Link:
Wired

Links:
Reddit
Wired
Wikipedia
Imgur

Usually when your car does not start, it means dead battery. But even if after you had tried to jump start the car, and the engine does not "crank" (ie. no crank sound), it means the battery is still fine.

One possible solution is to shift your transmission to neutral (if you have automatic transmission), and try to start the engine from "N". This is because even if you had the car in "P" park mode, the transmission might still get stuck at "D", so the vehicle is not allowing you to start.

By shifting the transmission around and finally to "N" neutral, you might be able to unstuck the transmission and get your car started.



Link:
Car no start troubleshooting
Mazda Forum
Mazda3 FAQ

Dalacin-T is a calming antibiotic gel really help you in the war against bacteria. Apply Dalacin-T gel morning and night all over your face not just on affected areas to prevent the spread.



Link:
Acne Treatment

To keep USB viruses from injecting themselves to your PC or laptop is to Disable the USB Autorun feature:

1. Click the Start button, then Run and enter "gpedit.msc" without the quotes
2. Go to Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System
3. Scroll down to "Turn off Autoplay" and double click on it
4. Click on the "Enabled" radio button, then for "Turn off Autoplay on" select "All drives"

OR

just keep holding Shift when you insert a USB disk. It cancels the autorun.

Delete autorun.inf file in the usb drive if you suspect it is infected with virus.



Link:
Sizlopedia
Stop windows from executing AUTORUN.INF

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it".^[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.


Link:
Wikipedia

I came across this question from the bonus question section of Jeopardy show.

The is question is:
At the same sea level, which latitude on earth will give you a lower weight?

To find out the answer, highlight this post either by dragging the mouse over the whole page or press "ctrl" and "a" at the same time.

At equator, or zero degree.

If your curious mind want to know why, go to "Ask an Astronomer" to find out!


Link:

Ask an Astronomer

Have you ever wondered how do things look to those with colorblindness? There is a flash program that allows a person without colorblind defect to view things through the eyes of those with colorblind.

And if you are colorblind, two pictures will look similar to you, but not the same. This is due to the fact that in order to simulate colorblindness for the normal vision people, certain colors from the normal photo has to be digitally altered to the effect.

In other words, for normal vision people, "normal" photo is the full color photo. Each "colorblind" photo is associated with color deficiency as associated with the colorblind people. To stimulate the deficiency effect for normal vision people, the corresponding color has to be altered from the "normal" photo.

For colorblind people, you will get a much vibrant "normal" photo when compared to the one that is associated with your color deficiency. This is because the color deficiency photo loses some of the color that you cannot associate with, rendering it less vibrant.

Vision simulator

=============================

Colorblindness Testing

To test if you have colorblind, you can use this simple test available on the same website. It is very effective, and you can know the results right away. If you suspect yourself as colorblind, you might want to get medically proven by going to the doctor.

This is the 3rd article on barefoot running movement. I talked about this increasingly popular movement in a Barefoot Running article from May 2009 and Nike "Free" brand for barefoot running movement from June 2009.

I came across this from a Lifehacker post about an article by Christopher McDougall on Daily Mail Online. The title of the article is "The painful truth about trainers: Are running shoes a waste of money?"

I am not advocating completely running barefoot as our world is literally full of danger like broken glasses, stool, etc But we should strive to reduce the amount of padding we have for the shoes to improve/strengthen our feet.

=========================================================

As quoted from the Daily Mail Online:
"
At Stanford University, California, two sales representatives from Nike were watching the athletics team practise. Part of their job was to gather feedback from the company's sponsored runners about which shoes they preferred.

Unfortunately, it was proving difficult that day as the runners all seemed to prefer... nothing.

'Didn't we send you enough shoes?' they asked head coach Vin Lananna. They had, he was just refusing to use them.

'I can't prove this,' the well-respected coach told them.

'But I believe that when my runners train barefoot they run faster and suffer fewer injuries.'

Nike sponsored the Stanford team as they were the best of the very best. Needless to say, the reps were a little disturbed to hear that Lananna felt the best shoes they had to offer them were not as good as no shoes at all.

When I was told this anecdote it came as no surprise. I'd spent years struggling with a variety of running-related injuries, each time trading up to more expensive shoes, which seemed to make no difference. I'd lost count of the amount of money I'd handed over at shops and sports-injury clinics - eventually ending with advice from my doctor to give it up and 'buy a bike'.

And I wasn't on my own. Every year, anywhere from 65 to 80 per cent of all runners suffer an injury. No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same. It doesn't matter if you're male or female, fast or slow, pudgy or taut as a racehorse, your feet are still in the danger zone.

But why? How come Roger Bannister could charge out of his Oxford lab every day, pound around a hard cinder track in thin leather slippers, not only getting faster but never getting hurt, and set a record before lunch?

