….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 people!

In fact, the median age of prime-time viewers has increased by a year every year since 2005.

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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 by any means discount a feral interpretation. This lack of meaning seems to discredit the growing movement towards a more literary approach to analyzing games. If games are devoid of any definite truth aside from logical and mathematical ones, then why write about them?

Well, for entertainment… for persuading others to hold a belief through analogy… to convince ourselves that there’s some underlying value to this habit that we sink our time/money/lives into….

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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 study science; specifically, bias in the interpretation and use of empirical research findings. I examine theory and research on a range of cognitive and motivational mechanisms for bias. Interestingly, not all biases are normatively proscribed; biased interpretations are defensible under some conditions so long as those conditions are made explicit. I consider a variety of potentially corrective mechanisms, evaluate prospects for collective rationality, and compare inquisitorial and adversarial models of science.

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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 future, and unrealistic views of personal control. McKay and Dennett argue that positive illusions are adaptive because they not only enhance psychological well-being—who doesn’t enjoy thinking of themselves as better than others—but because they enhance physical health as well.

A body of research spearheaded by psychologist Shelley Taylor and colleagues over the past 25 years consistently demonstrates a relationship between positive illusions and benefits to physical health including recovery from disease. Taylor’s work has shown that HIV-positive individuals with unrealistically positive views of their health outcomes survived longer and showed a slower illness course. In a similar set of studies, Taylor conducted extensive interviews with breast cancer patients and showed that those who fared the best with the disease were those whose positive illusions allowed them to attain a sense of meaning, a sense of mastery, and a positive view of themselves. Such findings are not to suggest that receiving a diagnosis for a fatal disease should immediately be cause for smiling and celebration. Indeed, it can be tremendously difficult to find optimism in dire circumstances: Author Barbara Ehrenreich described frustration with receiving advice to consider her own breast cancer diagnosis as a “gift” rather than a problem, in her recent screed against positive thinking, Bright-Sided. Nonetheless, a significant body of psychological research supports a relationship between positive thinking and positive health outcomes.

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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.

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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 wanted to buy online and then to decide which they would most like to own. Then the participants viewed the ratings of the same songs by two professional music experts. Meanwhile, a magnetic resonance imaging machine recorded the patterns of activity in their brains. Finally, as a way to measure the influence of the experts’ views, the participants had the chance to change their minds about which songs they wanted the most.

The brain scans showed that as soon as people learned they had chosen the same song as the experts, cells in the ventral striatum—a reward center wired with dopamine neurons that respond to pleasures like sugar and sex—fired intensely.

“If someone agrees with your choice, it’s intrinsically rewarding in the same way food or money is rewarding,” says one of the experimenters, Chris Frith of University College London.

On Wall Street, in business and in life…

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…What if bookmarks were smarter? What if we didn’t have to bother organizing our bookmark collection? What if saved content could make itself useful to us when we needed it? What if this was done automagically?

There are various potential solutions to this problem — bookmark search engines, integrated browser tools, etc. — but the solution I am most interested is a third-party service that would analyze browsing habits, search queries, and social media networks to present users with accurate and relevant content from their past to enhance a person’s browsing experience.

A service that could analyze your browsing tendencies and present you with relevant saved content is truly an intriguing idea (and one I have not yet seen attempted). We have services like RescueTime, which analyzes productivity, Woopra, which analyzes application usage, and Mint, which analyzes a person’s financial data (disturbingly enough). So why not allow one more thing to spy on you to help you organize and rediscover saved data that could be very useful to you? It would be automation at its finest.

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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 cognition than pure intelligence.

There appear to be three main neurophysiological ingredients that influence the creative process These are 1) relatively low levels of cortical arousal; 2) a relatively flat associative gradient; 3) a judicious amount of noise in the cognitive system. [Editor’s note: A person with a high associative gradient is able to make a few common associations with a stimulus word such as “flight,” whereas those with a flat gradient are able to make many associations with the stimulus word. Creative people have been found to have fairly flat gradients, and uncreative people have much steeper gradients.]

All three ingredients conspire to encourage the conditions whereby cognition runs outside of its normal attractors, and produces new and potentially valuable insights.

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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 quality of scientific information”, now published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. First, their views on whether homosexuality might be associated with mental illness were assessed, and then they were divided into two groups.

The first group were given five research studies that confirmed their pre-existing view. Students who thought homosexuality was associated with mental illness, for example, were given papers explaining that there were more gay people in psychological treatment centres than the general population. The second group were given research that contradicted their pre-existing view. (After the study was finished, we should be clear, they were told that all these research papers were fake, and given the opportunity to read real research on the topic if they wanted to.)

Then they were asked about the research they had read, and were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement: “The question addressed in the studies summarised … is one that cannot be answered using scientific methods.”

Click through for the frightening and oddly surprising conclusion.

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The real dream of any advertiser is to grab the attention of the right person at the right time. A new approach to online advertising, known as real-time bidding, could help make that vision easier to achieve.

Real-time bidding involves auctioning off the opportunity to show an online display advertisement to a specific type of user at a precise moment. A San Francisco-based startup called Triggit recently scored $4.2 million in funding from two venture capital firms, Foundry Group and Spark Capital, based on the promise of its real-time bidding platform.

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