Love really can grow from lust, study says

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AppId is over the quota

Questions about sexual desire and love have plagued humans for eons. While poets, musicians, and artists believe love lives in the heart, scientists know it exists in the brain. And sex? Apparently, that urge resides in the "little brain" or the bed or maybe a barn. It gets a little confusing what with those tired old adages about cows and free milk (or pigs and free sausage).

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He wants you, but does he love you? A new study finds love and sexual desire are controlled by the same part of the brain.

Now a new study has found that the same regions of the brain that control love also control sex -- indicating that sexual desire can actually morph into love. That's right. If a woman has sex with a man, he might not only buy the cow but love the cow, as well.

“Love and sex are clearly overlapping and they are different,” says Jim Pfaus, a professor of psychology at Concordia University in Montreal who's been studying love and libidos for more than a decade. “You can have desire for sex without love.”

But sex can also be the start of a beautiful relationship.

How does all of this work?

The brain's insular cortex (or insula) and the striatum play a role in both sexual desire and love. The insula is nestled deep within the cerebral cortex and influences emotions. While the striatum resides in the forebrain and receives messages from the cortex.

In order to map out the location of sexual desire and love, researchers reviewed 20 studies that used fMRI technology. First, they looked at the regions of the brain that lit up when sparked by love. They then compared the findings of all the papers to see what regions were activated when someone felt aroused or amorous.  

What they discovered was a bit surprising -- love and sexual desire both activate the striatum, showing a continuum from sexual desire to love. Each feeling impacts a different area of the striatum.

Sexual desire activates the ventral striatum, the brain’s reward system. When someone enjoys a great dessert or an orgasm, it’s the ventral striatum that flickers with life. Love sparks activity in the dorsal striatum, which is associated with drug addiction.

“You don’t make a connection that love is a drug; it acts just like drug addiction," says Pfaus. "Anyone who has had someone break up with them feels like a drug addict in withdrawal. You end up getting cravings.”

But it doesn't stop there. The researchers also saw an overlap between sexual desire and love in the insula.

“[The insula] translates emotional feelings into meaning,” explains Pfaus. “You take the internal state and give it external meaning.”

The areas of overlap indicate that sexual desire transitions into love in many cases, and the feelings aren’t separate.

“Even love at first sight, can it happen? Of course it can happen," says Pfaus. "And when it does happen, do you want to play Scrabble with each other? When it happens, you normally want to consummate it.”

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Facebook-Instagram Explained, Billion-Dollar Bubbles, and the CEO Who Really Was a Mensch

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

It's official. One billion dollars will buy Instagram, or a pile of patents from AOL. That's how much Facebook reportedly paid to acquire Instagram, maker of the eponymous snap-and-share photo app for smartphones, and what Microsoft spent on a mess of patents that AOL had. Now everyone is contemplating the value of a billion. HuffPo for some reason calculated what a billion dollars might purchase in college expenses (probably the more low-paid interns you hire, the more of your reports will relate to college). It determined that a billion bucks could pay 12,113 professors for a year, which doesn't seem like a bargain, or cover room and board for 250,000 students (we'd still apply for financial aid). Ewan Spence writes at his Forbes blog that these billion-buck deals "do little more than set down the big bind in the high stakes VC poker of Silicon Valley. You want to play? Find a billion. You've built a mobile phone application and it has some users? It's nothing till you can sell it for a billion."

ReadWriteWeb isolates eight factors behind the amazing ascent of Instagram: "In just 551 days, the photo-sharing mobile app zoomed from zero to 30 million-odd users, and 10 million U.S. visits by March 2012, up 1000% since December 2011. Its valuation outstrips that of the 116-year-old New York Times." Among the things Instagram did right in order to "win the startup lottery": it "didn't get creepy" about sharing private information, and its interface "stayed junk-free." TechCrunch says a new floodgate has opened for tech startups. "Two and a half years ago, Mint.com was acquired for $170 million, and everyone thought that was an amazing deal following the great recession. Now, a fledgling company with a small team gets acquired for $1 billion. My best guess is that it is about to get crazy." Where the Circles Meet wonders whether Facebook or Microsoft got a better deal for its gigabucks and concludes "the bigger winner in today's spending spree appears to be Microsoft. It gets a whole bundle of patents that are bound to come in handy at some point in the future both offensively and defensively. While Facebook's purchase of Instagram comes with great engineers to help retool the Facebook photo experience, leaving Instagram as a standalone app poses the problem of cannibalization of Facebook's photo options." But the big winners are the folks who received the billion, Instagram and AOL. "Instagram was an app that had no way to generate revenue," so it makes out like a bandit here.

