Crowdfunding is a new and more collaborative way to secure funding for projects. It can be used in different ways such as requesting donations for a worthy cause anywhere in the world and generating funding for a project with the contributors then becoming partners in the project. In essence, crowdfunding is the fusion of social networking and venture capitalism. In just the same way as social networks have rewritten the conventional rules about how people communicate and interact with each other, crowdfunding in all its variations has the potential to rewrite the rules on how businesses and other projects get funded in the future. Crowdfunding can be viewed as the democratization of business financing. Instead of restricting capital sourcing and allocation to a relatively small and fixed minority, crowdfunding empowers everyone connected to the Internet to access both the collective wisdom and the pocket money of everyone else who connects to the Internet.

There is a reason why so many of us are attracted to recorded music these days, especially considering personal music players are common and people are listening to music through headphones a lot. Recording engineers and musicians have learned to create special effects that tickle our brains by exploiting neural circuits that evolved to discern important features of our auditory environment. These special effects are similar in principle to 3-D art, motion pictures, or visual illusions, none of which have been around long enough for our brains to have evolved special mechanisms to perceive them. Rather, 3-D art, motion pictures, and visual illusions leverage perceptual systems that are in place to accomplish other things. Because they use these neural circuits in novel ways, we find them especially interesting. The same is true of the way that modern recordings are made.

Are the different types of mobile device, smartphones and tablets, substitutes or complements? Let's explore this question by considering the case of Madeleine and Alexandra, two users of these devices. Madeleine uses her tablet to take notes in class. These notes are synced to her smartphone wirelessly, via a cloud computing service, allowing Madeleine to review her notes on her phone during the bus trip home. Alexandra uses both her phone and tablet to surf the Internet, write emails and check social media. Both of these devices allow Alexandra to access online services when she is away from her desktop computer. For Madeleine, smartphones and tablets are complements. She gets greater functionality out of her two devices when they are used together. For Alexandra, they are substitutes. Both smartphones and tablets fulfil more or less the same function in Alexandra's life. This case illustrates the role that an individual consumer's behavior plays in determining the nature of the relationship between two goods or services.

Attitude has been conceptualized into four main components: affective (feelings of liking or disliking), cognitive (beliefs and evaluation of those beliefs), behavioral intention (a statement of how one would behave in a certain situation), and behavior. Public attitudes toward a wildlife species and its management are generated based on the interaction of those components. In forming our attitudes toward wolves, people strive to keep their affective components of attitude consistent with their cognitive component. For example, I could dislike wolves; I believe they have killed people (cognitive belief), and having people killed is of course bad (evaluation of belief). The behavioral intention that could result from this is to support a wolf control program and actual behavior may be a history of shooting wolves. In this example, all aspects of attitude are consistent with each other, producing a negative overall attitude toward wolves.

We're creatures who live and die by the energy stores we've built up in our bodies. Navigating the world is a difficult job that requires moving around and using a lot of brainpower ― an energy-expensive endeavor. When we make correct predictions, that saves energy. When you know that edible bugs can be found beneath certain types of rocks, it saves turning over all the rocks. The better we predict, the less energy it costs us. Repetition makes us more confident in our forecasts and more efficient in our actions. So there's something appealing about predictability. But if our brains are going to all this effort to make the world predictable, that begs the question: if we love predictability so much, why don't we, for example, just replace our televisions with machines that emit a rhythmic beep twenty-four hours a day, predictably? The answer is that there's a problem with a lack of surprise. The better we understand something, the less effort we put into thinking about it. Familiarity increases indifference. Repetition suppression sets in and our attention diminishes. This is why ― no matter how much you enjoyed watching the World Series ― you aren't going to be satisfied watching that same game over and over. Although predictability is reassuring, the brain strives to incorporate new facts into its model of the world. It always seeks novelty.

One of the keys to insects' successful survival in the open air lies in their outer covering ― a hard waxy layer that helps prevent their tiny bodies from dehydrating. To take oxygen from the air, they use narrow breathing holes in the body-segments, which take in air passively and can be opened and closed as needed. Instead of blood contained in vessels, they have free-flowing hemolymph, which helps keep their bodies rigid, aids movement, and assists the transportation of nutrients and waste materials to the appropriate parts of the body. The nervous system is modular ― in a sense, each of the body segments has its own individual and autonomous brain ― and some other body systems show a similar modularization. These are just a few of the many ways in which insect bodies are structured and function completely differently from our own.

