Derwent Capital Markets, a family-owned hedge fund, will offer investors the chance to use Twitter posts to gauge the mood of the stock market, co-owner Paul Hawtin says.

The Derwent Absolute Return Fund Ltd., set to start trading in February with an initial $39 million under management, will follow posts on the San Francisco website. A trading model will highlight when the number of times words on Twitter such as ‘calm’ rise above or below average.

A paper by the University of Manchester and Indiana University published in October said the number of emotional words on Twitter could be used to predict daily moves in the Dow Jones industrial average. A change in emotions expressed online would be followed two to six days later by a move in the index, the researchers said, and this information let them predict its movements with 87.6 percent accuracy.

‘Sentiment and mood dramatically change the impact of positive and negative news stories,’ said Hawtin in a telephone interview. ‘If the market’s in a very positive and bullish mood, it can shrug off bad news – bad news comes out and you expect the Dow to fall, and it doesn’t.’

Twitter now has 175 million users and sees 95 […]

No Comments

Political opinions are considered choices, and in Western democracies the right to choose one’s opinions — freedom of conscience — is considered sacrosanct.

But recent studies suggest that our brains and genes may be a major determining factor in the views we hold.

A study at University College London in the UK has found that conservatives’ brains have larger amygdalas than the brains of liberals. Amygdalas are responsible for fear and other ‘primitive’ emotions. At the same time, conservatives’ brains were also found to have a smaller anterior cingulate — the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.

If the study is confirmed, it could give us the first medical explanation for why conservatives tend to be more receptive to threats of terrorism, for example, than liberals. And it may help to explain why conservatives like to plan based on the worst-case scenario, while liberals tend towards rosier outlooks.

‘It is very significant because it does suggest there is something about political attitudes that are either encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that our brain structure in some way determines or results in our political attitudes,’ Geraint Rees, the neurologist who carried out the study, told the media.

Rees, who […]

No Comments

PARSONS, Kan. - An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.

That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.

In the last weeks, dozens of visitors and thousands of overnight packages have raced here, transforming this small prairie-bound city not far from the Oklahoma border for a brief time into a center of nostalgia for the days when photographs appeared not in the sterile frame of a computer screen or in a pack of flimsy prints from the local drugstore but in the warm glow of a projector pulling an image from a carousel of vivid slides.

In the span of minutes this week, two such visitors arrived. The first was a railroad worker who had driven from Arkansas to pick up 1,580 rolls of film that he had just paid $15,798 to develop. The second was an artist who had driven directly here after flying from London to […]

No Comments

Anesthesia doesn’t put patients to ‘sleep,’ as they’re often told. Rather, anesthesia puts the brain into a state of unconsciousness that’s more like being in a reversible coma than being asleep, a new study says.

The study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday looked at how the brain behaves while asleep, in a coma and under general anesthesia. The brain activity of an anesthetized patient, for example, was more like a deeply unconscious coma patient than someone sleeping.

Studying the effects of anesthesia on the brain could have implications for diagnosis and treatment for sleep disorders or recovery from comas. This abstract and news release explain the findings more fully.

About 60,000 patients in the U.S. every day receive general anesthesia for surgery. Here’s what the Mayo Clinic says about when it should be used.

‘Your doctor may recommend general anesthesia for procedures that:

* take a long time;
* affect your breathing, such as chest or upper abdominal surgery;
* or require you to be in an uncomfortable position.

No Comments

What would it take finally to get serious about rebuilding America?

Another Minnesota bridge collapse, with 13 lives lost? Another gas-line explosion in San Bruno, Calif., with an entire community decimated? Another colossal levee failure, like the one that devastated New Orleans? While America falls apart, successive administrations fiddle. Officials wring their hands over our deteriorating infrastructure but profess powerlessness in the face of the monumental task.
Continue Reading

There is, however, a smart way to approach this enduring problem – a bold and comprehensive plan to attack our crumbling bridges, railroads, dams, and water, sewer and power lines as well as our energy grid. All funded by new, special-issue Rebuilding Infrastructure Bonds.

This program could put America back to work. It could create more than 315,000 meaningful, long-term jobs in its first full year – with the number increasing each year, as additional projects are brought on-line. Over the life of this program, we estimate that more than 1 million jobs would be created, assuming that each project ran an average of three years.

The strength of this plan is that it is long term. It would extend at least 10 years, offering real, stable jobs – not temporary, make-work ones. It would […]

No Comments