It seems money is not just money…
From The Economist:
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Irrational economics
Look and feel
The value of a coin or banknote depends on its familiarity
By watching your online avatar exercise for five minutes, you are more likely to exercise yourself in the next 24 hours. See how else your avatar affects your real life — article from Time Magazine:
Monday, May. 12, 2008
Interesting article from Scientific American, reproduced below.
IMHO there is a part of our brain that allows us to make very quick decisions, which has to rely on short and effective heuristics to make quick decisions when there is not enough information and/or time to make rational decisions (called implicit bias in the article below). This is all done instinctively, and as such, we will never be able to get rid of it. But heuristics, although better than nothing, will often lead to erroneous conclusions due to its simplicity, so we need the rational part of our brain to gather more information and evaluate the situation properly whenever there is a chance to do so. Real prejudice and bigotry (explicit bias as they call it in the article below) stems from not performing this second step.
The article below points out that we can modify our implicit biases (that’s like creating new heuristics for the instictive part of our brain). In addition to deliberately performing that second step to make sound long-term decisions, it is in our interest to recognize our implicit biases and improve our heuristic rules to make more accurate quick decisions.
We are all discriminated against in our lives one way or another (some more than others). I think it is also in our interest to recognize this implicit bias in others (including the subconscious body language), and rather than shout discrimination immediately, give the other person a chance to bring in their rational decision making process, and maybe even help them to do so.
It’s especially important to recognize how the media influences our heuristics, and mostly in a negative way. For example, most usually form an incorrect heuristic of “it is more dangerous to fly than to drive” because plane crashes (being rare and highly newsworthy) end up on the front page of newspapers more often than the commonplace car crashes, when statistics clearly shows that flying is a lot safer than driving. So next time you see a muslim suicide bomber on the news, remind yourself to the real statistics of what an incredibly tiny percentage of muslims are actually terrorists.
Anyway, here’s the article:
By Siri Carpenter
It seems empathy is not a good thing when it comes to negotiations…
May 1st 2008
From The Economist print edition
It pays to get inside your opponents’ heads rather than their hearts
Read more »
Good to know… from The Economist:
Do not think on an empty stomach
Read more »
Hmm… hiring based on your mugshot — can it be far behind? I am waiting from someone to debunk this…
I picked up an old book on phrenology at a garage sale, thinking it was a great joke. Maybe not?
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Physiognomy and success
Jan 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Although it started out as a means of practising expressing myself, this blog is turning out to be more of a compendium of interesting information I come across. One of these days I’ll have to actually write something as opposed to cut and paste. 