Over 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth's primordial atmosphere was probably largely water vapour, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen. The appearance and subsequent evolution of exceedingly primitive living organisms (bacteria-like microbes and simple single-celled plants) began to change the atmosphere, liberating oxygen and breaking down carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. This made it possible for higher organisms to develop. When the earliest known plant cells with nuclei evolved about 2 billion years ago, the atmosphere seems to have had only about 1 percent of its present content of oxygen. With the emergence of the first land plants, about 500 million years ago, oxygen reached about one-third of its present concentration. It had risen to almost its present level by about 370 million years ago, when animals first spread on to land. Today's atmosphere is thus not just a requirement to sustain life as we know it ― it is also a consequence of life.

We are now imposing ourselves on nature, instead of the other way around. Perhaps the clearest way to see this is to look at changes in the biomass - the total worldwide weight - of mammals. A long time ago, all of us humans together probably weighed only about two-thirds as much as all the bison in North America, and less than one-eighth as much as all the elephants in Africa. But in the Industrial Era our population exploded and we killed bison and elephants at industrial scale and in terrible numbers. The balance shifted greatly as a result. At present, we humans weigh more than 350 times as much as all bison and elephants put together. We weigh over ten times more than all the earth's wild mammals combined. And if we add in all the mammals we've domesticated - cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, and so on - the comparison becomes truly ridiculous: we and our tamed animals now represent 97 percent of the earth's mammalian biomass. This comparison illustrates a fundamental point: instead of being limited by the environment, we learned to shape it to our own ends.

In the modern world, we look for certainty in uncertain places. We search for order in chaos, the right answer in ambiguity, and conviction in complexity. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world, best-selling writer Yuval Noah Harari says, than on trying to understand it. We look for the easy-to-follow formula. Over time, we lose our ability to interact with the unknown. Our approach reminds me of the classic story of the drunk man searching for his keys under a street lamp at night. He knows he lost his keys somewhere on the dark side of the street but looks for them underneath the lamp, because that's where the light is. Our yearning for certainty leads us to pursue seemingly safe solutions - by looking for our keys under street lamps. Instead of taking the risky walk into the dark, we stay within our current state, however inferior it may be.

In the late twentieth century, researchers sought to measure how fast and how far news, rumours or innovations moved. More recent research has shown that ideas ― even emotional states and conditions ― can be transmitted through a social network. The evidence of this kind of contagion is clear: 'Students with studious roommates become more studious. Diners sitting next to heavy eaters eat more food.' However, according to Christakis and Fowler, we cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends' friends' friends (in other words, across just three degrees of separation). This is because the transmission and reception of an idea or behaviour requires a stronger connection than the relaying of a letter or the communication that a certain employment opportunity exists. Merely knowing people is not the same as being able to influence them to study more or over-eat. Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, even when it is unconscious.

In 2011, Micah Edelson and his colleagues conducted an interesting experiment about external factors of memory manipulation. In their experiment, participants were shown a two minute documentary film and then asked a series of questions about the video. Directly after viewing the videos, participants made few errors in their responses and were correctly able to recall the details. Four days later, they could still remember the details and didn't allow their memories to be swayed when they were presented with any false information about the film. This changed, however, when participants were shown fake responses about the film made by other participants. Upon seeing the incorrect answers of others, participants were also drawn toward the wrong answers themselves. Even after they found out that the other answers had been fabricated and didn't have anything to do with the documentary, it was too late. The participants were no longer able to distinguish between truth and fiction. They had already modified their memories to fit the group. -> According to the experiment, when participants were given false information itself, their memories remained stable, but their memories were falsified when they were exposed to other participants' fake responses.

Anchoring bias describes the cognitive error you make when you tend to give more weight to information arriving early in a situation compared to information arriving later ― regardless of the relative quality or relevance of that initial information. Whatever data is presented to you first when you start to look at a situation can form an anchor and it becomes significantly more challenging to alter your mental course away from this anchor than it logically should be. A classic example of anchoring bias in emergency medicine is triage bias, where whatever the first impression you develop, or are given, about a patient tends to influence all subsequent providers seeing that patient. For example, imagine two patients presenting for emergency care with aching jaw pain that occasionally extends down to their chest. Differences in how the intake providers label the chart ― jaw pain vs. chest pain, for example ― create anchors that might result in significant differences in how the patients are treated.