Tarahumara runner Arnulfo Quimare runs alongside ultra-runner Scott Jurek in Mexico's Copper Canyons

Then there's the secretive Tarahumara tribe, the best long-distance runners in the world. These are a people who live in basic conditions in Mexico, often in caves without running water, and run with only strips of old tyre or leather thongs strapped to the bottom of their feet. They are virtually barefoot.

Come race day, the Tarahumara don't train. They don't stretch or warm up. They just stroll to the starting line, laughing and bantering, and then go for it, ultra-running for two full days, sometimes covering over 300 miles, non-stop. For the fun of it. One of them recently came first in a prestigious 100-mile race wearing nothing but a toga and sandals. He was 57 years old.

When it comes to preparation, the Tarahumara prefer more of a Mardi Gras approach. In terms of diet, lifestyle and training technique, they're a track coach's nightmare. They drink like New Year's Eve is a weekly event, tossing back enough corn-based beer and homemade tequila brewed from rattlesnake corpses to floor an army.

Unlike their Western counterparts, the Tarahumara don't replenish their bodies with electrolyte-rich sports drinks. They don't rebuild between workouts with protein bars; in fact, they barely eat any protein at all, living on little more than ground corn spiced up by their favourite delicacy, barbecued mouse.

How come they're not crippled?

I've watched them climb sheer cliffs with no visible support on nothing more than an hour's sleep and a stomach full of pinto beans. It's as if a clerical error entered the stats in the wrong columns. Shouldn't we, the ones with state-of-the-art running shoes and custom-made orthotics, have the zero casualty rate, and the Tarahumara, who run far more, on far rockier terrain, in shoes that barely qualify as shoes, be constantly hospitalised?

The answer, I discovered, will make for unpalatable reading for the $20 billion trainer-manufacturing industry. It could also change runners' lives forever.

Dr Daniel Lieberman, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, has been studying the growing injury crisis in the developed world for some time and has come to a startling conclusion: 'A lot of foot and knee injuries currently plaguing us are caused by people running with shoes that actually make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate (ankle rotation) and give us knee problems.

'Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented, people ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet and had a much lower incidence of knee injuries.'

Lieberman also believes that if modern trainers never existed more people would be running. And if more people ran, fewer would be suffering from heart disease, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world.

'Humans need aerobic exercise in order to stay healthy,' says Lieberman. 'If there's any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it's to run.'

The modern running shoe was essentially invented by Nike. The company was founded in the Seventies by Phil Knight, a University of Oregon runner, and Bill Bowerman, the University of Oregon coach.

Before these two men got together, the modern running shoe as we know it didn't exist. Runners from Jesse Owens through to Roger Bannister all ran with backs straight, knees bent, feet scratching back under their hips. They had no choice: their only shock absorption came from the compression of their legs and their thick pad of midfoot fat. Thumping down on their heels was not an option.

Despite all their marketing suggestions to the contrary, no manufacturer has ever invented a shoe that is any help at all in injury prevention

Bowerman didn't actually do much running. He only started to jog a little at the age of 50, after spending time in New Zealand with Arthur Lydiard, the father of fitness running and the most influential distance-running coach of all time. Bowerman came home a convert, and in 1966 wrote a best-selling book whose title introduced a new word and obsession to the fitness-aware public: Jogging.

In between writing and coaching, Bowerman came up with the idea of sticking a hunk of rubber under the heel of his pumps. It was, he said, to stop the feet tiring and give them an edge. With the heel raised, he reasoned, gravity would push them forward ahead of the next man. Bowerman called Nike's first shoe the Cortez - after the conquistador who plundered the New World for gold and unleashed a horrific smallpox epidemic.

It is an irony not wasted on his detractors. In essence, he had created a market for a product and then created the product itself.

'It's genius, the kind of stuff they study in business schools,' one commentator said.

Bowerman's partner, Knight, set up a manufacturing deal in Japan and was soon selling shoes faster than they could come off the assembly line.

'With the Cortez's cushioning, we were in a monopoly position probably into the Olympic year, 1972,' Knight said.

The rest is history.

The company's annual turnover is now in excess of $17 billion and it has a major market share in over 160 countries.

Since then, running-shoe companies have had more than 30 years to perfect their designs so, logically, the injury rate must be in freefall by now.

After all, Adidas has come up with a $250 shoe with a microprocessor in the sole that instantly adjusts cushioning for every stride. Asics spent $3 million and eight years (three more years than it took to create the first atomic bomb) to invent the Kinsei, a shoe that boasts 'multi-angled forefoot gel pods', and a 'midfoot thrust enhancer'. Each season brings an expensive new purchase for the average runner.

But at least you know you'll never limp again. Or so the leading companies would have you believe. Despite all their marketing suggestions to the contrary, no manufacturer has ever invented a shoe that is any help at all in injury prevention.

If anything, the injury rates have actually ebbed up since the Seventies - Achilles tendon blowouts have seen a ten per cent increase. (It's not only shoes that can create the problem: research in Hawaii found runners who stretched before exercise were 33 per cent more likely to get hurt.)

