The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions

by Dan Ariely

The heat of the moment is a powerful, dangerous thing. We all know this. If we’re happy, we may be overly generous. Maybe we leave a big tip, or buy a boat. If we’re irritated, we may snap. Maybe we rifle off that nasty e-mail to the boss, or punch someone. And for that fleeting second, we feel great. But the regret—and the consequences of that decision—may last years, a whole career, or even a lifetime.

At least the regret will serve us well, right? Lesson learned—maybe.

Maybe not. My friend Eduardo Andrade and I wondered if emotions could influence how people make decisions even after the heat or anxiety or exhilaration wears off. We suspected they could. As research going back to Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory suggests, the problem with emotional decisions is that our actions loom larger than the conditions under which the decisions were made. When we confront a situation, our mind looks for a precedent among past actions without regard to whether a decision was made in emotional or unemotional circumstances. Which means we end up repeating our mistakes, even after we’ve cooled off

I said that Eduardo and I wondered if past emotions influence future actions, but, really, we worried about it. If we were right, and recklessly poor emotional decisions guide later “rational” moments, well, then, we’re not terribly sophisticated decision makers, are we?

To test the idea, we needed to observe some emotional decisions. So we annoyed some people, by showing them a five-minute clip from the movie Life as a House, in which an arrogant boss fires an architect who proceeds to smash the firm’s models. We made other subjects happy, by showing them—what else?—a clip from the TV show Friends. (Eduardo’s previous research had established the emotional effects of these clips).

Right after that, we had them play a classic economics game known as the ultimatum game, in which a “sender” (in this case, Eduardo and I) has $20 and offers a “receiver” (the movie watcher) a portion of the money. Some offers are fair (an even split) and some are unfair (you get $5, we get $15). The receiver can either accept or reject the offer. If he rejects it, both sides get nothing.

Traditional economics predicts that people—as rational beings—will accept any offer of money rather than reject an offer and get zero. But behavioral economics shows that people often prefer to lose money in order to punish a person making an unfair offer.

Ah, human nature: want to find out more about the results of this study?

The Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Emotions

A TED Talk--of Hope--From Malawi

This Morning the first thing I saw when I turned on my computer was this talk by a young man from Malawi. Those, not all--but some--disenfrancised by the Europeans' spread across the globe in the form of the East India Tea company, the Spanish and Portuguese desire to acquire the wealth of the new worlds discovered to the west, the peoples in once-prosperous lands thrown off of their traditional lands for the sake of European monoculture, whether it be mahogany, or sugar, or rubber, are starting to claim back the land, a little at a time and to grow the food to support themselves instead of rummaging through the garbage heaps of the rich and building hovels out of discarded packing materials, drinking contaminated water that has been filtered through sewage.

Twenty-seven years ago, a friend with the exact same birthday as mine, wrote a book called A Diet For a Small Planet, the premise of which was that the earth so bountiful that no one need go hungry. Seven years ago, along with her daughter, she wrote another, called Hope's Edge. She and her daughter traveled all over the world finding the pockets of determined poor, building gardens in vacant lots, in waste fields, saying: Even now, as bad as things are we still have a chance. How many times have we been given this chance and not taken it? Another Down the Rabbit Hole question. Will we make it this time or is the Earth getting ready to shake us off, once more, like a dog shaking off fleas? Are we about to get busted back to caveman again?

A TED Talk--of Hope--From Malawi

The Real Cost of Search Engines

Search Engines's Dirty Secret06 April 2010 by James Clarage

For similar stories, visit the Comment and Analysis and Energy and Fuels Topic Guides

HOW much does a web search cost? You don't pay up front, but there are costs nevertheless, and they are not just measured in dollars.

The term search "engine" is apt. Searches are powered by millions of computers packed into warehouses, all wired together to function as a single system. Like any system, it obeys the laws of thermodynamics, and therefore wastes energy.

The first law says it takes energy to do work, even if that work is only to move electrons across silicon wafers. The second law says that no engine is perfect, meaning some of the input gets lost as heat. This is the entropy, or disorder, arising from your search.

A successful results page brings clarity and order to your corner of the universe, but down in the server farms things get messy. Thermal motion of silicon atoms agitates air molecules behind the CPU racks, heating them up. More energy must be fed in to power the computer fans and air-conditioning units needed to remove this heat from the warehouses.

