Adam Crowe › Comments

'RT talks to political risk consultant Dr. John Hulsman. Comparing the EU with a push-me-pull-you beast, he predicts that the union should either go for further substantial integration and unification, or cease to exist as a geopolitical entity.' -- "I was in a meeting with senior European leaders and they asked: 'What discipline can keep us from doing this?' And I just started laughing; they looked at me and I said, 'The markets.'" - Adam Crowe

'Families, freedom and virtue – the theory.' - Adam Crowe

'The gruesome and compelling statistics about how the growth of State power has displaced fatherhood and crippled the traditional family, and its effects on innocent and helpless children.' - Adam Crowe

'Dopamine, which is released during the stress response, stimulates areas of the prefrontal cortex, probably resulting in heightened attention and improved cognitive capacity. Chronic stress, however, appears to cause an overproduction of dopamine, which can result in reduced attention, increased overall vigilance, as well as a diminished capacity to learn new material and increased paranoid and psychotic behavior.' - Adam Crowe

'The new research deepens their study of the epigenetics of the brain and behavior, dealing for the first time with real-life challenges like stress. It also takes a rare systems biology approach, looking at the brain from the molecular level to the physiological level to behavior. "We did not know a stress response could be reprogrammed by your ancestors' environmental exposures," says Skinner, who focused on the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance and genomics aspects of the paper. "So how well you socialize or how your anxiety levels respond to stress may be as much your ancestral epigenetic inheritance as your individual early-life events." -- Crews says that increases in other mental disorders may be attributable to the kind of "two-hit" exposure that the experiment is modeling. "There is no doubt that we have been seeing real increases in mental disorders like autism and bipolar disorder," says Crews, who focused on the neuroscience, behavior and stress aspects of the... - Adam Crowe

'Submissiveness and dominance have their effects on the same reward circuits of the brain as power and cocaine. Baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get ‘promoted’ to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly. This makes them more aggressive and sexually active, and in humans similar changes happen when people are given power. What’s more, power also makes people smarter, because dopamine improves the functioning of the brain’s frontal lobes. Conversely, demotion in a hierarchy decreases dopamine levels, increases stress and reduces cognitive function. But too much power – and hence too much dopamine – can disrupt normal cognition and emotion, leading to gross errors of judgment and imperviousness to risk, not to mention huge egocentricity and lack of empathy for others.' -- Political power is the dizziness of loss aversion. - Adam Crowe

'The latest research on the effects of environment and genetics on personality...' - Adam Crowe

'Social media is playing a vital role in Syria's conflict, as both sides try to shape domestic and international opinion in their favour. Chilling videos of acts of brutality have the power to go viral and be broadcast on global TV networks - but sometimes, the pictures aren't everything they appear to be.' "Some facebook pages really look like hit lists." - Adam Crowe

'Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine operating in any other environment. Indeed, they begin to look with pity on the offline world, a terrifying place where each of us possesses only one life to live rather than two (or more) in parallel. “There’s this grilled cheese place down the street,” says Jim Kingsbury, marketing VP at One Kings Lane. “They can’t test anything. Should they price the sandwich at $6 or $6.50? What should be at the top of the menu? Those are purely intuitive choices that they have to make.” At one Silicon Valley office, I overheard an employee complain that dating can’t be A/B tested; an online profile can, to be sure, but once you’re in a relationship with a specific person, 100 percent of the “traffic” is on the line with every decision. The testable web is so much safer. No choices are hard, and no introspection is necessary. Why is B better than A? Who can say? At the end of the workday, we can only shrug: We went with B. We... - Adam Crowe

'#2. You Emotionally Bond With People You Sing With: Scientists have discovered that when we perform synchronized activities such as singing songs, reciting chants or even as simple an act as walking together, we end up feeling more connected to the people we're performing these activities with. ...how harmonious the participants felt had nothing to do with any positive emotions created by the synchronized activities themselves. Whether or not they enjoyed performing the activities, they simply became more cooperative with each other. The researchers concluded that "synchrony rituals" may therefore have evolved as a way for societies to get individuals to work together and be willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the group.' - Adam Crowe