In a paper for the British Journal Of Sports Medicine last year, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed there are no evidence-based studies that demonstrate running shoes make you less prone to injury. Not one.

It was an astonishing revelation that had been hidden for over 35 years. Dr Richards was so stunned that a $20 billion industry seemed to be based on nothing but empty promises and wishful thinking that he issued the following challenge: 'Is any running-shoe company prepared to claim that wearing their distance running shoes will decrease your risk of suffering musculoskeletal running injuries? Is any shoe manufacturer prepared to claim that wearing their running shoes will improve your distance running performance? If you are prepared to make these claims, where is your peer-reviewed data to back it up?'

Dr Richards waited and even tried contacting the major shoe companies for their data. In response, he got silence.

So, if running shoes don't make you go faster and don't stop you from getting hurt, then what, exactly, are you paying for? What are the benefits of all those microchips, thrust enhancers, air cushions, torsion devices and roll bars?

The answer is still a mystery. And for Bowerman's old mentor, Arthur Lydiard, it all makes sense.

'We used to run in canvas shoes,' he said.

'We didn't get plantar fasciitis (pain under the heel); we didn't pronate or supinate (land on the edge of the foot); we might have lost a bit of skin from the rough canvas when we were running marathons, but generally we didn't have foot problems.

'Paying several hundred dollars for the latest in hi-tech running shoes is no guarantee you'll avoid any of these injuries and can even guarantee that you will suffer from them in one form or another. Shoes that let your foot function like you're barefoot - they're the shoes for me.'

Soon after those two Nike sales reps reported back from Stanford, the marketing team set to work to see if it could make money from the lessons it had learned. Jeff Pisciotta, the senior researcher at Nike Sports Research Lab, assembled 20 runners on a grassy field and filmed them running barefoot.

When he zoomed in, he was startled by what he found. Instead of each foot clomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own - stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan.

'It's beautiful to watch,' Pisciotta later told me. 'That made us start thinking that when you put a shoe on, it starts to take over some of the control.'

Pisciotta immediately deployed his team to gather film of every existing barefoot culture they could find.

'We found pockets of people all over the globe who are still running barefoot, and what you find is that, during propulsion and landing, they have far more range of motion in the foot and engage more of the toe. Their feet flex, spread, splay and grip the surface, meaning you have less pronation and more distribution of pressure.'

Nike's response was to find a way to make money off a naked foot. It took two years of work before Pisciotta was ready to unveil his masterpiece. It was presented in TV ads that showed Kenyan runners padding
along a dirt trail, swimmers curling their toes around a starting block, gymnasts, Brazilian capoeira dancers, rock climbers, wrestlers, karate masters and beach soccer players.

And then comes the grand finale: we cut back to the Kenyans, whose bare feet are now sporting some kind of thin shoe. It's the new Nike Free, a shoe thinner than the old Cortez dreamt up by Bowerman in the Seventies. And its slogan?

'Run Barefoot.'

The price of this return to nature?

A conservative £65. But, unlike the real thing, experts may still advise you to change them every three months.

Edited extract from 'Born To Run' by Christopher McDougall, £16.99, on sale from April 23

"




=========================================================

I came across dating tips for shy guys by Toni Nova on Squidoo.com. I find it interesting partly because the tips are pretty much relevant not just for dating, but generally for you to succeed in your daily activities, especially if you are a shy guy. The examples that I am showing are in orange color.

Quote:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Quick dating tip #1... Get the skill, not the girl.
--->The most important thing when getting to know new people is to be sincere!!!

Most guys I know approach attractive women with a definite agenda in their mind.

They look at how hot she is and think to themselves, "Damn, that chick is fine... Look at those big melons. I'd sure like to get her digits, take her out on a date and then hopefully stick my head in between those things by the end of the night"

Or they think, "Jeez, she is hot, it's been months since I've had sex with someone else besides my right palm. She could end this miserable dry spell and maybe I could start spending my money on condoms instead of lotion and paper towels."

All joking aside, when a guy is too emotionally invested in getting a girl's number, taking her out or having sex with her, the woman he's talking to can smell his neediness from a mile away.

So here's my advice to you:

Since your trying to build your skills with approaching and talking to attractive women you should have only one agenda...

The next time you see a woman you're attracted to I don't want you to think about phone numbers, dates or sex.

Detach from all that for now.

Just think about her as an opportunity to gain a little experience and build up your skills with women.

And guess what?

She'll be able to pick up on your lack of neediness and it will make you much more attractive.

Plus, you'll be much more likely to go up to her in the first place because you're not putting any pressure on yourself.

And the more you approach women the more you WILL build your skills with them.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quick dating tip #2... Change the meaning of "rejection"
--->Very important. It will totally change your mindset. When you are rejected for something (friendship, job etc ), treat it not as if you are not good enough, but as your lack of marketing/presentation skills. Example, if you failed to get a job after interview, it does not mean you are not qualified, but your might not have successfully "wow" the interviewer. Improve on your self-marketing skills.

