Lifeboat Foundation

The researchers found that people have a moral preference for supporting good causes and not wanting to support harmful or bad causes. However, depending on the strength of the monetary incentive, people will at one point switch to selfish behavior. When the authors reduced the excitability of the rTPJ using electromagnetic stimulation, the participants’ moral behavior remained more stable.

“If we don’t let the brain deliberate on conflicting moral and monetary values, people are more likely to stick to their moral convictions and aren’t swayed, even by high financial incentives,” explains Christian Ruff. According to the neuroeconomist, this is a remarkable finding, since: “In principle, it’s also conceivable that people are intuitively guided by financial interests and only take the altruistic path as a result of their deliberations.”

Our actions are guided by moral values. However, monetary incentives can get in the way of our good intentions. Neuroeconomists at the University of Zurich have now investigated in which area of the brain conflicts between moral and material motives are resolved. Their findings reveal that our actions are more social when these deliberations are inhibited.

Continue reading “Morals versus money: How we make social decisions” »

US$190 million in investors’ money has been locked since Cotten died in December. His widow says she doesn’t know his passwords.

About US$190 million in cryptocurrency has been locked away in a online black hole after the founder of a currency exchange died, apparently taking his encrypted access to their money with him.

Investors in QuadrigaCX, Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, have been unable to access their funds since its founder, Gerald Cotten, died last year.

Continue reading “Canadian cryptocurrency fund boss Gerald Cotten died – and US$190million of his investors’ money may be encrypted forever” »

Behold the new black gold. Dark and warm, it oozes water and teems with beneficial properties. It even harbors precious metals.

And boy does it stink.

Call it the excrement economy. Between the rise of fecal transplants and water strained from latrine sludge, the poop market is hot. Besides removing toxic waste, the commodification of crap could mean big bucks, especially in the developing world. Sounds crazy, but look at what happened with used cooking oil — now processed into biofuel instead of dumped into landfills — which went from being worth nothing in the early 2000s to $3.30 a gallon in 2011, according to the Utah Biodiesel Supply.

Continue reading “Turning manure into gold: The excrement economy” »

A Chicago-based entrepreneur says many industrial power users can save money, get more electricity, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by using the energy they already consume more efficiently. It’s called recycling energy — capturing waste heat and turning it into power.

The theme for this year’s gathering is Globalization 4.0 – how we’re handling the changes wrought on the world by the increasing interconnectedness of cultures and economies.

We must also reckon with the future. Digitization, Big Data, and the migration of IT services to the cloud are driving change now but we’re also starting to see the opportunities that will lead to Globalization 5.0.

These are the themes that will dominate the Davos gatherings of the future, says General Atlantic’s Bill Ford.

Continue reading “Here’s what everyone will be talking about at Davos in 2020 and beyond” »

“Human players must explicitly manage an ‘economy of attention’ to decide where to focus the camera,” said the DeepMind team. “However, analysis of AlphaStar’s games suggests that it manages an implicit focus of attention. On average, agents ‘switched context’ about 30 times per minute,” the team wrote, which was similar to Komincz’s and Wünsch’s behaviors.

Ultimately, the DeepMind team concluded that AlphaStar won against both pros because of “superior macro and micro-strategic decision-making, rather than superior click-rate, faster reaction times, or the raw interface.”

Some people on his communications staff at the time were not pleased.

Sims writes that he was “getting antsy” in the room due to Trump’s abrupt question shortly before a televised phone call with the Space Station. NASA officials were believed to have gone to great lengths to coordinate with the Space Station, which could only be reached during a certain time due to “orbital mechanics.”

“All I could think about was that we had to be on camera in three minutes … And yet we’re in here casually chatting about shaving a full decade off NASA’s timetable for sending a manned flight to Mars,” Sims reportedly wrote. “And seemingly out of nowhere.”

Continue reading “Trump reportedly offered NASA ‘all the money you could ever need’ to land on Mars during his presidency” »

According to the World Health Organisation, up to a half-million people around the world suffer a spinal cord injury each year. Often caused by road traffic crashes, accidents or violence, the loss of motor control or paralysis significantly impacts quality of life and requires years of treatment and care. Spinal cord injury is also associated with lower rates of school enrollment and economic participation, and carries substantial individual and societal costs.

Current methods for spinal cord injury treatment involve cumbersome brain-machine interfaces, with many cables linking the patient and a computer to restore limited motor functions. Other methods to map brain activity, such as magnetoencephalography, require very large machinery and particularly low-temperature working conditions.

Continue reading “Can nanotechnology rewire an injured spinal cord?” »

Ladies Monday with Cindy Rampersaud.

How do we prepare young people for jobs that do not yet exist?

Continue reading “The Future Yet To Be Imagined” »