
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Religion, although it is not the best method of determining moral norms, has often been very effective at promoting them. Religions often satisfy many of Daleiden's criteria for raising people to be conditioned egoists, especially by practicing the aforementioned elements of prosocial training. He suggests that this is what they are doing when they instill a sense of virtue and justice, right and wrong.
  • Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 imagine dystopian future societies that control the populace by advanced scientific techniques. Harris argues that moral scientists approaching truths does not imply an "Orwellian future" with "scientists at every door". Instead, Harris imagines data about normative moral issues being shared in the same way as other sciences (e.g. peer-reviewed journals on medicine).
  • Science of morality should identify basic components required for human flourishing, drawing heavily on findings from positive psychology. In a proto-scientific example, Abraham Maslow suggested a hierarchy of needs: basic physical survival, then social and self esteem needs, and lastly philosophical and self-actualization.
  • self-
  • Research looking for optimal ethical systems can draw on all the methods of science, especially those used by positive psychology. While this might include obvious methods like asking people to self-report what they think they need to flourish in life – psychology has shown that people are often surprisingly incorrect on these matters (particularly when it comes to making predictions and recollections). Some cases in point: having too many varieties of consumer goods actually creates consumer choice anxiety; when it comes to removing bandages, Dan Ariely's research suggests that "getting it over with as quickly as possible" may cause more negative memories than if one went slowly (with breaks) while being careful never to reach a 'peak' in pain; stress is not always harmful (such stress is called eustress). While very careful use of self-report can still be illuminating (e.g. bogus pipeline techniques), in the end, unconscious methods of inquiry seem to be more promising. Some unconscious methods of data collection include the Implicit Association Test and neuroimaging. In these ways, science can further our understanding of what humans need to flourish, and what ways of organizing society provide the greatest hope for flourishing.
  • Extensive study of cooperation has shed some light on the objective (and subjective) advantages of teamwork and empathy. The brain areas that are consistently involved when humans reason about moral issues have been investigated by a quantitative large-scale meta-analysis of the brain activity changes reported in the moral neuroscience literature.[76] In fact, the neural network underlying moral decisions overlapped with the network pertaining to representing others' intentions (i.e., theory of mind) and the network pertaining to representing others' (vicariously experienced) emotional states (i.e., empathy).
  • There is evidence to suggest that a risk factor for becoming victims of bullying is deficient moral development. Examples of deficient moral development may be something like neglecting an agent's intentions during an action, or blaming them for accidents. In other words, victims of bullying may be more likely to make less accurate moral assessments, for some reason. The researchers also found that, in contrast, bullies were just as morally developed as victim defenders. The difference is that bullies are more able to disengage themselves. That is, for whatever reason, bullies end up suppressing their feelings of compassion and conscience.[77]
Innovation Blues

Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing - 0 views

  • Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing
  • The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children's Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.
Innovation Blues

How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air - TED 2009 - GreenSpaces - 0 views

  • How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air
  • With only three varieties of plants, we can “grow our own fresh air” indoors, to keep us healthy.
  • 1. Areca Palm (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens)Works well in the day timeGreat for living areasOne needs about 4 shoulder high plants/personNeeds to be put outdoors once every 3-4 monthsThe leaves of the plant need to be wiped everyday in Delhi and perhaps once a month in a cleaner cityThe soil used should be of vermi manure or use hydroponics
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 2. Mother-in-law’s Tongue (Sansevieria trifasciata)Converts CO2 into O2 at nightOne requires about 6-8 such waist high plants per person in the bedroomLeaves need to be wiped in the same way as the Areca PalmThe soil used should be of vermi manure or use hydroponics
  • 3. Money Plant (Epipremnum aureum)Excellent for removing Formaldehyde and other VOC’sBest grown using hydroponic
Innovation Blues

Overview of Online Project Management & Planning Software | Clarizen - 0 views

  • All Together NowClarizen’s pure SaaS-based project execution platform goes beyond project management, giving your whole team a centralized environment to manage projects, tasks, resources, budgets – as well as associate emails, chat and documents - with in an intuitive, easy to use UI. Project managers and organizations get real-time visibility and clarity, enabling them to make decisions based on data, not guesswork.  Users of the system gain a flexible, task management tool to help them understand priorities and get the important work done on time.
  • The Project Software Your Team will UseClarizen has great adoption rates, because it is provides each user a personalized dashboard showing only tasks, conversations, and documents that are relevant to them. As each user updates their status, using email, mobile apps, or from within Clarizen, this data rolls up to the manager’s view. As a project manager or executive, you have full visibility to plan, delegate, and get real-time status into what your team is working on.
  • Combining Project Structure with CollaborationClarizen marries project management with collaboration, ensuring that all email, chat and other unstructured communications are associated within the context of a project.  The result is a work management environment with robust simplicity: Clarizen is feature-rich and powerful enough for the most seasoned project professional, yet it’s easy for a novice to begin working more productively as soon as they begin using Clarizen.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Real-Time Visibility to Your Projects' StatusGain real-time visibility to your project's status by empowering team members to take an active role in managing their own time and tasks. You can define your project's key deliverables and get immediate visibility about where you stand with Clarizen’s unique Roadmap view. Set your roadmap as an external widget, and share your progress with your team, your exec team, and even your customers or suppliers. Stay current through email alert notifications and easy-to-understand personalized dashboards. Know exactly what is new for you and what requires your attention, according to your role and responsibilities.
  • Start Today!Online project management software offers many benefits. A pure SaaS model means rapid ROI, minimal IT intervention, and ensures users are always working with the latest version of the application. Clarizen’s flexible and simple pricing model – no up-front investment and no hidden costs, allows you to add or subtract users as needed, adjusting your investment to your project planning and business needs.Best of all, you can login and get started immediately!
Innovation Blues

