….The median age of prime-time television viewers is nearing 51 years old. ….51 the median? This means that more than half of all prime-time viewers are outside of the golden demographic of 18-49. The medium that has long been synonymous with massive reach is quickly becoming the most efficient way to reach lots of old [...]

There’s no inherent truth in games, at least not in the sense of submersed intentions, just as there’s no huntsman in the cluster of stars that forms the constellation Orion. Interpretation is merely self-fulfilled imagination, each as valid and invalid as the next. While one interpretation may come closer to the artist’s intent, that doesn’t [...]

The latter half of this century has seen an erosion in the perceived legitimacy of science as an impartial means of finding truth. Many research topics are the subject of highly politicized dispute; indeed, the objectivity of the entire discipline of psychology has been called into question. This essay examines attempts to use science to [...]

Biases and systematic errors of belief are not always a bad thing, sometimes our spectacularly inflated senses of self can help keep us healthy. McKay and Dennett concluded that only one mistaken belief passes muster, something that they called “positive illusions.” Positive illusions refer to unrealistically positive views of oneself, unrealistically positive optimism toward the [...]

Physics envy, is this desire to be able to explain 99% of all economic phenomenon with 3 laws. That’s what physicists can do. In fact we (economists) have 99 laws that explain maybe 3% of all phenomenon. Read The Full Article Here (via MIT)

That may help explain why market sentiment can change so swiftly, why true contrarians are so hard to find and why investors care so much about the “consensus view” on Wall Street. In the experiment, researchers from University College London and Aarhus University in Denmark asked 28 people to submit a list of songs they [...]

It’s true, it often takes me longer to look up a bookmark than to just find the source. Before bookmarking becomes a worthwhile endeavor, it needs to be made a wee bit more clever. …What if bookmarks were smarter? What if we didn’t have to bother organizing our bookmark collection? What if saved content could [...]

An interesting look at the creative process and how technology might one day enhance it. There are two primary types of cognitive enhancement — enhancement of intelligence and enhancement of creative faculties. Even though creativity is often considered a quasi-mystical process, it may surprise some that we are actually closer to enhancing this aspect of [...]

One of the stickier problems with information is that typically we only believe it when it conforms to our preconceived notions. Case and point: How deep do these views go, and how far do they generalise? Professor Geoffrey Munro took about 100 students and told them they were participating in a study on “judging the [...]