Back in the dfoays when I would attempt to talk to a hot woman and she acted cold, indifferent, rude or bitchy, it almost always made me feel like dirt.

I would take it personally.

I would start to draw some very disempowering conclusions from her response to me, like maybe I'm not tall enough, or maybe I'm not good looking enough.

And I know a ton of guys who do the same thing.

Are you one of them by any chance?

Here's why that is SO bad...

Your brain is a very sophisticated piece of machinery and it will always look to protect you from danger.

So if your self-worth is at risk every time you try to approach a woman then your brain will automatically look to protect you by coming up with rationalizations, excuses, delay tactics or anything else it can do to prevent you from talking to that woman.

So then what's the answer?

The solution to this problem is to "reframe" or change the way you look at rejection.

Keep this fact in mind:

When you approach a woman who doesn't know you from Adam and she "rejects" you, it's not YOU she's rejecting at all.

How could it be? She doesn't even know you, does she?

The only thing she is rejecting is the approach you made.

And so the only conclusion you should draw is that your approach is flawed and needs some work but YOU are not flawed at all.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quick dating tip #3... Make sure to warm up.
--->When going for job interview, make sure you warm up first either by striking a conversation with the reception desk person. You might get some helpful tips from him/her!

This is what I see a lot of guys do when they go out...

They walk into a club, bar, lounge or other type of social venue. They stand around with a serious look on their face looking like they're not having such a great time. Then when they see an attractive woman they try to quickly psyche themselves up to go up to her and say something.

This almost never works. Why?

Two reasons...

1. The odds are that almost every woman in the place has already noticed you. They saw you standing around, scanning the room to see where the party is instead of having a good time and being the party yourself.

2. You've been standing around quiet and in a state of low energy for an extended period of time. It's very difficult to just snap your fingers and go from zero to sixty in a couple of seconds and be social, upbeat and talkative.

So here's what to do instead...

Before you attempt to talk to any attractive women make it a point to talk to at least 5 or 10 other people in what ever venue you're in.

What do you say to them?

It really doesn't matter as long as it's light and up beat.

You can make funny comments about your surroundings or ask them questions then start little mini conversations with them and share a few laughs.

The bartender, waiter, busboy, bouncer, the couple standing by your right, the two dudes drinking a beer on your left, and the fat chick in front of you can all be used to warm yourself up and get in a talkative, fun and social mood.

Then when you do see a hottie in your proximity it won't seem like such a big leap to talk to her. You'll already be in a positive and talkative state and because women are highly intuitive she's most likely to pick up on that and find it all the more attractive.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quick dating tip #4... Choose the right arena
--->If you are a shy guy, best way to meet new people is through online (Facebook etc). You can easily expand your network of friends for hang out activities by getting to know friend's friends.

The first 3 dating tips I've given you so far, can be used in just about any kind of social venue like a club, a lounge or a bar.

But do you want to know what I think?

Of course you do. You wouldn't be reading this if you didn't.

I think those places aren't all that great for meeting women.

Sure, with the lights, the booze, the music and the sexy clothes women wear when they're out, you would certainly assume that you can meet a bunch of women, take them home and do naughty things together but how often does that really happen?

The truth is that there are much better ways to meet women. So do you want to know my all time favorite?

My favorite way to meet women is MySpace and Facebook.

In fact, if you know what you're doing you, me or any other guy can meet more women, on either one of these sites, any night of the week, then we could in a whole weekend of club and bar hopping.

There are hundreds of millions of women on these sites and the majority of them are single.

Because they are in the comfort of their own home, because dozens of other dudes aren't approaching them to hit on them, and because their nosy friends are there watching, these women are SO much more receptive to a guy who says the right things.

But here's the best part and why I have this listed as a dating tip for a shy guy.

MySpace and Facebook can be used as your own personal "flight simulator" for building your skills with women.

Let me explain...

You can shoot out messages to dozens of beautiful, young and single women in just minutes. And you can immediately start working on building your skills with starting conversations, building attraction, flirting back and forth, getting phone numbers and setting up "dates".

And you can do all of this without ever having to risk one single face-to-face rejection.

These sites are like a shy guys best friend. They give you a totally safe arena to work on your skills and meet a whole bunch of women in the process.

I definitely urge you to use them to your advantage.

One last thing...

I hope you found these dating tips for shy guys helpful and I think if you apply them you'll see some definite improvement but... we both know that reading one article isn't really going to be enough to help you have all the options with women you really want and deserve.

So to help you on your journey I'd like to offer you my totally FREE 7 part eCourse.

This eCourse is filled some of my best ideas for everything from meeting women onlineto... building attraction over the phone and of course to... several of my best seduction techniques for picking up women in person."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

via:
Squidoo.com (4 Quick Dating Tips for Shy Guys)

This is a follow-up post from the Barefoot Running article from May 2009. If you want to learn more about barefoot running movement and why it is gaining popularity/good for your feet, go back and read the previous article.

