May greed has an evolutionary advantage?

Religion and science have litter agreements, but they share this view: greed is not good for you. The definition of greed is that An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth. Greed tells you to think you have more than what you have got."Greed never allows you to think you have enough; it always destroys you by making you strive ever harder for more," Rabbi Benjamin Blech writes in "Taking Stock: A Spiritual Guide to Rising Above Life's Ups and Down."

Not many people think greed is good. But might it have some evolutionary advantage?

Paul Zak, , might understand. He talked about greed as part of a lecture series titled "Science and the Seven Deadly Sins" at the New York Academy of Sciences.

"The seven deadly sins are still deadly because they separate us from other people," he said. "They are all about putting 'me' first, and that is maladaptive for social creatures like us."

Zak , a neuroeconomist and professor at Claremont Graduate University has done studies that have manipulated brain chemistry in human beings to show that oxytocin causes people to be moral.

Zak said that his research suggests that people who are greedy have brains that work differently. "Their character traits are similar to those of psychopaths. They simply do not care about others the way most people do, and the dysfunctional processing of oxytocin in their brains appears to be one reason for this."

It's hard to find a positive slant on greed if you mean the moral aspect of greed.

Evidences show time of birth has relationship with health of babies

It seems to be unthinkable babies conceived at certain times of the year appear healthier than those conceived during other times. Now scientists have shown that the unimaginable phenomenon is actually true. And they may know why it happens.

Since the 1930s, researchers have noticed that children born in winter were more prone to health problems later in life: slower growth, mental illness, poor health status, and early death. Among the proposed explanations were diseases, harsh temperatures, and higher pollution levels associated with winter, when those expectant mothers and near-term fetuses might be most vulnerable. However, as economists looked at demographics, the picture got more complicated. Mothers who are nonwhite, unmarried, or lack a college education are more likely to have children with health and developmental problems. They are also more likely to conceive in the first half of the year. That made it hard to tease out the socioeconomic effects from the seasonal ones.

May is the most unfavorable time to get pregnant, study conducted by Economists Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt finds. Babies conceived this month (and thus delivered in winter) were 13% more likely to be born premature, and their gestation time was almost a week below the average, Currie and Schwandt report.

"Healthy" Foods are not as they are labeled

People tend to choose larger portions of food if they are labeled as being “healthier”, even if they have the same number of calories, according to a new study.

That misconception can lead to people eating larger portions of so-called healthy foods, and therefore more calories.

whether health and nutrition claims had any influence on people choosing portion sizes of these foods? A study led by Barbara Livingstone, a professor at the University of Ulster, uncovered the question.

The researchers asked 186 adults to assess the appropriate portion sizes of foods. Given a bowl of coleslaw, the participants served themselves more of the coleslaw labeled “healthier” than the coleslaw labeled “standard.” For instance, obese men served themselves 103 grams of healthy coleslaw and 86 grams of standard coleslaw.

In reality, the healthy-labeled coleslaw had just as many calories—941 kilojoules (or 224 calories) for every 100 grams—as the “standard” coleslaw, which had 937 kilojoules (or 223 calories).

Additionally, people tended to underestimate how many calories were in a serving for the “healthier” coleslaw. The participants most often thought the “healthier” coleslaw contained 477 kilojoules, or 113 calories. In contrast, they were not far off in estimating the calories in the “standard” coleslaw.

Why one can not keep a secret

Unlike what we usually think about the brain, it doesn’t have one central driver. Instead, the brain consists of a lot of competing strength that are trying to drive the ship. In fact one is not one thing. In the brain, there are different political parties which form a parliament that decide what you do. This is why people often find it is hard to decide and cajole themselves and contract with themselves. It’s because these strengths are all trying to be in control.

This sheds light on a lot of issues about human behavior. One of them is about why one can’t keep a secret. You may say it could be a toaster or something like that. Maybe you need to take over rivals framework to understand what a secret is, which is that a part of your brain wants to tell something and another part of your brain doesn’t want to because of the social consequences of it. You need multiple parts of the brain that are in competition with one another. If all these different parts want to tell the story, then it’s just a good story. And if none of the parts want to tell it, then it’s just something you don't do. It’s that tension that you get from different populations in the brain, that's what constitutes a secret.

The math in the twelve-tone

First number the pitches in order from 0 to 11 to name the intervals of twelve in the circle with twelve referring dots. When you draw lines connecting the first and the last intervals of a serial, which are both minor thirds, you can have several parallel lines with arrows on them. If we don’t move the dots and rotate the lines by 180 degrees, the blue line between D and C# would end up being line from G# to G with the arrow pointing the other direction. The same thing is true for all the other lines. This is not an accident. It is the principle with triton of twelve-tone.

Study shows that an Avatar teaches you how to lose weight

A study, published in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology recently looked into how that effect relates to weight loss--but used virtual people in place of real ones.

In the small study, women who watched virtual behaviors of themselves ended up exercising more in real-life, too.

It sounds pretty unbelievable, but the study suggests that watching virtual people work out could help you lose weight.

In psychology, there's a term "social cognitive theory." Part of that theory illustrates that when good things happen to people who behaved a certain way, observers are more likely to imitate that behavior, especially if the observer and the observed look alike. Seeing your twin sister drawing? Probably helpful. Watching movie stars do it? Maybe not so much.

The team of researchers made an avatar that looked like each woman in a group of eight. After that, the researchers had the women make a weekly clinic visit, where they watched a video of their avatar making healthy choices. One week the women saw the virtual person choosing the right portion size; another week the well-disciplined virtual person walked at an appropriate speed across a treadmill. After four weeks, the eight women lost a modest average of 3.5 pounds, which is about what you'd expect when adhering to standard dieting practices. 3.5 pounds might not sound that much, but the process could lead to more weight loss, larger studies have shown.

How to Learn a Language Quickly

Researches and simulations show that one can learn the meaning of words rapidly if he or she assume that every object has only one word.

Richard Blythe from the University of Edinburgh in the UK look into the problem. Small-scale lab tests have shown that children and adults use mutual exclusivity to determine word meaning. But researchers don’t know how effective this strategy is compared with others when dealing with hundreds or thousands of words.

To solve this question, Blythe and his colleagues used a physics analogy like others in the past. They assume word learning resembles some problems in nonequilibrium statistical physics, where a large number of entities (such as molecules and atoms) interact, and the probability distributions for certain states evolve over time. In language learning, a word like “cup” will start off with many confounders, and so the probability of “cup” meaning cup will be low. But over time this probability—and that of other word-meaning pairs—will grow to one, analogous to the system approaching equilibrium.

The researchers figure it out that the mutual exclusivity assumption is extremely effective.

Linda Smith, a cognitive scientist from Indiana University in Bloomington, says that mutual exclusivity is a common theme in brain studies. “Competition is how the brain works—in all domains, at all levels,” she says. If the brain forms an oassociatin between a word and an object, this will inhibit other words from forming a similar association with the same object. She expects some psychologists will take issue with the idea that learners retain a set of confounders for each word from one utterance to the next, but she says that similar kinds of ambiguity are included in theories of the brain’s memory retrieval.