[monochrom] Why Surprises Temporarily Blind Us
Reading this story requires you to willfully pay attention to the sentences and to tune out nearby conversations, the radio and other distractions. But if a fire alarm sounded, your attention would be involuntarily snatched away from the story to the blaring sound. New research from Vanderbilt University reveals for the first time how our brains coordinate these two types of attention and why we may be temporarily blinded by surprises. The research was published March 7, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience. The simple example of having your reading interrupted by a fire alarm illustrates a fundamental aspect of attention: what ultimately reaches our awareness and guides our behavior depends on the interaction between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention. For coherent behavior to emerge, you need these two forms of attention to be coordinated, René Marois, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the new study, said. We found a brain area, the inferior frontal junction, that may play a primary role in coordinating these two forms of attention.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100311091615.htmLink -- Posted By johannes to http://www.monochrom.at/english/2010/03/why-surprises-temporarily-blind-us.htmmonochrom at 3/16/2010 08:59:00 AM
[monochrom] Lehman Brothers Scandal Rocks the Fed
After a year-long investigation, court-appointed bank examiner Anton Valukas has produced a deadly 2,200 page report which details the activities that led to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. The report is a keg of dynamite. The question now is whether anyone in government has the nerve to light the fuse. Valukas provides powerful evidence that Lehman executives were involved in balance sheet manipulation by implementing an arcane accounting procedure called Repo 105 which masked the bank's true financial condition from investors and regulators. According to Valukas, Lehman was Unable to find a United States law firm that would provide it with an opinion letter permitting the true sale accounting treatment using Repo 105. So, Lehman executives went outside of the country in an effort to enlist the support of a London law firm that would approve the procedure. It is impossible to overstate the significance of Valugas's findings. The report exposes the opaque but central role of the repo market which provides essential short-term loans for financial institutions. (Lehman used repos to conceal the full extent of its collapse, by dint of the amount of leverage it was using, meaning the pitiful asset anchor tethered to a vast zeppelin of debt) More importantly, it shows the cozy and, very probably criminal relationship between the country's main regulatory bodies and the Wall Street behemoths. The activities of the New York Fed (NYFRB), which at the time was headed by Timothy Geithner, is particularly suspect in this regard. The report should trigger an immediate Congressional investigation, probing the whole affair and most importantly the role of the Fed. http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney03152010.htmlLink -- Posted By johannes to http://www.monochrom.at/english/2010/03/lehman-brothers-scandal-rocks-fed.htmmonochrom at 3/16/2010 09:06:00 AM
[monochrom] A weapons system that tracks mosquitoes? Huh?
Doesn't Nathan Myhrvold get enough attention? The guy is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, a multimillionaire, a gourmet chef, a prize-winning photographer and keeper of multiple higher degrees from prestigious institutions. As the CEO and founder of Intellectual Ventures, a private outfit that invests in pure inventions, he frequently finds himself in the news. And yet, at the annual techno-hip TED conference in February, Myhrvold decided to up the ante, tapping into the misery of millions of rural African women and their families to wrap his business in a cloak of moral urgency. Every 43 seconds a child dies of malaria, he told the crowd. And current anti-malaria interventions, many of which target the rural African women and children who are malaria's main victims, don't work that well, he said. Insecticides can be environmentally dangerous and some people use anti-mosquito bednets to catch fish instead. That's why Myhrvold came up with his latest invention: A mini-Star Wars weapons system that tracks mosquitoes in the air and shoots them down mid-flightâwith lasers, of course. Like a Death Ray. All you need to make one is a Blu-ray player and a laser printer, plus a few months of processing time on a supercomputer, and voila!: you're on your way to eradicating malaria in Africa for good. Oh. My. http://www.zcommunications.org/ted-lecturer-exploits-african-women-and-children-by-sonia-shahLink -- Posted By johannes to http://www.monochrom.at/english/2010/03/weapons-system-that-tracks-mosquitoes.htmmonochrom at 3/16/2010 09:10:00 AM
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[monochrom] div.
Das unwerte Hartz IV-Leben Soziologieprofessor Gunnar Heinsohn will die Unterschicht finanziell austrocknen, weil die zu viele gesellschaftlich wertlose Kinder in die Welt setzt http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/32/32272/1.html Geschlecht: unbestimmt Der australische Bundesstaat New South Wales hat erstmals einen Menschen offiziell als Neutrum anerkannt: Ende der Dualität von Mann und Frau? http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/32/32268/1.html -- Rainer Fuegenstein r...@kaneda.iguw.tuwien.ac.at -- Der Mensch ist die Krone der Schöpfung. Der Österreicher ist die Schöpfung der Krone. --
