The Power of Framing, or Marketing

An article about how just changing the name of a food made people perceive it as healthy, or not, and then to go ahead and eat it accordingly to their diet plan.  To me this study brings up the idea of framing, where you can create a mental frame work around an event -such as work, or a tragedy, to make the event a constructive or "learning" experience.  It also brings to mind euphemisms and marketing that masks something with a clever name. The next time you are faced with a difficulty, just rename it "Joylicoius."
Participants in one study were presented with a mixture of vegetables, pasta, salami, and cheese, served on a bed of fresh romaine lettuce. The item was either identified as "salad" or "pasta." When it was called pasta, dieters perceived it as less healthy. In another study, participants were given samples of a product, which was labeled either "fruit chews" or "candy chews." "Dieters perceived the item with an unhealthy name (candy chews) to be less healthful and less tasty than non-dieters," the authors write. As a result, dieters consumed more 

Are Nickel Nickels the New Silver Quarters?

The author of Liar's Poker and The Big Short, Michael Lewis shares in an interview with Stephen Colbert that commodities are the hedge to take against inflation spectacularly demonstrated in how the cost of the metal to make a nickel is now worth 7 cents.  He describes how a hoarding investor has bought $20 million dollars worth of nickels to store away in public storage bins -I picture Scrooge McDuck with a big smile.  But there is history being repeated here, in the story of silver in dimes and quarters which soon became worth more than the coins' face value.  If you look at a nickel, it does seem way more chunky and heavy than a physical item representing 5 cents should really look.  Thus I am totally in with Lewis's prediction nickels, as we know them now, will soon be an item of the past, like the 90% silver half dollar coins of pre-1965 era.  As more hoarders remove nickels  from circulation I imagine the government will create a more slimmer version.

"Run for your life!" How to harness your "natural instincts to get regular exercise?

Interesting article that shows the obvious concept that regular exercise is good for you, even if you are a fly.  Here the scientist used flies with short lifespans to suggest that years of life can be added to an animal's life by doing regular exercise.  The trick was making flies exercise, the solution was having them inhabit a terror chamber that continually shook every 20 seconds.  Could there be a parallel solution for humans?

The experiments show, for example, that after "years" of regular exercise, elderly flies demonstrate the vigor of middle-aged flies, says Wessells, an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. "The goal is not to extend their life spans, but to improve their ability to move around well and have a good quality of life as they age," he continues. "And it turns out that flies have some of the same trouble that humans do -- getting started is the hardest part." Every 20 seconds, a motorized arm trips a lever and drops the frame a short distance causing the flies to be knocked to the bottom of the tube.  And as soon as they fall down, they scurry back up the wall. They do it again and again and again. "The machine takes advantage of their natural instinct to climb." 

Staying healthy for you and all your minions.

Here is interesting research on our gut inhabitants who should be considered an extension of our own body, according to the investigating scientist.  Centuries of cultural heritage have taught the importance of consuming fermented foods for the benefit of our health, with yogurt once considered a health elixir.  Recent research has also pointed to how bacterial infections in places like the mouth can lead to ulcers and heart attacks.  At some point in the future I believe the common person will wonder why we didn't consider our body's bacterial inhabitants as important to our well-being as today's commonly accepted belief in the importance of eating vegetables and getting regular exercise.

On a more philosophical level, Mazmanian says, the findings suggest that our concept of "self" should be broadened to include our many trillions of microbial residents. "These bacteria live inside us for our entire lives, and they've evolved to look and act like us, as part of us," he says. "As far as our immune system is concerned, the molecules made by gut bacteria should be tolerated similarly to our own molecules. Except in this case, the bacteria 'teaches' us to tolerate them, for both our benefit and theirs."

Illusions of Wealth

This article shares the perspective of a money manager who believes our last decade of GDP growth has been entirely due to increased spending on credit and therefore is fake, and we will have a bad awakening someday soon when international countries decide the dollar is not the best place to park short-term assets.
Arnott says the U.S. economy actually went off the rails more than a decade ago. What's more, many of us have failed to realize it because the most widely watched economic indicator, gross domestic product, actually tracks consumption, irresponsible or otherwise, rather than real wealth generation... "GDP that stems from new debt — mainly deficit spending — is phony: it is debt-financed consumption, not prosperity," Arnott writes. "Net of deficit spending, our prosperity is nearly unchanged from 1998, 13 years ago.",,,The worst case result could include the collapse of the purchasing power of the dollar, the demise of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, the dismantling of the middle class, and a flight of global capital away from dollar-based stocks and bonds.

Go Global, Go Passive, Go Vanguard

There is a big lesson to learn with investing, it's that the market is unpredictable. Most money managers will not beat the index of the total stockmarket, which you can invest in through Vanguard's VTI fund. A further step toward passively beating the majority of money managers would be to place a good chunk of your investment into the global market. This article talks about Vanguard's World Stockmarket Index, VWO, which has already enticed $60 billion of investors dollars, so you can know it is a wise choice.