'This depiction of the digital marketing landscape was shown at a Buddy Media event marking the launch of the social marketing software agency's new suite of measurement tools. You can click to enlarge it, but that won't make it look any simpler.' - Adam Crowe

Demetri Kofinas: "That's why we have evolution." - Adam Crowe

'Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. Facebook's business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users. On the other hand, Facebook is, everyone has come to agree, profoundly different from the Web. First of all, it exerts a new level of hegemonic control over users' experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 million, soon a billion, eventually two billion (one of the problems with the logic of constant growth at this scale and speed, of course, is that eventually it runs out of humans with computers or smart phones). And then it is social. Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined... - Adam Crowe

'..."go-getters" who are willing to work hard for rewards had higher release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in areas of the brain known to play an important role in reward and motivation, the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. On the other hand, "slackers" who are less willing to work hard for a reward had high dopamine levels in another brain area that plays a role in emotion and risk perception, the anterior insula. -- The role of dopamine in the anterior insula came as a complete surprise to the researchers. The finding was unexpected because it suggests that more dopamine in the insula is associated with a reduced desire to work, even when it means earning less money. The fact that dopamine can have opposing effects in different parts of the brain complicates the picture regarding the use of psychotropic medications that affect dopamine levels for the treatment of attention-deficit disorder, depression and schizophrenia because it calls into question the general... - Adam Crowe

'Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all. Their metabolism is dialed down to almost nothing, an adaptive advantage in a place with so few resources. The bacteria that survive are the ones that can satisfy themselves with minute traces of oxygen and a parsimonious diet of organic material laid down millions of years ago. “These communities have not received input or new food since the dinosaurs walked the planet,” Roy said. “Those that are left down there are the ones that can deal with the lowest amount of food.”' - Adam Crowe

'The 19th-century economist and social philosopher Henry George developed the theory of the business or trade cycle based on malspeculation in land value, although he did not use that term. Such malspeculation would not occur in a pure free market, thus the “business” cycle should more accurately be called "the interventionist cycle" or "the economic distortion cycle." There are two major interventions that cause malspeculation. First is an injection of money into the banking system, an increase in loanable funds not caused by higher savings but by money expansion. The resultant cheap credit fuels both malinvestment and malspeculation in real estate. When the money injections stop, interest rates rise back up, and such projects and purchases slow down and stop. When land values stop rising, speculators sell, and the fall in land values brings down the financial sector that provided the mortgages. Malspeculation carries land values beyond that warranted by the rents. Henry George... - Adam Crowe

'The thought of Karl Marx continues to resonate throughout the world and is never more prominent than in the use of the propaganda term “capitalism” by both advocates and opponents of economic freedom. The opposition to “capitalism” by the Occupy movements show that Marxist thought has penetrated deeply into global economic culture. -- In the analysis of the American economist and social philosopher Henry George, the surplus from production is ground rent. Suppose in some geographic region, the average product of labor is greater than the wage paid to workers. The existence of that surplus at that location makes the location valuable, and so entrepreneurs will bid up what they pay to be located there. They will keep bidding up the rent until the rent has soaked up all the surplus. Generally, what economists call the “producer surplus” is really land rent, and since landowners produce nothing, they are non-producers, and the surplus is better called the “non-producer surplus.” -- Hence... - Adam Crowe

'The second question is whether consumers will use just one electronic wallet on their phones, choosing between, say, Google, PayPal and their own bank, or whether they will have several. Most analysts think that consumers will gravitate towards a single electronic wallet which will hold many cards. This is because there may be significant benefits to be gained from aggregating transactions and the data associated with them. For example, PayPal’s wallet will allow consumers to use various stores of value besides money when paying for goods or services. These could include coupons, loyalty points from stores and banks and air miles from airlines. PayPal stands to profit from steering customers into shops, perhaps by reminding them that they have unused coupons. It could also tell shopkeepers about the tastes of their customers, allowing retailers to make targeted shopping offers (“this would look great with the black skirt you bought last week”) or extend credit on the fly. -- Google,... - Adam Crowe