In the previous article, major shoe brands were not involved in the barefoot running culture. However, Nike has picked up the slack and introduced its "Free" brand to cater to those who are into barefoot running.

So far, Nike has introduced Free 3.0, Free 5.0 and Free 7.0 with the scale 0 = barefoot and 10 = fully padded. There is no way Nike will introduce a Free 0.0 as it means shoeless, which equals to zero profit for Nike.

There is an article from The Science of Sport regarding the direction that the running shoe industry is moving into.

========================================================================

There is also a review from Today's Complex on Nike Free 3.0 II running shoe. Quote:
"If you are looking for a shoe that is so light you barely know it’s there, the Nike Free 3.0 II is the shoe for you.========================================================================

There is also another review from Urban Semiotic Nike Free 5.0 running shoe. Quote:
"I ordered a pair of Nike Free 5.0 shoes the other day and from the moment I put them on I realized

I came across this topic on reddit.com and there is another similar interesting talk on TED.com titled Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice. Barry Schwartz is an American psychologist and he has written a book with the title The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less) and you can find it on Amazon or any bookstore.

There is a similar study by Sheena S. Iyenga from Columbia University and Mark R. Lepper from Stamford University titled When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? The results of the study can be summarized by the article Customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy.

There is funny comic strip that talks about choices at Daisy Owl.

========================================================================

Example anecdote on this issue from reddit.
From user HardwareLust:
"I think it depends on what type of person you are. My gf and I are polar opposites on this subject.========================================================================

From user combuchan also from Reddit:
"I was in the grocery store the other day to pick up some various cleaning supplies to finish the job in my place.



Another talk by Barry Schwartz for Google.

via:
TED.com
Wikipedia.org (Barry Schwartz)
Amazon.com (The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less)
DaisyOwl.com (Daisy Owl - Cheese)

An interesting article from NewScientist, which touches the rationality of human being. If you have taken economic classes, you would know that one of the basic assumption for the field is we act rational in order to improve our lives. We seek to increase the limited resources that we have and as everyone starts to do so, we indirectly promotes market efficiency.

Quote verbatim:

===============================================

AROUND the time of the G20 summit in London on 2 April, the streets of cities across the world were filled with people protesting against the excesses of the banking bosses, among other things. Chances are you agreed with the sentiment. Chances are too that if you had been asked to put your hand in your pocket to fund a campaign to seize their bonuses, even if you wouldn't see any of the money, you'd have been sorely tempted.

If so, congratulations: you have just confounded classical economics, which says that no rational person should ever reduce their own income just to slash someone else's. And yet that's exactly what we do. Classical economics, it turns out, is a pretty terrible predictor of how we actually behave.

But why do we inflict pain for no gain? On the face of it, it is rather a perverse way of going about things. Does spitefulness stem from an affronted sense of fairness? Or something altogether darker: envy, lust for revenge - or perhaps even pure sadism?

It might be all those things. Economists, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have been teasing out how, used judiciously, spiteful behaviour can be one of our best weapons in maintaining a fair and ordered society. But intentions that are noble in one situation can be malicious in another - making spite a weapon that can all too easily backfire.

Human spite is a complex affair. It is not pure selfishness in the Darwinian sense, like a stag that picks a fight with another. Though it might be gored in the process, the stag is actually acting in its own best interests. If it ends up with more mates, then the chances of passing on its genes are increased, an evolutionary prize worth fighting for.

Nor is spite as we practise it true spite in the biologist's sense. That would involve diminishing our own evolutionary fitness just so we can lower that of some unrelated individual. That behaviour exists, but it is hard to come by, says Stuart West, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford. There is a particular type of parasitic wasp, for example, some of whose larvae do not develop into adults capable of reproduction, but instead kill unrelated larvae of the same species, freeing up resources for their siblings. And in several types of bacteria, spiteful cells produce chemicals that kill both themselves and other members of their kind, unless they carry a genetic marker of relatedness to the suicidal individual. That makes microbes the kings of true spite, says West.

Human spite is something altogether subtler. Psychological motivations and social contexts influence our course of action. That requires a very special set of circumstances and skills, says Marc Hauser, a biologist at Harvard University. First, it needs a stable social grouping in which unrelated individuals interact regularly, and in which costs incurred retain relevance. What's more, you must also be able to spot when you're getting a raw deal, identify the guilty party, and be willing to do something about it.

That requires what Hauser has dubbed "floodlight" intelligence - the ability to see the big picture and combine many cognitive inputs over time. That, he suggests, might make both spite and reciprocity - the doing and returning of favours - uniquely human qualities. The "laser-beam" intelligence of most animals might be superb at solving individual problems, but it is simply not good enough at generalising experience to develop such complex behaviours (see "Is spite uniquely human?").