Whatever you search for, it boils down to the same cycle: move atoms, then cool atoms. Both these steps consume energy. How much? Let's run through some numbers, using the leading search engine as our guide. There's lots more. Read it here.

The Real Cost of Search Engines

One Man's Volunteer Effort To Plant Trees

in San Francisco

As a volunteer, Charlie Starbuck has helped to plant trees by the thousands on the streets of San Francisco, a city long on charm but short on leafy green trees. For almost 30 years, Charlie Starbuck has volunteered to plant trees all over San Francisco, one street at a time, as a member of the nonprofit group Friends of the Urban Forest.( Van Slambrouck, Contributor, April 5, 2010 San Francisco)
Charlie Starbuck has them in just about every part of this city. Walk a block or two in virtually any neighborhood, from the concrete canyons of the financial district to the windblown avenues of the Outer Sunset and Mr. Starbuck's fingerprints are there. It might be a Brisbane box, a bronze loquat, a primrose, or a purple leaf plum. Whatever the species of tree, chances are excellent that Starbuck helped plant it. Not as in ordered the tree or arranged for the planting. But as in actually put his fingers in the dirt and planted it.

A soft-spoken gentleman fond of berets, Starbuck has volunteered for a citywide tree-planting program since 1981, nearly without interruption. That's almost 30 years of weekly plantings, without pay, come rain or shine. "For Charlie to be that consistent..." says Doug Wildman, program director of San Francisco's Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF), his voice trailing off as he searches for the right superlative. "Well, he's our rock." FUF (www.fuf.net) is the nonprofit group for which Starbuck has volunteered all these years.One man's volunteer effort to plant trees in San Francisco As a volunteer, Charlie Starbuck has helped to plant trees by the thousands on the streets of San Francisco, a city long on charm but short on leafy green trees. For almost 30 years, Charlie Starbuck has volunteered to plant trees all over San Francisco, one street at a time, as a member of the nonprofit group Friends of the Urban Forest.

Unfortunately, Charlie is fighting a losing battle. Not only are we losing our forest canopy to the rapid sprawl of outlying subdivisions, we're losing out urban trees as well. And each tree lost can contribute enomously to the utility bills of urban householders and to their health-care bills as well. To read a story about this see :
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0426/p20s01-sten.html.

Would you like to be part of the solution? In addition to Friends of the Urban Forest (above) you can also visit the following website:
be the change: http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=4083a.

Eggs for Breakfast Reduces Calorie Consumption

A new study demonstrates that eating protein-rich eggs for breakfast reduces hunger and decreases calorie consumption at lunch and throughout the day. The study, published in the February issue of Nutrition Research, found that men who consumed an egg-based breakfast ate significantly fewer calories when offered an unlimited lunch buffet compared to when they ate a carbohydrate-rich bagel breakfast of equal calories.

This study supports previous research which revealed that eating eggs for breakfast as part of a reduced-calorie diet helped overweight dieters lose 65 percent more weight and feel more energetic than dieters who ate a bagel breakfast of equal calories and volume.Now, as ever, the moneyed class gets the most press, their proclivities and habits making headlines while the rest of humanity surges ever-onward hungrily and anonymously.

This rule is particularly true with women, in whose ranks the voices of the poor drown particularly silently. Rich women, on the other hand, have always seemed to be of particular interest to almost everybody.

In this instance, the press is working itself into a lather over the news, reported by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine, that a few stay-at-home moms in Berkeley are raising chickens in their back yards. "Femivores," she calls them, as if women growing food for their families is a phenomenon that needs a new name. (I won't even mention my misgiving about the grammar.)

The blogosphere, in response to this prompt, busies itself with reading the scratches in the dirt: What does it all mean?Now, as ever, the moneyed class gets the most press, their proclivities and habits making headlines while the rest of humanity surges ever-onward hungrily and anonymously. This rule is particularly true with women, in whose ranks the voices of the poor drown particularly silently. Rich women, on the other hand, have always seemed to be of particular interest to almost everybody.

In this instance, the press is working itself into a lather over the news, reported by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine, that a few stay-at-home moms in Berkeley are raising chickens in their back yards. "Femivores," she calls them, as if women growing food for their families is a phenomenon that needs a new name. (I won't even mention my misgiving about the grammar.)
The blogosphere, in response to this prompt, busies itself with reading the scratches in the dirt: What does it all mean? Read More...