We might think that our gut instinct is just an inner feeling ─ a secret interior voice ─ but in fact it is shaped by a perception of something visible around us, such as a facial expression or a visual inconsistency so fleeting that often we're not even aware we've noticed it. Psychologists now think of this moment as a 'visual matching game'. So a stressed, rushed or tired person is more likely to resort to this visual matching. When they see a situation in front of them, they quickly match it to a sea of past experiences stored in a mental knowledge bank and then, based on a match, they assign meaning to the information in front of them. The brain then sends a signal to the gut, which has many hundreds of nerve cells. So the visceral feeling we get in the pit of our stomach and the butterflies we feel are a result of our cognitive processing system.

One vivid example of how a market mindset can transform and undermine an institution is given by Dan Ariely in his book Predictably Irrational. He tells the story of a day care center in Israel that decided to fine parents who arrived late to pick up their children, in the hope that this would discourage them from doing so. In fact, the exact opposite happened. Before the imposition of fines, parents felt guilty about arriving late, and guilt was effective in ensuring that only a few did so. Once a fine was introduced, it seems that in the minds of the parents the entire scenario was changed from a social contract to a market one. Essentially, they were paying for the center to look after their children after hours. Some parents thought it worth the price, and the rate of late arrivals increased. Significantly, once the center abandoned the fines and went back to the previous arrangement, late arrivals remained at the high level they had reached during the period of the fines.

There is a pervasive idea in Western culture that humans are essentially rational, skillfully sorting fact from fiction, and, ultimately, arriving at timeless truths about the world. This line of thinking holds that humans follow the rules of logic, calculate probabilities accurately, and make decisions about the world that are perfectly informed by all available information. Conversely, failures to make effective and well-informed decisions are often attributed to failures of human reasoning ─ resulting, say, from psychological disorders or cognitive biases. In this picture, whether we succeed or fail turns out to be a matter of whether individual humans are rational and intelligent. And so, if we want to achieve better outcomes ─ truer beliefs, better decisions ─ we need to focus on improving individual human reasoning.

Brightness of sounds means much energy in higher frequencies, which can be calculated from the sounds easily. A violin has many more overtones compared to a flute and sounds brighter. An oboe is brighter than a classical guitar, and a crash cymbal brighter than a double bass. This is obvious, and indeed people like brightness. One reason is that it makes sound subjectively louder, which is part of the loudness war in modern electronic music, and in the classical music of the 19th century. All sound engineers know that if they play back a track to a musician that just has recorded this track and add some higher frequencies, the musician will immediately like the track much better. But this is a short-lived effect, and in the long run, people find such sounds too bright. So it is wise not to play back such a track with too much brightness, as it normally takes quite some time to convince the musician that less brightness serves his music better in the end.

Stories populate our lives. If you are not a fan of stories, you might imagine that the best world is a world without them, where we can only see the facts in front of us. But to do this is to deny how our brains work, how they are designed to work. Evolution has given us minds that are alert to stories and suggestion because, through many hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection, minds that can attend to stories have been more successful at passing on their owners' genes. Think about what happens, for example, when animals face one another in conflict. They rarely plunge into battle right away. No, they first try to signal in all kinds of ways what the outcome of the battle is going to be. They puff up their chests, they roar, and they bare their fangs. Animals evolved to attend to stories and signals because these turn out to be an efficient way to navigate the world. If you and I were a pair of lions on the Serengeti, and we were trying to decide the strongest lion, it would be most foolish ─ for both of us ─ to plunge straight into a conflict. It is far better for each of us to make a show of strength, to tell the story of how our victory is inevitable. If one of those stories is much more convincing than the other, we might be able to agree on the outcome without actually having the fight.