Naughty but nice

If that's true, the floodlight is switched on at an early age. At a meeting of London's Royal Society in January, Hauser reported preliminary results from experiments in which children between 4 and 8 years old were offered varying numbers of sweets for themselves and another child unknown to them. They had to pull either a lever delivering the sweets, or another that tipped the sweets out of reach. Infants of all ages almost always rejected one sweet for themselves if the other child was set to receive more. The older children often also rejected sweets if they got more than the other child. Where that kind of concern about inequality disappears to is unclear, because we adults certainly don't have it. "Imagine you have four dollars on your side, and there's one on the other side," says Hauser. "It's highly unlikely that you'll dump your four dollars." But the negative, spiteful version persists: most of us would be quite prepared to sacrifice a dollar to stop someone else getting four. "Spite is the ugly sister of altruism," says Hauser.

What motivates this ignoble behaviour? A clue is provided by laboratory experiments known as public goods games. In a standard public goods game, each participant is given the same amount of money, some or all of which they can pay into a common pot. What's in the pot is then multiplied by the experimenters and divided equally between the players, so that even those who put in nothing get a share of its contents. The best outcome for all is if everyone puts their cash into the pot. But that does not naturally happen. In repeated rounds of the game, some individuals hold on to their own cash and hope to leech off other people.

Deterred by these freeloaders, the players who at first cooperate start to hold onto their cash. Cooperation breaks down entirely, and the whole group misses out on the bonus - society as a whole suffers (see diagram). But allow participants to pay for the privilege of punishing defectors, and it is a very different game. Cooperative players eagerly part with still more of their cash to punish cheats - who soon learn that cooperation is the cheaper option (Nature, vol 415, p 137).

Simply, it seems that niceness needs nastiness. Our sense of fairness and our willingness to inflict damage on one another combine to encourage contributions to the common good and deter people from cheating. Researchers call this altruistic punishment. "But at the end of the day, it's still spite," says economist Benedikt Herrmann of the University of Nottingham, UK. The benefits of this constructive spite might not be immediate, but they are real - in the long run, we all benefit more if we can ensure others in society toe the line.

Our brains are certainly wired to respond positively to this constructive form of spite. Although we might lose out financially, scans show that a region called the striatum, which responds to rewarding experiences, lights up during altruistic punishment (Science, vol 305, p 1254). So, problem solved. Spite is in our own best interests and our brains reward us for it, so we should welcome it, right?

Not quite. The problem is that it's not only doing bad things to bad people that makes us feel good. Recent studies have shown how the striatum responds in the same way to schadenfreude, when we take a morally dubious pleasure in others' misfortunes (Science, vol 323, p 937). Adolescent boys with aggressive conduct disorder show similar brain activity when they watch a video of someone hurting another person (Biological Psychology, vol 80, p 203).

Sadism aside, it is easy to imagine why evolution might have wired us up like this, according to Hidehiko Takahashi of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan, leader of the schadenfreude study. "Altruistic punishment might bring an indirect benefit to us from society, and schadenfreude a direct benefit from a rival." But it also suggests that the line between the cooperative and competitive prompts for spiteful behaviour is blurry and subjective. If the prospect of bankrupting a few fat cats gives us a twinge of pleasure, it is hard to say whether that is because we believe they have robbed society, or because we are envious of their wealth and success and happy to see them toppled.

Daniel Zizzo, an economist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, points out that we shouldn't necessarily feel too bad about being bad - as long as we don't take it too far. "Envy has a stigma attached to it," he says, "but it's a powerful motivation towards egalitarianism and entrepreneurship." But it can also be used to cut down anyone who seems too clever or successful, possibly stunting innovation to the detriment of society. Accusations of witchcraft, which are often levelled against the successful, are a classic case in point, he says. If we can't raise ourselves up, we might find dragging someone else down just as good.

And there is evidence that, in some parts of the world, the rewards of spite can lead to just that kind of counterproductive behaviour. Last year Karla Hoff, an economist at the World Bank who is currently working at Princeton University, and her colleagues reported the results of experiments conducted in villages in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (American Economic Review, vol 98, p 494). In these tests, two players started out with 50 rupees each. The first could choose to give his to the second, in which case the experimenters added a further 100 rupees, giving the second player 200 rupees in total. The second player could decide to keep the money for himself, or share it equally with the first player. A third player then entered the game, who could punish the second player - for each 2 rupees he was willing to spend, the second player was docked 10 rupees.

The results were startling. Even when the second player shared the money fairly, two-thirds of the time the newcomer decided to punish him anyway - a spiteful act with seemingly no altruistic payoff. "We asked one guy why," says Hoff. "He said he thought it was fun."

Hoff found that high-caste players were more likely to punish their fellow gamers spitefully than low-caste players, leading her to suggest that context is everything. It is not that people in Uttar Pradesh are nastier than elsewhere, but rather that the structure of their society makes them acutely conscious of status. The sensitivity of higher castes to their position makes them tend not to support any changes that threaten to level the social hierarchy, such as development projects. But higher castes can also put others down, safe in the knowledge that "untouchables" are unlikely to strike back. "If you're low caste it's dangerous to rise in status," says Hoff. "You'll get beaten up or worse."