Patentology looks at these two deals and other recent acquisitions and analyzes: "All of these deals have in common the fact that the entire valuation is based on intangible assets. How do you put a price on a bundle of patents? On a team of great employees? On a loved brand? Or on the future potential of a technology? Are the recent valuations justified, or are we heading for another industry meltdown similar to the 'dot-com' bust of March 2000? After all, the Zuckerbergs, Systroms and Kriegers of the world could be excused for failing to learn the lessons of history - they were little more than kids at the time!" Epicenter says we can turn off the bubble alarm and safely return to our desks. Facebook's paying $28 for each of Instagram's 35 million users was a sensible buy and a much better deal that far stupider tech acquisitions of the past. Concurs Rick Webb at Betabeat: "I am having a hard time moulding the Instagram purchase toward a bubble narrative. Facebook's IPO is estimated to value the company at a hundred billion dollars or so. It's really not that much money to them." Meanwhile, some devoted users of Instragram are a little glum. "Are the golden days of Instagram over?" writes Jenna Wortham at Bits: "The sale of Instagram brings a harsh reality into focus, the realization that the secret rooms or private spaces online where we can share, chit-chat and hang out with our friends are fading. The few safe havens that do exist are quickly being encroached upon or are next on the shopping list for a company like Google, Apple or Facebook." Paul Ford nicely sums up some of the user regret at Daily Intel: "For many Instagram users it's discomfiting to see a giant company they distrust purchase a tiny company they adore -- like if Coldplay acquired Dirty Projectors, or a Gang of Four reunion was sponsored by Foxconn."

But cheer up. Sometimes there are happy endings in the valley of dreams. The dramatic and touching story of a smaller tech acquisition has become a sort of Schindler's List of stock options. Business Insider reports on the fairytale story behind the recent $210 million buyout of mobile app developer OMGPOP, whose Draw Something had become a craze. Apparently, the startup was on its last legs just months ago and had to make layoffs to survive. When the new app began to take off and the buyout looked imminent, CEO Dan Porter scrambled to re-hired the laid off workers so they could cash in. "He was literally negotiating the deal and jamming the re-hires back into payroll....Their options kept vesting and they benefitted from the sale. Porter didn't have to do it. It was just the mensch thing to do."

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Really Fixing Our Medical System