Eggs for Breakfast Reduces Calorie Consumption

Oh My....Don't attack the Dalai Lama!

A group of researchers has linked a huge, China-based cyber espionage ring to the theft of thousands of documents — including classified information, visa applications, and personal identities — from “politically sensitive targets” around the world.

The command-and-control infrastructure of this so-called Shadow Network used platforms such as Twitter, Google Groups, Blogspot, Baidu Blogs, blog.com and Yahoo Mail to maintain persistent control of infected computers.

They also used Tor, a system designed to grant online anonymity to political protesters, crime victims, journalists and others. The network then attacked targets ranging from the offices of the Dalai Lama to the United Nations as well as Indian and Pakistani government officials. Not all of the attacked organizations can be positively identified, but researchers are confident that India was the primary target.

Oh My....Don't attack the Dalai Lama!

Bees see color 3X as Fast as We Do

The Way Bees See Color

Bees see color at about triple the speed that humans do, a new study finds.

The findings are the first to measure bumblebee color vision speed and show how it compares with that of monochromatic vision, or the "black-and-white" vision used to track motion.

Since speedy vision takes up quite a bit of energy, the results suggest seeing quickly in color must be rather valuable for bees.

"Color vision doesn't have to be so fast — if you want to track something moving accurately you need fast processing to track its changing position, but objects don't change color rapidly, that tends to be a permanent feature," said study author Peter Skorupski, a researcher at Queen Mary, University of London, in England. "[The results] suggest to us that color vision must be pretty important in the life of a bumblebee."

Bees see color 3X as Fast as We Do

Functional Street Art

Watch Out for the Bikes!

Recently, I've started noticing these bilingual, and potentially quite helpful, wheat-pastings around Los Angeles. I finally had to stop and take some pictures last night:

Placed on utility boxes like this along the sides of main roads used by bikes and cars, these signs show how much energy the biking share-the-road movements are gaining. Clearly, this isn't quite the same as having a bike lane, but I'd love to think these posters could be the guerrilla way to start people thinking about making a space for cyclists, even if it isn't yet painted on the road.

I'm not sure who's behind these, but I've gotta say, these are probably my newest favorite act of productive civil disobedience (and I do keep a list: these guys are on it and so is this guy) and an exciting example of street art as functional civic intervention.

Well done, whoever you are.

These pictures were taken along Figueroa Boulevard near Highland Park, Los Angeles

Functional Street Art

A Little Art Project

What Do We Do With These Relics

That Are Too Heavily Engineered to Demolish?

We began trying to answer this question a few years ago about the exact elevator described above. It's now vacant, the curved walls utilized as a rock climbing facility, a stones throw from Omaha's city center, and is passed daily by 76,000 cars on the adjacent freeway. And here's what we've come up with: invite artists all over the nation to design 20'x80' panels to hang on 16 of the silos that interpret the interconnectedness of land use, agriculture, and food and then celebrate the opening of the massive pieces of art with an enormous dinner table and meal at the base of the elevator. All the food for the meal will be provided by small scale local farmers. All the art panels will be sponsored by food/agriculture corporations, and ALL will enjoy an epic celebration in the shadow of the iconic relic.

A Little Art Project

WHAT A SHYSTER!

I cannot believe this jerk had me so sucked in. He actually made me believe, stringing me along for two days that I was going to pay for his program by advertising it for him, and I imagine I would have, if it even works.

But after day two, of one time-wasting screwup after another (and we all know time is money, don't we boys and girls) this absolute S%$T tells me he has bad news and his program (I had already bought one the night before, after a free trial, that cost more than his) is going to cost me up front as well.

After buying Photoshop, Illustrator NetObjects Fusion and the like for years (and upgrades every year) his program would have been the merest nothing. But my guess is that anybody who has to resort to tactics like that to sell something is selling NOTHING.

More power to him. I'm sure he sucks in people every day and makes lots of lovely money. But for what I charge an hour, and the amount of time I wasted on him, he can go P%&S up a rope. Go ahead check him out for yourself. It's worth the laugh.

WHAT A SHYSTER!

Gotta Love Him!

Gotta Love Him!