The moral seems to be that, while spiteful behaviour can be a powerful force for keeping a society functioning smoothly, the structure of that society must be able to contain and channel those spiteful urges. "Social norms are a moral scaffold that keeps aggression and spite under control," says Herrmann. Societies that have strong laws tend to be those where individuals have a strong sense that they should treat strangers fairly - and are willing to punish cheats informally through gossip and ostracism.

So if you want to squeeze the bankers till their pips squeak, it might indeed be the case that spite is right. But it pays to examine your motives carefully. Woe betide a society in which altruistic punishment gives way to an envy-driven contest where everyone stands to lose. Hoff likes to illustrate the dangers with a Russian joke. A genie appears to a man and says: "You can have anything you want. The only catch is that I'll give your neighbour double." The man says: "Take out one of my eyes."

John Whitfield is a freelance writer based in London

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via:

NewScientist

When you run, which part of your foot touches the ground first?
A) the heel?
B) mid-foot?
C) fore-foot?

Recently, there is a movement that calls for "barefoot-style running" which promotes landing your feet on mid- to fore-foot. It is said this is the most natural way human runs before all those Nike, Adidas, Puma running shoes were invented.

When the running shoes were invented, we were told that landing on the heel was the correct way. Many "gimmick" running technologies were introduced to the market, such as air, shox, cell, etc to further lead us into using our heels as the first point of contact with the ground.

However, if you have ever run barefoot or on sandal, you would have realized that landing on your heel first hurts a lot! Unconsciously, you would change your way of running and land mid- to fore-foot. This further shows that evolution has made our feet to adapt to mid- to fore-foot stride running style.


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From Popular Science: The Sole of a Winner

First of all, let's set the record straight. Man is a natural long distance runner. Despite impressions to the contrary foisted on us daily from our predominantly sedentary and "well-fed" modern lifestyle, it is interesting to note that for long enough distances a well-trained human can outrun just about any other creature on the planet.

Of course, recognizing the health benefits of exercise, not all of us live a sedentary life, and running has become a popular form of physical activity. In addition to the exercise aspects, however, those of us with a competitive or goal-oriented nature, from the elite athlete to the recreational runner, might be interested in running faster. Obviously accomplishing a 5K personal best or qualifying for the Boston Marathon requires a solid training program and a substantial amount of hard work. But what about those incidentals that might enhance our ability to train and thus augment our performance on race day? (We're not talking about performance-enhancing drugs here.)

That's where the video comes in. Running is a complex biomechanical phenomenon and this advertisement caught our attention because the design of these innovative shoes appears to seriously take some of the science into account. We are not endorsing a product here (especially since we haven't actually tested the shoes yet), however, let's analyze some of the issues presented in the video.

The major feature that separates these shoes from most other standard running footwear is that they force the runner into a mid-foot to fore-foot landing on each stride. Most running shoes have a large well-cushioned "heel counter" that makes it possible to strike the ground heel first without damaging the foot. While we do naturally walk heel first, it is true that heel striking is an inefficient way to run. Apropos of the video, let's apply Newton's third law. In order to land heel first, the foot must make impact in front of the center of gravity of the runner. This requires that the heel is going to push into the ground with a component of that force in the forward direction. The ground will then exert an equal and opposite reaction force, which means that there will be a braking effect on each stride. A mid- to fore-foot landing is going to take place more directly underneath the runners center of gravity alleviating this undesirable hindrance to forward motion.

In fact, consider the following: Man evolved to run barefoot, and shoes arrived on the scene only in the last few tens of thousands of years or so. Try running barefoot some time (preferably on a softer surface like grass) and pay attention to your foot strikes. You might find that it's almost impossible to land heel first. Your command central (your brain) just won't let you do it. Too much jarring. Your bare heel isn't designed to handle that pounding. The evidence supports that landing nearer the middle to front of the foot is the most efficient way to go. However, heel strikers should be advised that it might take some time to retrain your gait so that this feels at all natural. Trying to reform too quickly from a lifetime of heel striking could be a recipe for injury.

Finally what about those "actuator" thingies on the bottom of the shoe? The claim (put in more specific physics terms) is that they store elastic potential energy upon compression which is transformed back into kinetic energy upon push-off. While it is undoubtedly true that this must be happening to some extent, just like with a bouncy ball, the question remains as to what magnitude of an overall effect this could actually have. Let's do a rough estimate:

Exhibit A: The kinetic energy of a 75 kg runner moving at a speed of 4.0 m/s = ½ mv² = 600 Joules.

Exhibit B: The amount of energy stored in a highly energy efficient spring (spring constant k = 1000 N/m) compressed a distance x = 1.0 cm (.01m) = ½ kx² = 0.05 J.