Without question, in many ways the US medical system is the envy of most of the world. We have some of the best medical colleges, many of the best physicians, and state of the art hospitals. Also, our drug companies are some of the most productive in the world.
In spite of the above, our medical system is seriously broken. Medical outcomes often trail behind other countries with ostensibly lower quality care, and costs are exorbitant. It is true that some very positive steps have already been taken to reduce costs, such as capping physician and hospital fees via PPO contracts, bulk negotiation for reduced drug costs by large providers and insurers, and reducing the cost of the "paper jungle" in hospitals via automation.
While the above is all positive, the system is still like an albatross around the neck of the ultimate payors (individuals and employers). While many hospitals are charitable and offer discounts to the uninsured, and many general practitioners take on geriatric patients knowing they will not be adequately reimbursed by Medicare, most people have a sense that the cost of the system is simply out of control. Even people covered by comprehensive PPO plans, where in-network providers accept strict fee caps imposed by the insurer, suffer from having to pay high premiums and steep out-of-pocket payments. Further, providers compensate for PPO and Medicare fee caps by shifting cost to insured's that are covered by insurance plans that they don't have a fee contract with. The end result is that almost everyone finds medical care too expensive.
I believe the system can be fixed, but it will require great political courage, as well as a willingness on the part of the American public to trash some currently held sacred beliefs. Nothing this complex can be solved by a simple or easy to swallow quick fix. It requires a comprehensive, and quite honestly, painful set of steps.
Detailed Plan
Force Hospitals To Adopt Smart Automation
I'm referring here to the type of advanced automation that minimizes duplication of services, administration of treatments that may be dangerous due to drug interactions, etc. In the US, professional firms (medical clinics, law offices, etc.) are notoriously IT illiterate. The Obama administration should provide tax incentives to spawn a cottage industry of consultants to help health care providers select and implement medical information management systems that really drive costs down by averting wasteful and dangerous decisions. Hospitals that fail to adopt smart automation within a certain period of time would become uncompetitive and driven out of business.
Reduce The Implementation Cost For New Drugs
Factoring in the cost of research, getting FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval, and marketing expense, it now costs a drug maker over $1 billion USD to bring a new drug to market. Only about 20% of this amount is for actual research. The rest is just regulatory approval (performing tests and submitting trial data) and marketing. The FDA needs to streamline and speed up the approval process, and then issue detailed public information so doctors and patients can make drug decisions without relying on the drug maker's expensive TV campaigns (which would hopefully become useless and cease). Admittedly, less stringent testing before approval will lead to some incremental public danger (drugs that would have been disapproved instead of being marketed for a time before losing accreditation due to poor effectiveness or dangers not flagged earlier), but this is a cost we will have to bear if we wish to reign in the rapidly growing cost of drugs.
Set Reasonable Caps On Doctor Compensation
In the US, the individual states regulate the insurance industry (not the federal government). The state insurance commissioners need to get together and set limits on per hour expenses that doctors can receive for specific procedures from insurance policies. Insurance policies that violate these caps should not be approved for public sale. The idea would be to set the caps high enough so that the medical profession continues to attract competent people, but not so high that some jerk gets $500,000 per year just for analyzing X-rays.
Get Really Tough On Tort Reform
While this is a hard on patients that suffer the results of medical malpractice, we need to limit malpractice awards from juries to actual economic damages, plus reasonable punitive damages in cases of gross negligence. Payments for "pain and suffering" need to be eliminated. Admittedly, this is controversial, as such damages are routinely awarded in non-medical civil cases where they are deemed appropriate by the jury. The problem is that juries are awarding enormous pain and suffering damages out of sympathy for the damaged patient, driving malpractice insurance costs through the roof, and thus contributing in a major way to the overall medical cost problem.
Take Religion Out Of Medicine
While we may have seemed to veer to the left in the last election, real decision making in the US is controlled by a small clique of wealthy, very conservative people. The religious right interprets the "right to life" as "the obligation to live." This has impacted medical care in a major way. Heroic, hugely expensive measures are taken, using insurance as a major payment vehicle, to keep people alive for short periods of time in very poor health condition. The decision to provide insured coverage for life saving treatments should be made on a cost/benefit basis, comparing the cost of the coverage with the overall anticipated benefit (added years of life, and expected quality of those years). Procedures that don't meet the test should be denied (unless the patient can pay the cost himself), and instead the insurance should merely provide for keeping the patient as comfortable as possible until death (e.g., pain killers, psychological support, etc.). This is the approach taken in a number of Northern European countries, which incidentally have excellent medical care systems. The far right's idea that everyone has an obligation to live as long as possible, no matter how miserable they are, is both ridiculous and anachronous.
Encourage International Cooperation Regarding Prescription Drugs
The US badly needs to cooperate with foreign countries to determine standards of accreditation for proprietary and generic drug makers. Accredited foreign manufacturers should be able to legally import their locally approved drugs to the US (right now the FDA forbids it). This would foster international competition with respect to drug prices, which would greatly benefit US consumers (right now, we pay far more than anyone else for drugs).
Conclusion
While our medical system is badly broken, it can be fixed with courage and hard work. The real impediment to a substantive correction is human nature, namely greed and cowardice:
Legislators that are too beholden to drug company political contributions to allow Medicare to negotiate pricing for medications Hospital administrators that are afraid of technological change Doctors that sometimes charge outrageous fees for minimal work Patients expecting to get the best of everything regardless of cost/benefit considerations Society being too afraid to let go of outdated religious conceptions Government being too cowardly to fast track promising drugs and open the market to imports Legislators being too greedy to repel the legal lobby and institute drastic medical tort reform
There is way too much hand wringing about insurance costs. The insurers are simply intermediaries, and they do not make extravagant returns on capital. The root cause of the problem is excessive cost at the provider level (hospitals, physicians, etc.). Until the etiology of the problem is solved, the symptoms will remain. The cure is a little like castor oil - it tastes terrible going down, but eventually you feel a lot better. Also, as with castor oil, you won't take it unless your mother forces you to. With all the vested interests here, real change won't occur unless Obama forces it down our collective throats.

