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It is a simple idea supported by both economic theory and most people’s intuition: If welfare benefits are generous and taxes high, fewer people will work. Why bother being industrious, after all, if you can get a check from the government for sitting around

The idea may be backward.

Some of the highest employment rates in the advanced world are in places with the highest taxes and most generous welfare systems, namely Scandinavian countries.

Given how ordinary people use the term, it’s not surprising that academic economists are a little vague about it—but you’ll be glad to hear that they know they’re being vague. A generation of economists have criticized their colleagues’ inability to specify what a “market” actually is. George Stigler, back in 1967, thought it “a source of embarrassment that so little attention has been paid to the theory of markets.” Sociologists agree: according to Harrison White, there is no “neoclassical theory of the market—[only] a pure theory of exchange.” And Wayne Baker found that the idea of the market is “typically assumed—not studied” by most economists, who “implicitly characterize ‘market’ as a ‘featureless plane.’

When we say “market” now, we mean nothing particularly specific, and, at the same time, everything—the entire economy, of course, but also our lives in general. If you can name it, there’s a market in it: housing, education, the law, dating. Maybe even love is “just an economy based on resource scarcity.”

The use of markets to describe everything is odd, because talking about “markets” doesn’t even help us understand how the economy works—let alone the rest of our lives. Even though nobody seems to know what it means, we use the metaphor freely, even unthinkingly. Let the market decide. The markets are volatile. The markets responded poorly. Obvious facts—that the economy hasn’t rebounded after the recession—are hidden or ignored, because “the market” is booming, and what is the economy other than “the market”? Well, it’s lots of other things. We might see that if we talked about it a bit differently.

. The purpose of this review article is to summarize recent researches focusing on phantom limb in order to discuss its definition, mechanisms, and treatments.

The incidence of phantom limb pain has varied from 2% in earlier records to higher rates today. Initially, patients were less likely to mention pain symptoms than today which is a potential explanation for the discrepancy in incidence rates. However, Sherman et al.4 discuss that only 17% phantom limb complaints were initiated treated by physicians. Consequently, it is important to determine what constitutes phantom pain in order to provide efficacious care. Phantom pain is pain sensation to a limb, organ or other tissue after amputation and/or nerve injury.5 In podiatry, the predominant cause of phantom limb pain is after limb amputation due to diseased state presenting with an unsalvageable limb. Postoperative pain sensations from stump neuroma pain, prosthesis, fibrosis, and residual local tissue inflammation can be similar to phantom limb pain (PLP). Patients with PLP complain of various sensations including burning, stinging, aching, and piercing pain with changing warmth and cold sensation to the amputated area which waxes and wanes.6 Onset of symptoms may be elicited by environmental, emotional, or physical changes.

The human body encompasses various neurologic mechanisms allowing reception, transport, recognition, and response to numerous stimuli. Pain, temperature, crude touch, and pressure sensory information are carried to the central nervous system via the anterolateral system, with pain & temperature information transfer via lateral spinothalamic tracts to the parietal lobe. In detail, pain sensation from the lower extremity is transported from a peripheral receptor to a first degree pseudounipolar neurons in the dorsal root ganglion and decussate and ascend to the third-degree neurons within the thalamus.7 This sensory information will finally arrive at the primary sensory cortex in the postcentral gyrus of the parietal lobe which houses the sensory homunculus.8 It is unsurprising that with an amputation that such an intricate highway of information transport to and from the periphery may have the potential for problematic neurologic developments.

First-world commercial air travel has become so extremely safe that when something does go wrong, figuring it out can be a huge challenge -- which heightens the mystery and, for many people, the terror of these episodes, by making them seem so random.

the FAA standard, and pretty much the global standard, for certifying critical components and systems is one in a billion probability of failure, or 10 to the minus 9th. The FAA calls this standard "improbable."