Caffeine: A User's Guide to Getting Optimally Wired - Developing Intelligence - 0 views

  • Caffeine: A User’s Guide to Getting Optimally Wired
  • Caffeine is the most widely used stimulant in the world, but few use it to maximal advantage. Get optimally wired with these tips.
  • 1) Consume in small, frequent amounts. Between 20-200mg per hour may be an optimal dose for cognitive function. Caffeine crosses the blood-brain barrier quickly (owing to its lipid solubility) although it can take up to 45 minutes for full ingestion through the gastro-intestinal tract. Under normal conditions, this remains stable for around 1 hour before gradually clearing in the following 3-4 hours (depending on a variety of factors). A landmark 2004 study showed that small hourly doses of caffeine (.3mg per kg of body weight [approx 20 mg per hour; thanks digg!]) can support extended wakefulness, potentially by counteracting the homeostatic sleep pressure, which builds slowly across the day and acts preferentially on the prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain thought responsible for executive and “higher” cognitive functions).
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 2) Play to your cognitive strengths while wired. Caffeine may increase the speed with which you work, may decrease attentional lapses, and may even benefit recall – but is less likely to benefit more complex cognitive functions, and may even hurt others. Plan accordingly (and preferably prior to consuming caffeine!)
  • Recall from memory may be improved by caffeine (here and here), possibly due to enhancements in memory encoding rather than retrieval per se. Another study shows caffeine can actually impair estimates of “memory scanning” speed (in the Sternberg paradigm), so the failure of many studies to find recall-related effects of caffeine may reflect a speed-accuracy tradeoff at the time of retrieval.
  • 3) Play to caffeine’s strengths. Caffeine’s effects can be maximized or minimized depending on what else is in your system at the time. The beneficial effects of caffeine may be most pronounced in conjunction with sugar. For example, one factor analytic study has shown caffeine-glucose cocktails provide benefits to cognition not seen with either alone.
  • Withdrawal symptoms can onset within 12 to 24 hours of caffeine consumption and last between 2 and 9 days.
  • Caffeine’s effects might be masked by green tea extract, Kava Kava or St. John’s Wort – all of which contain theanine and are associated with subjective feelings of relaxation – but other preliminary evidence indicates the opposite effect: theanine might actually potentiate the benefits of caffeine on some tasks (reported in longer format here).
  • Similarly, nicotine may speed the metabolism of caffeine.
  • 4) Know when to stop – and when to start again. Although you may not grow strongly tolerant to caffeine, you can become dependent on it and suffer withdrawal symptoms. Balance these concerns with the cognitive and health benefits associated with caffeine consumption – and appropriately timed resumption.
  • Long-term ingestion of large quantities of caffeine (by way of coffee) is associated with a variety of health benefits – not only cognitive enhancements but also reduction in risk for type 2 diabetes (c.f.), Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s . These beneficial effects may be related to the neuroprotective role of adenosine.
  • some studies show grapefruit juice might keep caffeine levels in the bloodstream high for longer, though others have found no such effect
  • In addition, there are well-established cognitive effects where recall is best when it matches the context of encoding – so if you’re caffeinated when you study for the test, you better be caffeinated when you take it.
  • 5) Finding good sources of caffeine Despite the huge variety of sources of caffeine – including caffeinated soap, candy, and of course chocolate – the optimal use of caffeine is likely to involve small, hourly doses along with some cardioprotective agent. Given the high solubility of caffeine, absorption time should not be an issue (but if for some reason it is, try gum). Otherwise, why not enjoy a cup of green tea (coffee-flavored, if you must), as the Chinese have for nearly 5000 years? It’s hard to come by a better longitudinal study than that.
Innovation Blues

Memory News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - Lifehacker - 0 views

  • Remember More Without Trying Too Hard
  • Memory is a tricky beast. You might sit and study for hours on end, but for some reason it never seems to stick with you. However, as Time points out, implicit learning relies on three factors that are easy to control.
  • You'll need to do three things when studying or learning a new skill: Give your mind a ton of material: This might seem obvious, but immersing yourself completely in what you're trying to learn is the first step to actually learning it. You don't have to actively try to memorize things, just expose yourself to the skill or material as much as possible. Practice: We tend to stop practicing a skill or stop studying when we think "we've got it." However, well after we learn something we still continue to refine that skill. Sleep: It's thought that sleep is essential to learning and remembering. Some studies have suggested that the brain identifies patterns in our memories and consolidates them to make them permanent when we're sleeping. In essence, a good night of rest might be better than an all-night study-fest.
Innovation Blues

