USATODAY.com - Study: Emotion rules the brain's decisions

USATODAY.com - Study: Emotion rules the brain's decisions: "The evidence has been piling up throughout history, and now neuroscientists have proved it's true: The brain's wiring emphatically relies on emotion over intellect in decision-making.

A brain-imaging study reported in the current Science examines 'framing,' a hot topic among psychologists, economists and political hucksters.

Framing studies have shown that how a question is posed — think negative ads, for instance — skews decision-making. But no one showed exactly how this effect worked in the human brain until the brain-imaging study led by Benedetto De Martino of University College London."

...
The brain images revealed the amygdala, a neural region that processes strong negative emotions such as fear, fired up vigorously in response to each two-second (on average) gambling decision. Where people resisted the framing effect, a brain region connected to positive emotions such as empathy, and another that activates whenever people face choices, lit up as well, seeming to duke it out over the decision.

Dance Machine

The dude with the pink shirt reminds me I need some new shoes.

How I Became a Basketball Fan

Northwest Florida Daily News: NBA star Yao Ming swears off shark's fin soup in wildlife protection campaign: "BEIJING (AP) - NBA star Yao Ming pledged Wednesday to give up eating shark's fin soup, a Chinese delicacy, as he joined a campaign to promote wildlife protection.

'Endangered species are our friends,' Yao said at a news conference organized by the London-based conservation group WildAid.

The group said China is the world's biggest importer of shark's fins, which conservationists say are cut from sharks that are thrown back into the ocean to die.

'As the human population increases, many wildlife species are decreasing, and the primary reason is that humans fail to treat animals as friends,' said Yao, who played for the Shanghai Sharks basketball team before moving to the Houston Rockets."

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact: "So far, we've been able to harvest only a tiny fraction of geothermal energy resources, taking advantage of places where local geology brings hot water and steam near the surface, such as in Iceland or California, where such phenomena have long been used to produce electricity. But new oil-field stimulation technology, developed for extracting oil from sources such as shale, makes it possible to harvest much more of this energy by allowing engineers to create artificial geothermal reservoirs many kilometers underground."

Buildix from ThoughtWorks :: project start-up in a box

Buildix from ThoughtWorks :: project start-up in a box: "Continuous Integration, Source Control, a Wiki and a Bug-Tracker are all cornerstones of a functioning Agile development project. But if you've not configured them all before, it can be a bit tricky - and you might miss some of the tight integration that makes them really useful."

Another example that thought works.