Based on this calculation, it shouldn't surprise us that most of the elastic energy stored and released during the running motion takes place within the muscles of the body itself. The elastic properties of the shoes appear to be incidental and probably aren't going to make a lot of difference!

Nevertheless, one out of two ain't bad, and these shoes do represent one of the more interesting innovations in running shoe technology to come around in a long time.

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From Popular Science: Tested - The Sole of a Winner

A few weeks back we analyzed some of the features of the innovative Newton Running shoe in terms of the relevant physics principles. While at the time the point was to assess the theory behind the shoes, it was suggested that I put them to the test in my "lab." In other words, out on the roads and trails where, being of the distance-runner species, I generally spend at least an hour per day. While this is in no way any kind of systematic scientific experiment (which is beyond the scope of my resources), based on my personal experience with the shoes, I'll make an informal attempt to further address the claims made by the two Newtons (Running and Isaac!).

Let's address the two major issues from our previous article.

1) As we discussed last time, a mid- to fore-foot strike is a more efficient way of running than heel striking. Does running in the Newton shoes force you into a mid- to fore-foot strike?

That's easy. They sure do. It's those "actuator lugs" on the sole of the shoe, which make it very awkward to strike with the heel. You have to land mid-foot on the lugs or it feels like your foot is unnaturally tilting backwards. Running in the shoes does feel a bit odd at first, even for a mid-foot striker like myself, so if you try them, be aware they do take some getting used to. Because the lugs come down several millimeters below the rest of the sole, it feels like there's a small but perceptible mound under the ball of your foot, upon which you are balanced while running. As with barefoot running, you feel most comfortable in the Newtons when you run "light on your feet," landing mid- to fore-foot. However the feel is really rather different from barefoot running, due to that ridge of lugs underneath the ball of your foot.

2) As per the claim, do the actuator lugs really have superior elastic properties that conserve and return energy more effectively than "regular" running shoes?

This is a very interesting question, it turns out. According to the analysis from the previous article, physically it appears quite unlikely that the actuator lugs can store an amount of elastic energy significant enough to improve running economy. While the elasticity of the lugs may well be greater than in the sole of a traditional shoe, the amount of potential energy stored in the shoe itself will be negligibly small when compared to the total energy of the runner's stride. Does this mean that the claim of greater energy efficiency is bogus? Not necessarily! One thing that stands out for me while running in these shoes on a smooth hard surface (asphalt) is that during the time between foot strike and push-off -- that is, when my foot is in contact with the ground -- the lugs grip really well. There is no slipping.

If so, then it's possible that these shoes actually might improve running economy. My (highly subjective) experience during my test runs was one of less effort than usual at a given pace. This, of course, could be a purely psychological artifact -- maybe I was just excited to try out a new pair of fancy shoes. To really determine if this is true would require a controlled experiment with multiple runners over a long period of time. (Well worth the effort, I think, by the way!)

However, if there is an improvement in running economy compared to standard shoes, I hypothesize that it's not the elastic properties of the lugs that makes the difference. Rather, it's the friction between the lugs and the road that does the trick. Interestingly, while browsing the Newton website, I was interested to find that one of the features they advertise is low friction. I think that they're getting that one sort of backwards. A large amount of static friction between a running shoe and the running surface is a good thing. We're not talking about getting stuck to the pavement like a fly on some half-dried puddle of grape juice. We're talking about a no-slip foot strike.

With my current non-Newton shoes, I can often feel a small but perceptible slide during contact with the ground. The muscles have to work harder to make small adjustments every time this happens, which results in a decrease in stride efficiency. So with the Newtons, although the energy stored in the lugs themselves may not be a major factor in improving economy, the energy saved in the body due to less slipping -- the result of a large amount of static friction between the shoes and the road -- may well be.

Newton Running represents a relatively new innovation in the design of running shoes: an attempt to create shoes that facilitate a more natural and energy-efficient stride, an attempt to return us to our barefoot running roots without having to cut up our feet. Despite all of the cushioning and stability features of most "traditional" contemporary running shoes, the incidence of running injury is actually greater now than in the days of those primitive Pumas and Adidas. Is this because cushioned shoes with thick heel counters have taken us away from a more natural running stride? How well Newton Running shoes are able to resolve this and take us back to that ideal stride is not yet certain, but it's a worthwhile endeavor and a thought-provoking new option in the world of running shoes.

Finally, what of barefoot running itself, the true au-naturel version of the sport? Its devotees swear by it. Look for an investigation into this controversial topic a few weeks down the road!

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Shoe brand:

Newton Running



Terra Plana Vivo Barefoot

Vibram Five Fingers

Wetsuits Reef Walker



via:
Popular Science: The Sole of a Winner
Popular Science: Tested - The Sole of a Winner
Society for Barefoot Living

Another interesting read about "The running shoe debate: how barefoot runners are shaping the shoe industry" from Popular Mechanics.