This passively managed fund, which tracks the MSCI Emerging Markets index, holds nearly 900 stocks in 21 different countries. But this is a capitalization-weighted index, which means that despite its broad global reach, the largest economies have the most influence. Nearly 60% of the fund is invested in four places: China, Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan.

UCSF Caloric Restriction Adopters

Article about some Bay Area adopters of Caloric Restriction as a means to manage health, included here is a video from UCSF's public affairs team.  I think a wonderful point brought up by the Bay Area engineer interviewed as a CR aficianado is that CR doesn't have to have the aim of extending lifespan -it will increase the odds of improved health with lower incidence of all diseases related to aging.   Here is a description of what he does, to me it just sounds like "being healthy:"

Arsenault eats about 1,800 calories a day, largely in the form of organic fresh fruit smoothies, organic salads, raw skim milk and some fish. In addition to carefully scrutinizing the calories of everything he eats, he bikes, swims and runs.

Invest in Real Returns

This interesting article points out how the recent move of money into gold reserves has lead to the six-fold increase in destruction of South American rain forest in Peru as miners try to pull every little last bit of the metal out of the ground.  NASA satellites have captured and quantified some of the real-world impact of putting income into gold investments, which brings up a good point about how to think about your investments. 
The mining "is now plainly visible from space," Swenson says. "At the two sites we studied, Guacamayo and Colorado-Puquiri, nearly 5,000 acres were cleared in just three years, between 2006 and 2009, largely outpacing nearby deforestation caused by human settlement."
 While many will look strictly at returns whether in the form of capital gains or steady income-streams, in reality this can be very short sighted as we learned from the equity boom during the Dot.Com at the turn of the millennium followed by a preference for fixed-income investments leading to the explosion of desire for mortgage-backed securities.  At the end of the day, the place you park your income earned today so that down the road you can have it with purchasing power beating inflation ought NOT be a vehicle summarized by the percentage of return you end up reaping over that period, but also about how your capital leads to real actions and stewardship of scarce resources to create real positive returns for society.  You can see such a win-win solution happening in companies like GE that brought society many real technological innovations over the past century (perhaps Google will be a similar story for our culture), but such observations also stand for other standard everyday companies that provide a service or good that people use to live a happy and productive life.  

Inflammation, Cancer, and Aging

Recent theories on aging focus around the concept that chronic inflammation may attribute to earlier mortality.  One of my professors from the USC school of Gerontology put forward the theory that the extension of average lifespan seen in the last century is due to a decrease in lifelong inflammation starting at an early age, because of increases in sanitation and control of disease such as through vaccinations.    Here is an article that finds a molecular clue to the connection between inflammation and aging through cancer.  A small RNA molecule that is a marker for inflammation is found to down regulate another protein, Wee1, that signals the cell to stop the process of cell division when errors are present -preventing mutations and the chance of cancer:

"The investigators learned that miR-155 also targets WEE1 and showed that high levels of miR-155 lead to low levels of WEE1. They reasoned that low levels of WEE1 allowed cell division to continue even when DNA damage is present, leading to a growing number of mutations."

Here is the actual research paper which shares these insights:

The control of cell-cycle progression and DNA repair in
eukaryotes are highly conserved. However, in the event of an
infection the cells must respond quickly by producing cytokines,
chemokines, and other inflammatory components of the immune
defense. During this robust response, it is possible that the DNA
repair machinery and cell-cycle checkpoints are put on hold. At
this stage the up-regulation of miR-155 by inflammatory stimuli
to clear the antigen quickly also results in an increased mutation
rate. Furthermore, regardless of the primary cause of a mutation,
there is a high probability that, in the event of an infection, the
mutation will be fixed. In conclusion, we believe that
simultaneous miR-155–driven suppression of a number of
tumor suppressor genes combined with a mutator phenotype
allows the shortening of the series of steps required for tumorigenesis and
represents a model for cancer pathogenesis.

The Twinkie Caloric Restriction Diet

An article about how just eating Twinkies can lead to weight loss, however, probably not an improvement in health.  This is important to take in the perspective of how Caloric Restriction is the only proven way to extend lifespan, if done correctly.  In Gerontology research Caloric Restriction (CR) was often referred more correctly as Dietary Restriction without Malnutrition. From the article:

"The diet had one important lesson: It really showed just how much weight loss can improve your health. It also demonstrated that just cutting the number of calories you take in is enough to make you lose weight."

Visualizing Mortality History

This link to a youtube video is of Hans Rosling who shows how economic investment in the developing countries of the world has led to the longer lifespans and reduced infant mortality found in industrialized countries.

Best Books On Investing

    Four books summarizing investment knowledge from an article published from Fortune at CNN Money.

	Your Money and Your Life: A Lifetime Approach to Money Management By Robert Z. Aliber. Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises By Charles P. Kindleberger A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing By Burton G. Malkiel. The Evolution of Technical Analysis: Financial Prediction from Babylonian Tablets to Bloomberg Terminals