10. Libet’s Challenge to Free Will Your decisions feel like your own, but Benjamin Libet’s study using electroencephalography (EEG) appeared to show that preparatory brain activity precedes your conscious decisions of when to move. One controversial interpretation is that this challenges the notion that you have free will. The decision of when to move is…
A new study has found that people who buy into “pseudo-profound bullsh*t” – the researchers’ words, not ours – are more likely to score on the low side for verbal and fluid intelligence, and are also more likely to believe in conspiracies and endorse alternative medicine. What exactly is pseudo-profound bullsh*t, you might ask? In…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in both natural and artificial environments. However, microbial diversity is usually reduced under strong selection pressures, such as those present in habitats rich in recalcitrant or toxic compounds displaying antimicrobial properties. Caffeine is a natural alkaloid present in coffee, tea and soft drinks with well-known antibacterial properties. Here we present the…
There has been much talk on the Googlebox about us being saved by a Christmas rally and I thought what an ideal topic for a chart. So I went and had a look at the average December gain for a variety of markets over the past 20 years and the results are below. As you…
A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counselling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly…
Reviewing a handful of studies on the subject, Harvard Health contends that “gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” So it’s no wonder expressing gratitude is the first social habit most of us acquire. We’re taught to say thank you around the…
A brilliant American financier and his exotic wife build a lavish mansion in the jungles of Costa Rica, set up a wildlife preserve, and appear to slowly, steadily lose their minds. A spiral of handguns, angry locals, armed guards, uncut diamonds, abduction plots, and a bedroom blazing with 550 Tiffany lamps ends with a body…
I have lost count of the number of conversations I have had with aspiring traders over the past 30 odd years. These conversations tend to have a few common themes, they are undoubtedly aspirational, often exciting and sometimes lacking in reality. It is this lack of reality that is the saddest part for me because…
For a man who has built a $US30 billion hedge fund empire on the prowess of artificial intelligence, David Harding is as human as you can get. The 55-year-old founder of London-based Winton Capital Management’s personal fortune of $US1.5 billion is irrefutable proof that systematic trading can work, and works spectacularly well. But that does not make him…
