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People who see the "glass as half empty" may be more willing to contribute to a common goal if they already identify with it, according to researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, University of Chicago and Sungkyunkwan University.

"The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds-fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself. We're not driven only by emotions, of course-we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower-and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about."

"Why the increasing business use of social media by business? Social media offers immense potential for marketing, image-making, advertising, public relations efforts, customer relations, investor relations and a variety of other positive, beneficial activities.  But it also carries potential risks, a caveat perfectly illustrated by the Hastings case. The risks of social media are in some, but not all respects, similar to those of print media.  But not all libel laws apply-issues of malice and negligence have not been definitively decided in the courts. Insider trading issues, however, are clear.  The transmission via social media of insider information about a publicly traded company is illegal. Using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or private blogs to transmit insider information to large numbers of people is a violation of law."

ONE HAS LATELY heard much of the hashtag. That is, the Twitter symbol #, used to categorize a tweet. Charlie Sheen's first tweet, for example, was famously: "Winning ..! Choose your Vice... #winning #chooseyourvice." #Winning has gone on to live in irony across the Twitterverse, in mockery of the eternally less-than-winning Sheen. But even President Obama recently urged students to tweet their senators about raising the interest rates on federally subsidized student loans with the hashtag "#DontDoubleMyRate." The new thing, however, is using the word "hashtag" in conversation. Especially if you are under a certain age, you may be catching people saying things like, "I ran into that guy I met-hashtag happy!" or, in response to someone complaining, "My flashlight app isn't working," perhaps you have heard the retort, "Hashtag First World problems!" A college student not long ago reported a favorite witticism to be appending observations with: "Hashtag did that just happen?

"With the rise of texting, instant chat and transcription apps, more people are ditching the venerable tool that once revolutionized the telephone business, displaced armies of secretaries and allowed us to eat dinner more or less in peace. The behavioral shift is occurring in tandem with the irreversible fading of voice calls in general, prompting more wireless carriers to offer unlimited voice minutes. In data prepared for USA Today, Vonage, an Internet phone company, says the number of voice-mail messages left on user accounts was down 8 percent in July from a year ago."

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The entire Indiana University community mourns the passing today of Distinguished Professor Elinor Ostrom, who received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her groundbreaking research on the ways that people organize themselves to manage resources. Ostrom, 78, died of cancer at 6:40 a.m. today at IU Health Bloomington Hospital surrounded by friends.

"I know you're not a reader but man, you'd love this." It was pointless saying so but I couldn't help myself. I'd fallen head long again, deep into a story I didn't have to overhear or construct for myself. I was spending hours in my own little world, happily away from the enforced gaming I resisted at school - supposedly classical games that would make us better people.

Business bloggers at Harvard Business Review discuss a variety of business topics including managing people, innovation, leadership, and more.

The joke was intended to be absurd, but the absurdity presumed a lack of seriousness in the whole matter. It was an attempt at post-serious humor - but most people with common sense agree that the struggles of Tibet still deserve respect and seriousness. The joke is on anyone who really cares. It came across as the kind of out-of-touch humor that overprivileged, spiritually mean, advertising industry creatives (specifically, the kind that kids refer to as "douchebags") would come up with.

During the week of February 14-18, private businesses and government agencies are encouraged to allow employees who normally make the trek into office each day to work from home instead. More than 35,000 companies and organizations have pledged to participate in the event. According to the official Telework Week Website, this would save an estimated $2,451,069 and more than 1,600 tons of pollutants from entering the atmosphere. Where these numbers come from is not entirely clear, but it stands to reason that fewer people commuting would help save money and reduce pollution to some extent.

Social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube continue to polarize corporations and people in charge of networks, judging by a new report from OpenDNS. The sites showed up on both "top blacklisted" and "top whitelisted" lists covering the entire year of 2010.

The increasing use of text-messaging by teens - and increasingly often, by younger children - has given some people cause for concern. They argue that the abbreviations used in texting are detrimental to literacy development. Spelling, grammar, phrasing - these are all somehow poised to suffer, critics of texting contend, because of the use of shortened words and sentences. Soon, they predict, students' essays will be filled with LOLs and L8Rs. But a new study from Coventry University finds no evidence that having access to mobile phones harms children's literacy skills. In fact, the research suggests that texting abbreviations or "textisms" may actually aid reading, writing, and spelling skills.

"When you create a new article, blog post, or a new page on your web site (a new URL), the search engine will crawl that URL. They might even see some links form other web sites to that new URL. But if the search engines see real people mentioning the URL and interacting with it, they consider that the URL is validated, socially. The URL is "accepted". And it's that human interaction that the search engines are looking for. If the search engines can figure out some form of social validation of a URL, then most likely it is going to be a page that they will want to show in their search results. Social validation is that human SEO factor that the search engines have been looking to include in their algorithm for a very long time."

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have been dubbed by some to be "Wiki Revolutions" because "just as people can self-organize to contribute to Wikipedia...they can participate in social change and coalesce into revolutionary movements as never before." Now, it seems that wikis may not only be behind toppling governments, but also stripping plagiarizing government officials of their educational titles. This week, German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the "Dr" from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

The best managers know how to frame work as a problem that is a lot of work to complete and a small amount of work to check. Mediocre managers spend too much time checking and revising their employees' work, and begin to approach the cost of just doing it themselves. (The worst managers hire incompetent people.) Wolfram Alpha made me this cute Venn diagram of the sweet spot: Competent (C) and not Micromanaged (M). Teams led by good managers reside in the shaded area of the diagram.

Feedback from friends posted publicly on people's profiles also tend to be overwhelmingly positive, which can further boost self-esteem, said Hancock, who co-authored a paper published Feb. 24 in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking."Unlike a mirror, which reminds us of who we really are and may have a negative effect on self-esteem if that image does not match with our ideal, Facebook can show a positive version of ourselves," Hancock said. "We're not saying that it's a deceptive version of self, but it's a positive one."It may be one of the reasons why Facebook has 500 million users, who spend more than 700 billion minutes per month communicating with their friends via photos, links and status updates."For many people, there's an automatic assumption that the Internet is bad. This is one of the first studies to show that there's a psychological benefit of Facebook," Hancock said.

The arrival of Generation C will have an impact comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution, but it will take place much more quickly. For managers, it is no longer sufficient to plan for the next few quarters, or even the next few years. Companies that aren't willing to determine their strategies for the longer term - 10 to 15 years out - are putting their business models and value chains at risk. Executives must begin now to develop an agenda that includes an analysis of the capabilities and workforces they will need in the next decade and beyond. A critical step will be to make sure that the organization as a whole understands the coming changes, and that there are already people within the organization who are living these changes now, who don't perceive them as a threat, and who can help integrate them into the organization's business plan.

YouGov BrandIndex shared some findings with us regarding brand perception around Groupon in light of the company's (what some might refer to as) blunders.  A spokesperson for the firm tells WebProNews, "With two strikes under its belt within 10 days of each other (Super Bowl ad, flower debacle), how's Groupon consumer perception faring? People love the bargains of Groupon, but they are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with what's been going on." "YouGov BrandIndex looked at three scores to get a much fuller picture -- buzz (what are you hearing), satisfaction (are you a satisfied customer) and value (does this give you good value)," he says.