PhysOrg flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that holds “out of sight, out of mind” as a savings strategy. Instead, we save better by keeping our eggs in one basket:

[University of Kansas School of Business assistant professor Promothesh] Chatterjee’s research utilized four separate studies totaling 566 participants. All four studies presented participants the opportunity to earn money [...]

New Scientist adds up the arguments over bitcoins, the computer-generated form of money. We’re now seeing plans to regulate the imaginary currency:

Virtual currencies are to be regulated by the US Treasury after the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) moved to clarify their status under anti-money-laundering laws.

The move comes as Bitcoins doubled in value in just a few [...]

Boston Globe blows the lid off an M.I.T. syndicate that appears to have made a cool $8 million fixing the lottery:

[Massachusetts Inspector General Gregory W.] Sullivan’s report details the way a handful of math and science wizards, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduates looking for an interesting school project, turned Cash WinFall into a nearly fulltime business, spending [...]

MIT’s Technology Review is not a publication ordinarily given to hyperbole. So it’s a little distracting when their web desk declares that Facebook is heading for an implosion that will take internet business as we know it down with it:

The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value [...]

SONG: “Inside the Box.” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “CEOs and the Candle Problem”, Nature, “A Mad Hemorrhage” blog, 2 Apr 2012, as used in the post “About those CEO bonuses: How financial incentives make us less creative.”.

ABSTRACT: This song was a response to Mike Phirman’s SongFu [...]

Nature blogger Graham Morehead isn’t looking over any new research with this post, which makes it all the more remarkable. Since the early 1960s, we’ve known that offering money as a reward makes us worse at solving problems:

Knowing what was going to happen didn’t help. His new division became just as crisis-soaked and hectic as the last one. Then [...]

New Scientist looks at where and how business happens – and reveals that out of 37 million global companies, it’s only a very few who call the shots:

the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a [...]

A new U.N. report (over at Scientific American) shows we’re actually wasting 300 million Hummer H2s’ weight of food every year:

What is more interesting is how the food is wasted around the world:

Food losses in industrialized countries are as high as in developing countries, but in developing countries more than 40% of the food [...]

The New Republic looks at the science of choice… and the mental costs of not being able to afford much:

In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In [...]