Countershading is the process of optical flattening that provides camouflage to animals. When sunlight illuminates an object from above, the object will be brightest on top. The color of the object will gradually shade darker toward the bottom. This shading gives the object depth and allows the viewer to distinguish its shape. Thus even if an animal is exactly, but uniformly, the same color as the substrate, it will be easily visible when illuminated. Most animals, however, are darker above than they are below. When they are illuminated from above, the darker back is lightened and the lighter belly is shaded. The animal thus appears to be a single color and easily blends in with the substrate. This pattern of coloration, or countershading, destroys the visual impression of shape in the organism. It allows the animal to blend in with its background.

Negative numbers are a lot more abstract than positive numbers ― you can't see negative 4 cookies and you certainly can't eat them- but you can think about them, and you have to, in all aspects of daily life, from debts to contending with freezing temperatures and parking garages. Still, many of us haven't quite made peace with negative numbers. People have invented all sorts of funny little mental strategies to sidestep the dreaded negative sign. On mutual fund statements, losses (negative numbers) are printed in red or stuck in parentheses with no negative sign to be found. The history books tell us that Julius Caesar was born in 100 B.C., not -100. The underground levels in a parking garage often have designations like B1 and B2. Temperatures are one of the few exceptions: folks do say, especially here in Ithaca, New York, that it's -5 degrees outside, though even then, many prefer to say 5 below zero. There's something about that negative sign that just looks so unpleasant.

Observational studies of humans cannot be properly controlled. Humans live different lifestyles and in different environments. Thus, they are insufficiently homogeneous to be suitable experimental subjects. These confounding factors undermine our ability to draw sound causal conclusions from human epidemiological surveys. Confounding factors are variables (known or unknown) that make it difficult for epidemiologists to isolate the effects of the specific variable being studied. For example, Taubes argued that since many people who drink also smoke, researchers have difficulty determining the link between alcohol consumption and cancer. Similarly, researchers in the famous Framingham study identified a significant correlation between coffee drinking and coronary heart disease. However, most of this correlation disappeared once researchers corrected for the fact that many coffee drinkers also smoke. If the confounding factors are known, it is often possible to correct for them. However, if they are unknown, they will undermine the reliability of the causal conclusions we draw from epidemiological surveys.

The right to be forgotten is a right distinct from but related to a right to privacy. The right to privacy is, among other things, the right for information traditionally regarded as protected or personal not to be revealed. The right to be forgotten, in contrast, can be applied to information that has been in the public domain. The right to be forgotten broadly includes the right of an individual not to be forever defined by information from a specific point in time. One motivation for such a right is to allow individuals to move on with their lives and not be defined by a specific event or period in their lives. For example, it has long been recognized in some countries, such as the UK and France, that even past criminal convictions should eventually be spent and not continue to affect a person's life. Despite the reason for supporting the right to be forgotten, the right to be forgotten can sometimes come into conflict with other rights. For example, formal exceptions are sometimes made for security or public health reasons.

To an economist who succeeds in figuring out a person's preference structure ― understanding whether the satisfaction gained from consuming one good is greater than that of another ― explaining behavior in terms of changes in underlying likes and dislikes is usually highly problematic. To argue, for instance, that the baby boom and then the baby bust resulted from an increase and then a decrease in the public's inherent taste for children, rather than a change in relative prices against a background of stable preferences, places a social scientist in an unsound position. In economics, such an argument about birth rates would be equivalent to saying that a rise and fall in mortality could be attributed to an increase in the inherent desire change for death. For an economist, changes in income and prices, rather than changes in tastes, affect birth rates. When income rises, for example, people want more children (or, as you will see later, more satisfaction derived from children), even if their inherent desire for children stays the same.

The difference in the Moon's gravitational pull on different parts of our planet effectively creates a stretching force. It makes our planet slightly stretched out along the line of sight to the Moon and slightly compressed along a line perpendicular to that. The tidal stretching caused by the Moon's gravity affects our entire planet, including both land and water, inside and out. However, the rigidity of rock means that land rises and falls with the tides by a much smaller amount than water, which is why we notice only the ocean tides. The stretching also explains why there are generally two high tides (and two low tides) in the ocean each day. Because Earth is stretched much like a rubber band, the oceans bulge out both on the side facing toward the Moon and on the side facing away from the Moon. As Earth rotates, we are carried through both of these tidal bulges each day, so we have high tide when we are in each of the two bulges and low tide at the midpoints in between.