From casual violence to genocide, acts of cruelty can be traced back to how the perpetrator identifies with other people, argues psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. Is he right?

Conscientious, dependable (as opposed to carefree) individuals tend to stay healthier and live longer, and “sociability, generally speaking, isn’t as health protective as people think,” in part because highly sociable people often find themselves in environments that encourage unhealthy behaviors.

"Roughly, the Scary Idea posits that: If I or anybody else actively trying to build advanced AGI succeeds, we’re highly likely to cause an involuntary end to the human race. "

"DARPA's new memristor-based approach to AI consists of a chip that mimics how neurons process information"

This is alist of text books available under creative commons licenses and other forms of open license.

There are 7 main weapons of influence in the persuasion architect’s arsenal. Here is that list.

Not surprisingly, it's easier to chisel people with two digit IQs than people with three digit IQs.

" When humans evolved the ability to be wrenched with feeling the pain of others, where was it going to process it? It got crammed into the anterior cingulate. And thus it “does” both physical and psychic pain."

"Empathy is unusual in the animal kingdom. So empathy must have had some major survival benefits for it to have evolved. What might those benefits have been?

Empathy seems to have evolved in three major steps."

From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

"a list of the most bizarre and ethically scant experiments ever conducted."

" Dr. Cleckley used interviews, observation and medical records to learn about his patients, but today, brain imaging offers scientists a new way to peer behind the mask. A growing number of them now see psychopathy as a neurodevelopmental disorder, one in which a combination of genetic and environmental factors, such as neglect or poor bonding with parents, lead to deficits in the brain. And if biology is to blame, can society hold the psychopath responsible? "

"One of the more fascinating psychotic conditions in the medical literature is known as Cotard’s syndrome, a rare disorder, usually recoverable, in which the primary symptom is a “delusion of negation.” According to researchers David Cohen and Angèle Consoli of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, many patients with Cotard’s syndrome are absolutely convinced, without even the slimmest of doubts, that they are already dead. "

"The right loves genetic explanations for poverty or mental illness. But science fingers society"

Progressives have been suckers for a myth of human cognition called the Enlightenment model. This holds that people make rational decisions by assessing facts. All that has to be done to persuade people is to lay out the data: they will then use it to decide which options best support their interests and desires. A host of psychological experiments demonstrates that it doesn’t work like this.

"People spend years in psychoanalysis, often quite fruitlessly, because psychoanalysts are schooled in Freudian dogma that teaches them to locate problems within the patient’s own unconscious states, and to try to resolve these problems by introspection. Thus patients are directed to look inwards when they should really be looking outwards… Obsession with the self has been the characteristic psychological error of the generations of the seventies and eighties. I do not not deny that problems of the self are vitally important; the error consists in seeking answers to those problems by focusing on the self."

"They figure out the psychological moment when someone wants to pay and then design the best experiences around that."

"The Pentagon wants troops to be faster, stronger and more resilient. And with help from robotics, nanotechnology and neuroscience, the military's cyborg army -- from human troops to rat-bot recruits -- is getting prepped for battle."

"It’s no-one’s idea of news that the internet is changing the way we live. But could it actually be fostering ignorance?"

Article looks at using tech to analyze content and decypher if the writer is being honest.

"Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue. "

MIT's Mind Machine Project is exactly what i'm working toward in my masters .Get on it or get left behind!

"Oppressive regimes and even democratic governments restrict Internet access. Existing anti-censorship systems often require users to connect through proxies, but these systems are relatively easy for a censor to discover and block. This project offers a possible next step in the censorship arms race: rather than relying on a single system or set of proxies to circumvent censorship firewalls, we explore whether the vast deployment of sites that host user-generated content can breach these firewalls. We have developed Collage, which allows users to exchange messages through hidden channels in sites that host user-generated content. Collage has two components: a message vector layer for embedding content in cover traffic; and a rendezvous mechanism to allow parties to publish and retrieve messages in the cover traffic. Collage uses user-generated content (e.g., photo-sharing sites) as “drop sites” for hidden messages. To send a message, a user embeds it into cover traffic and posts the content on some site, where receivers retrieve this content using a sequence of tasks. Collage makes it difficult for a censor to monitor or block these messages by exploiting the sheer number of sites where users can exchange messages and the variety of ways that a message can be hidden. Our evaluation of Collage shows that the performance overhead is acceptable for sending small messages (e.g., Web articles, email)."