That means in a transport category airplane [JF note: this includes airliners] the certification standard for a failure, or combination of failures, that would prevent the airplane from successfully landing on a runway must be one in a billion flights. Not hours, flights.

economic historians reckon the question of whether the benefits of globalisation outweigh the downsides is more complicated than this. For them, the answer depends on when you say the process of globalisation started.

it is impossible to say how much of a “good thing” a process is in history without first defining for how long it has been going on.

Although Adam Smith himself never used the word, globalisation is a key theme in the Wealth of Nations. His description of economic development has as its underlying principle the integration of markets over time. As the division of labour enables output to expand, the search for specialisation expands trade, and gradually, brings communities from disparate parts of the world together

Travel experience is valued in globalized society. “Loves to travel” is tacked onto countless dating profiles.

Conventional wisdom holds that travel makes us well-rounded people. But what actually are the psychological effects of travel? 

New research suggests there's a dark side lurking underneath the well-established benefits of foreign experiences.

it’s a good time for a critical review of the technical literature of self-driving cars. This literature reveals that autonomous vehicles don’t work as well as their creators might like the public to believe.

The world is a 3-D grid with x, y, and z coordinates. The car moves through the grid from point A to point B, using highly precise GPS measurements gathered from nearby satellites. Several other systems operate at the same time. The car’s sensors bounce out laser radar waves and measure the response time to build a “picture” of what is outside.

It is a masterfully designed, intricate computational system. However, there are dangers.

On the London Underground, Piccadilly Circus station is nearly vacant on a weekday morning, while the Delhi Metro is ferrying fewer than half of the riders it used to. In Rio, unpaid bus drivers have gone on strike. New York City subway traffic is just a third of what it was before the pandemic.

Public transit offers a relatively simple way for cities to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention a way to improve air quality, noise and congestion.

“It’s urgent to act.”

European plane maker Airbus EADSY -0.02% SE said Wednesday it plans to cut production of its flagship A380 superjumbo and A400M military transport aircraft, threatening thousands of jobs, though overall strong demand for airliners may mitigate staff cuts.

But Airbus’s A380 has missed out on the boom. Airlines worry that they won’t be able to fill an aircraft that seats more than 500 passengers. Plus, the superjumbo carries a price tag of $445.6 million before typical discounts,

Emirates Airline, the world’s largest by international traffic, in February signed an order for 20 A380s with an option for 16 more.

the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller in his book "The Mating Mind" explored the notion that since human males woo their mates with art, poetry, music and humor, as well as with brawn, much of the expansion of our brain may have been sexually selected.

sexual selection explains civilization itself. They mathematically explored the possibility that "as females prefer males who conspicuously consume, an increasing proportion of males engage in innovation, labor and other productive activities in order to engage in conspicuous consumption. These activities contribute to technological progress and economic growth.

Michael Shermer, in his book "The Mind of the Market," argues that you can trace anticapitalist egalitarianism to sexual selection. Back in the hunter-gatherer Paleolithic, inequality had reproductive consequences. The successful hunter, providing valuable protein for females, got a lot more mating opportunities than the unsuccessful.

The “eyes-free” goal addresses an obvious limitation of the human brain: we can’t look away from where we’re heading for more than a few seconds without losing our bearings. And time spent looking at a cellphone is time spent oblivious to the world, as shown in the viral videos of distracted phone users who stumble into shopping-mall fountains. Most people intuitively grasp the “two-second rule.”

Researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute outfitted cars and trucks with cameras and sensors to monitor real-world driving behavior. When drivers were communicating, they tended to look away for as much as 4.6 seconds during a 6-second period. In effect, people lose track of time when texting, leading them to look at their phones far longer than they know they should

Heads-up displays like Google Glass, and voice interfaces like Siri, seem like ideal solutions, letting you simultaneously interact with your smartphone while staying alert to your surroundings

When we talk about “searching” these days, we’re almost always talking about using Google to find something online.