'#7. Critics say that LVT redistributes wealth from landowners, but there is nothing morally wrong with an inequality in wealth and income. But when government provides public goods paid for by taxes other than on land, this pumps up rent and land value, redistributing wealth from workers to landowners. And for land value provided by nature, geoist ethics say that human equality requires an equal benefit from natural resources. Inequality in market wages respects equal self-ownership, while an unequal benefit from the natural heritage does violate our creation as moral equals. -- #9. Critics of LVT claim that much of wages is due to luck, connections, and talents, so a portion is wages is unearned. But as Henry George wrote, justice is the end, taxation only the means. It is just for the benefits of natural resource to be shared, and for landowners to pay back the rental generated by public goods. Self-ownership is also just, even if some have greater wealth due to luck. Nobody is... - Adam Crowe

'...innovation moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think fire), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think steam engine), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac). As with Maslow's hierarchy, you shouldn't look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the highest level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We're already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn't seem particularly pressing. We've become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal state or projecting that state outward. An entrepreneur has a greater... - Adam Crowe

'“You still feel good when everyone wishes you happy birthday on Facebook even though you know they were prompted to do it.” Dr. Rosen said the average person was not addicted to Facebook. Instead, he characterized the relationship as a compulsion. “Addictions are about finding pleasure,” he said. “Compulsions are born from anxiety, and Facebook is psychologically important. It allows us to project on the world, in a way that we’ve never been able to before, who we are and what we want to say about ourselves.” As a result, he said, Facebook “drives our behavior online.” He added: “We are always checking to see if anyone posted on our wall, if they liked a photo, responded to an update. For those who use it, they are feeling more of a need to look at it and check in and reduce the anxiety of feeling like they are missing out on something.”' - Adam Crowe

'It was the great unwinding of the Zynga arbitrage. As Matthew Ingram of GigaOm pointed out, Zynga had been something of a Facebook proxy before the latter went public. It makes sense: the companies are symbiotic. Without Facebook, Zynga wouldn't exist. And without Zynga, Facebook wouldn't have about 12 percent of the revenue that it does. Once that had sorted out, Zynga's stock began trading more normally. But if Zynga and Facebook are so connected, why did one tank while the other didn't? The answer is that they both tanked -- kind of. Remember: Facebook's underwriters wouldn't let its share price fall below $38 a share today. That's what underwriters do. They take a company public in return for a guarantee to buy at the IPO price. So if traders thought that the IPO price was overvalued, they might have taken it out on the next best thing. Which was bad news for Zynga. That's why the news didn't get any better for the FarmVille creator even after its stock stopped flash crashing.... - Adam Crowe

'...its $100bn-plus valuation vastly exceeds the value of its relatively low value ads, meaning it really has to become much more like television than like Google. Except that it isn't television. It doesn't really even have an audience – that is, people thinking and feeling something similar (ideally, all at once). And it isn't run by people who even care about media – or doing what media does: that is, holding people's attention by means of pain, or charm, or jokes. (Facebook will eventually try, like all other internet companies, to hire media people – but they won't get the jokes.) Of course, the future is coming and we have somehow convinced ourselves that forward-thinking technology companies, by learning so much more about people's behavior and habits and knowing more about them than they do themselves, will somehow, with undreamed-of efficiency, sell them something. And these social media savants will be able to do this without having to rely on the much more mysterious and... - Adam Crowe

'But here's the rub. In 2011, Facebook made $4 per user per year. To earn its market cap of $100 billion today, it would have to earn five-times that figure per user. This sets up a tug-of-war over user information. Facebook has lots of it. Advertisers want to see more of it. Users want them to see less of it. The true value of Facebook could depend on who wins that turf war. The upside is that Facebook has created something without precedent: an addictive product for hundreds of millions of people who spent their time creating, for free, something of huge importance to advertisers, which is personal information about their lives and interests. The downside is that Facebook is still extremely protective about the sort of ads it displays, partly because it's extremely sensitive to the fact that its users consider Facebook private. -- Ultimately, Facebook isn't like Google, or the yellow pages, or TV, and it doesn't want to be. It wants to be something totally new: an infrastructure for... - Adam Crowe

