A football field covered with M&M’s says don’t waste your money playing the lottery

I’m sure you’ve seen the photos of many of those many delighted lottery winners! Yes, they do exist.  As we all know, though, winning the Powerball requires a lot of luck. For every smiling winner there are millions of people with nothing to show for their money.  How much luck…

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How to fear

The June/July 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind presents in article by David G. Myers entitled "The Powers and Perils of Intuition." (this particular article is not available online except to subscribers).  The starting point for many articles on intuition is the work Kahneman and Tversky, who explored shortcuts we…

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Why it’s difficult to be a socially conscious investor.

The October 2007 edition of The Atlantic presents an article by Henry Blodget entitled "The Conscientious Investor."  It is an in-depth discussion of what it means to engage in "socially responsible investing," or SRI.  Up front, he makes the point that virtuous investing "can cost you." To illustrate, if you…

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A “war” that’s not important to win or lose

What follows is an excerpt from an article from Salon.com entitled "Breaking the Iraq Stalemate." Trapped by reality, Bush can no longer use his time-tested rhetoric to rally America. Instead, he is forced to contradict his own grand ideological claims. His pathetic speech last week was a preview of what…

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How to trace your family tree 50,000 years back to your African origins

National Geographic's Genographic Project offers all of us an extraordinary opportunity: a method of tracing each of our family trees back to our African roots.  Yes, each of us is African.  An ever-growing collection of DNA studies unambiguously demonstrate that each of us had ancestors who lived in Africa more…

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