That’s quite a twist for a word that has long carried existential connotations, that has been bound up in our sense of what it means to be conscious and alive. We don’t just search for car keys or missing socks. We search for truth and meaning, for love, for transcendence, for peace, for ourselves. To be human is to be a searcher.

in its original conception, the Google search engine did transport us into a messy and confusing world—the world of the web—with the intent of helping us make some sense of it. It pushed us outward, away from ourselves. It was a means of exploration

reading doesn’t just make a fleeting impression. It may make long-term changes to to the brain.

heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, the area of the brain associated with receptivity for language. Heightened connectivity in other parts of the brain suggested that readers may experience “embodied semantics,” a process in which brain connectivity during a thought-about action mirrors the connectivity that occurs during the actual action.

reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist

With colleagues at the University of Cambridge, I worked on a web game called urbangems.org. In it, you are shown 10 pairs of urban scenes of London, and for each pair you need to choose which one you consider to be more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on user votes, one is able to rank all urban scenes by beauty, quiet and happiness. Those scenes have been studied at Yahoo Labs, image processing tools that extract colour histograms. The amount of greenery is associated with all three peaceful qualities: green is often found in scenes considered to be beautiful, quiet and happy. We then ran more sophisticated image analysis tools that extracted patches from our urban scenes and found that red-brick houses and public gardens also make people happy.

On the other hand, cars were the visual elements most strongly associated with sadness. In rich countries, car ownership is becoming unfashionable, and car-sharing and short-term hiring is becoming more popular. Self-driving cars such as those being prototyped by Google will be more common and will be likely to be ordered via the kind of mobile apps similar to the ones we use for ordering taxis nowadays. This will result into optimised traffic flows, fewer cars, and more space for alternative modes of transportation and for people on foot.

Cities will experience transformations similar to those New York has experienced since 2007. During these few years, new pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes were created in the five boroughs, creating spaces for public art installations and recreation. And it’s proved popular with local businesses too, boosting the local economy in areas where cyclists are freer to travel.

In acknowledging the problem, politicians must endorse a solution, but the only major policy solutions to climate change — taxing or regulating the oil, gas and coal industries — are anathema to the base of the Republican Party. Thus, many Republicans, especially in Florida, appear to be dealing with the issue by keeping silent.

on this, Republicans are dead set against taking action on climate change on the national level. If you have political aspirations, this is not something you should talk about if you want to win a Republican primary.”

“Sea level rise is our reality in Miami Beach,” said the city’s mayor, Philip Levine. “We are past the point of debating the existence of climate change and are now focusing on adapting to current and future threats.” In the face of encroaching saltwater and sunny-day flooding like that on Alton Road, Mr. Levine has supported a $400 million spending project to make the city’s drainage system more resilient in the face of rising tides.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that companies cannot discriminate against job applicants or employees for religious reasons, even if an accommodation is not requested.

a victory for workers who want to exercise their religion on the job, from their wardrobe to transportation to time off

it could have major implications in the future for other job applicants and employees who seek time off for religious observances, as well as those who adhere to strict dress codes.

but gene therapy may be coming to the rescue. Gene therapy’s success in treating  blindness disorders –many are in late stage trials—gave hope to a field deterred by early missteps. And now gene therapy researchers are expanding their gaze to focus on all manner of sensory diseases.

notable success in using gene therapy techniques to treat a sensory disorder came last year when otolaryngolotist

The neurons [in VGLUT3 mutant mice] are waiting for the neurotransmitter to activate them”—but no signal comes, and the mice are profoundly deaf,

We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. Long-form reading, listening and viewing habits are giving way to browse-and-choose consumption. With the increase in the number of media options — or distractions, depending on how you look at them — something has to give, and that something is our attention span. - Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at George Mason University We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society.

One Duke University student was famously quoted in a 2006 Time magazine essay telling his history professor, "We don't read whole books anymore."

Now there are lots of websites that present whole books and concepts in nano form

today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

What if Millennials’ aversion to car-buying isn’t a temporary side effect of the recession, but part of a permanent generational shift in tastes and spending habits? It’s a question that applies not only to cars, but to several other traditional categories of big spending—most notably, housing. And its answer has large implications for the future shape of the economy—and for the speed of recovery.

Half of a typical family’s spending today goes to transportation and housing