'Dreams are seen as being projections of parts of oneself. Often these are parts that have been ignored, rejected or even suppressed. One aim of gestalt dream analysis is to accept and reintegrate these. As with all gestalt therapy, dream analysis involves much dialogue and acting out. The dreamer is encouraged to enter into dialogue with the various aspects of the dream. The dreamer will also be encouraged to take the part of the dream elements, to act out the dream from their perspective. This applies as much to inanimate as to animate objects. So, for example, if you dream of being chased across a field you might begin a dialogue where you turn to face the pursuer and start asking him/her/it questions. Then you might take the place of the pursuer and start describing the chase from that point of view. This process could then be repeated from the perspective of a tree in the field overlooking the chase - a new perspective that could bring unexpected realisation.' - Adam Crowe

'The goal all along has been to increase the power and authority of the EU. Various manmade facilities such as central banking and the governments of nation-states themselves were enlisted in creating first tremendous debt and now the response, which surely shall be greater centralization. The top men have actually said as much. We figure that the global elite that apparently wants to rule the world has two scenarios in mind. The first one is to keep the EU together – with a good deal of pain and chaos. The second one is to collapse the EU – with a good deal of pain and chaos. Either scenario facilitates world government. The trap is sprung. The powers-that-be, after exposing us endlessly to "Merkozy," now reveal that they have plenty of firepower and are prepared to use it. Gone is the nonsense about the new German empire and the special relationship between France and Germany. Gone is any pretense that England stands back, wishing to disengage from the EU. The old men of the City of... - Adam Crowe

'Where is this business model? Google provides a service – a search algorithm. Microsoft provides computer software. Apple provides innovative and beautiful software.What exactly is the bottom line for Facebook? Essentially, the company is worth whatever information it can pilfer from its client base. And that information may be worth more to the American intelligence companies that apparently crowd around Facebook than to the private sector itself. This is a company, then, that is fundamentally at war with its users. It provides the "thinnest" of services – social connectivity. Go online and it is hard to find a kind word for Facebook. Feedback to articles (not the articles themselves) is crammed with comments on Facebook's various problems from a business standpoint. Many deplore Facebook's lack of real privacy and manipulation of data and are skeptical about the company's prospects going forward. We share the same sentiments. We cannot account for the US$ 104 billion that the... - Adam Crowe

'Google submitted a new patent that uses the imaging and sound pickup capabilities of your smartphone to trigger advertisements for relevant products or experiences: "Implementations may include one or more of the following features. Sensing the environmental condition can include sensing at least one of temperature, humidity, sound, light, or air composition. The digital billboard can be installed at an indoor location, and sensing the environmental condition can include sensing an indoor or outdoor environmental condition. In general, in another aspect, a computer-implemented method includes enabling advertisers to associate advertisements with one or more environmental conditions to allow the advertisements to be provided to users whose environmental conditions match the environmental conditions associated with the advertisements; and enabling the advertisers to bid for environmental conditions associated with one or more keywords."' - Adam Crowe

'Jung proposed two basic approaches to analyzing dream material: the objective and the subjective.[22] In the objective approach, every person in the dream refers to the person they are: mother is mother, girlfriend is girlfriend, etc. In the subjective approach, every person in the dream represents an aspect of the dreamer. Jung argued that the subjective approach is much more difficult for the dreamer to accept, but that in most good dream-work, the dreamer will come to recognize that the dream characters can represent an unacknowledged aspect of the dreamer. Thus, if the dreamer is being chased by a crazed killer, the dreamer may come eventually to recognize his own homicidal impulses. Gestalt therapists extended the subjective approach, claiming that even the inanimate objects in a dream can represent aspects of the dreamer.' - Adam Crowe

'Facebook succeeded because it built new online habits around frequent offline behaviors. TheFacebook.com, as it was originally known, offered users a digital way to feel connected to others throughout the day and from anywhere they could access the web. The power of this universal human need for social acceptance and connection helps explain how the company grew well beyond college campuses and now touches one in eight people on the planet. Ask a devoted Facebook user why they log-in to the site several times per day and they’ll describe features they love and provide examples of how they use the service. They’ll tell you it’s a great way to share photos or keep up with their friends. But below the surface is the need for emotional gratification. Though we can all shift our emotional states ourselves, it’s not easy. Instead of going through the hard work of consciously changing the way we feel, we use ready-made solutions to do it for us. Facebook, and the companies like it, are the... - Adam Crowe