What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain - 0 views

  • affeine is one seriously misunderstood substance. It's not a simple upper, and it works differently on different people with different tolerances—even in different menstrual cycles. But you can make it work better for you.
  • Luckily, one intrepid reader and writer has actually done that reading, and weighed that evidence, and put together a highly readable treatise on the subject. Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, by Stephen R. Braun, is well worth the short 224-page read. It was released in 1997, but remains the most accessible treatise on what is and isn't understood about what caffeine and alcohol do to the brain.
  • Caffeine Doesn't Actually Get You Wired Right off the bat, it's worth stating again: the human brain, and caffeine, are nowhere near totally understood and easily explained by modern science. That said, there is a consensus on how a compound found all over nature, caffeine, affects the mind.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Normally, when adenosine levels reach a certain point in your brain and spinal cord, your body will start nudging you toward sleep, or at least taking it easy. There are actually a few different adenosine receptors throughout the body, but the one caffeine seems to interact with most directly is the A1 receptor.
  • it functions as a supremely talented adenosine impersonator. It heads right for the adenosine receptors in your system and, because of its similarities to adenosine, it's accepted by your body as the real thing and gets into the receptors.
  • caffeine actually binds to those receptors in efficient fashion, but doesn't activate them—they're plugged up by caffeine's unique shape and chemical makeup. With those receptors blocked, the brain's own stimulants, dopamine and glutamate, can do their work more freely—"Like taking the chaperones out of a high school dance,"
  • caffeine very clearly doesn't press the "gas" on your brain, and that it only blocks a "primary" brake. There are other compounds and receptors that have an effect on what your energy levels feel like—GABA, for example—but caffeine is a crude way of preventing your brain from bringing things to a halt. "You can," Braun writes, "get wired only to the extent that your natural excitatory neurotransmitters support it." In other words, you can't use caffeine to completely wipe out an entire week's worth of very late nights of studying, but you can use it to make yourself feel less bogged down by sleepy feelings in the morning.
  • What's important to take away is that caffeine is not as simple in effect as a direct stimulant, such as amphet
  • amines or cocaine; its effect on your alertness is far more subtle.
  • The general consensus on caffeine studies shows that it can enhance work output, but mainly in certain types of work. For tired people who are doing work that's relatively straightforward, that doesn't require lots of subtle or abstract thinking, coffee has been shown to help increase output and quality. Caffeine has also been seen to improve memory creation and retention when it comes to "declarative memory," the kind students use to remember lists or answers to exam questions.
  • The effectiveness of caffeine varies significantly from person to person, due to genetics and other factors in play. The average half-life of caffeine—that is, how long it takes for half of an ingested dose to wear off—is about five to six hours in a human body. Women taking oral birth control require about twice as long to process caffeine. Women between the ovulation and beginning of menstruation see a similar, if less severe, extended half-life. For regular smokers, caffeine takes half as long to process—which, in some ways, explains why smokers often drink more coffee and feel more agitated and anxious, because they're unaware of how their bodies work without cigarettes.
  • regular caffeine use has also been shown to decrease receptors for norepinephrine, a hormone akin to adrenaline, along with serotonin, a mood enhancer. At the same time, your body can see a 65 percent increase in receptors for GABA, a compound that does many things, including regulate muscle tone and neuron firing. Some studies have also seen changes in different adenosine receptors when caffeine becomes a regular thing.
  • A 1995 study suggests that humans become tolerant to their daily dose of caffeine—whether a single soda or a serious espresso habit—somewhere between a week and 12 days. And that tolerance is pretty strong.
  • You start to feel caffeine withdrawal very quickly, anywhere from 12 to 24 hours after your last use. That's a big part of why that first cup or can in the morning is so important—it's staving off the early effects of withdrawal. The reasons for the withdrawal are the same as with any substance dependency: your brain was used to operating one way with caffeine, and now it's suddenly working under completely different circumstances, but all those receptor changes are still in place. Headaches are the nearly universal effect of cutting off caffeine, but depression, fatigue, lethargy, irritability, nausea, and vomiting can be part of your cut-off, too, along with more specific issues, like eye muscle spasms. Generally, though, you'll be over it in around 10 days—again, depending on your own physiology and other factors.
  • Beyond the equivalent of four cups of coffee in your system at once, caffeine isn't giving you much more boost—in fact, at around the ten-cup level, you're probably less alert than non-drinkers.
Innovation Blues

Falling for Science - The MIT Press - 0 views

  • "This is a book about science, technology, and love," writes Sherry Turkle. In it, we learn how a love for science can start with a love for an object—a microscope, a modem, a mud pie, a pair of dice, a fishing rod. Objects fire imagination and set young people on a path to a career in science. In this collection, distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers as well as twenty-five years of MIT students describe how objects encountered in childhood became part of the fabric of their scientific selves. In two major essays that frame the collection, Turkle tells a story of inspiration and connection through objects that is often neglected in standard science education and in our preoccupation with the virtual.
1 - 12 of 12
Showing 20 items per page