Read More

Really Fixing Our Medical System

Without question, in many ways the US medical system is the envy of most of the world. We have some of the best medical colleges, many of the best physicians, and state of the art hospitals. Also, our drug companies are some of the most productive in the world.
In spite of the above, our medical system is seriously broken. Medical outcomes often trail behind other countries with ostensibly lower quality care, and costs are exorbitant. It is true that some very positive steps have already been taken to reduce costs, such as capping physician and hospital fees via PPO contracts, bulk negotiation for reduced drug costs by large providers and insurers, and reducing the cost of the "paper jungle" in hospitals via automation.
While the above is all positive, the system is still like an albatross around the neck of the ultimate payors (individuals and employers). While many hospitals are charitable and offer discounts to the uninsured, and many general practitioners take on geriatric patients knowing they will not be adequately reimbursed by Medicare, most people have a sense that the cost of the system is simply out of control. Even people covered by comprehensive PPO plans, where in-network providers accept strict fee caps imposed by the insurer, suffer from having to pay high premiums and steep out-of-pocket payments. Further, providers compensate for PPO and Medicare fee caps by shifting cost to insured's that are covered by insurance plans that they don't have a fee contract with. The end result is that almost everyone finds medical care too expensive.
I believe the system can be fixed, but it will require great political courage, as well as a willingness on the part of the American public to trash some currently held sacred beliefs. Nothing this complex can be solved by a simple or easy to swallow quick fix. It requires a comprehensive, and quite honestly, painful set of steps.
Detailed Plan
Force Hospitals To Adopt Smart Automation
I'm referring here to the type of advanced automation that minimizes duplication of services, administration of treatments that may be dangerous due to drug interactions, etc. In the US, professional firms (medical clinics, law offices, etc.) are notoriously IT illiterate. The Obama administration should provide tax incentives to spawn a cottage industry of consultants to help health care providers select and implement medical information management systems that really drive costs down by averting wasteful and dangerous decisions. Hospitals that fail to adopt smart automation within a certain period of time would become uncompetitive and driven out of business.
Reduce The Implementation Cost For New Drugs
Factoring in the cost of research, getting FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval, and marketing expense, it now costs a drug maker over $1 billion USD to bring a new drug to market. Only about 20% of this amount is for actual research. The rest is just regulatory approval (performing tests and submitting trial data) and marketing. The FDA needs to streamline and speed up the approval process, and then issue detailed public information so doctors and patients can make drug decisions without relying on the drug maker's expensive TV campaigns (which would hopefully become useless and cease). Admittedly, less stringent testing before approval will lead to some incremental public danger (drugs that would have been disapproved instead of being marketed for a time before losing accreditation due to poor effectiveness or dangers not flagged earlier), but this is a cost we will have to bear if we wish to reign in the rapidly growing cost of drugs.
Set Reasonable Caps On Doctor Compensation
In the US, the individual states regulate the insurance industry (not the federal government). The state insurance commissioners need to get together and set limits on per hour expenses that doctors can receive for specific procedures from insurance policies. Insurance policies that violate these caps should not be approved for public sale. The idea would be to set the caps high enough so that the medical profession continues to attract competent people, but not so high that some jerk gets $500,000 per year just for analyzing X-rays.
Get Really Tough On Tort Reform
While this is a hard on patients that suffer the results of medical malpractice, we need to limit malpractice awards from juries to actual economic damages, plus reasonable punitive damages in cases of gross negligence. Payments for "pain and suffering" need to be eliminated. Admittedly, this is controversial, as such damages are routinely awarded in non-medical civil cases where they are deemed appropriate by the jury. The problem is that juries are awarding enormous pain and suffering damages out of sympathy for the damaged patient, driving malpractice insurance costs through the roof, and thus contributing in a major way to the overall medical cost problem.
Take Religion Out Of Medicine
While we may have seemed to veer to the left in the last election, real decision making in the US is controlled by a small clique of wealthy, very conservative people. The religious right interprets the "right to life" as "the obligation to live." This has impacted medical care in a major way. Heroic, hugely expensive measures are taken, using insurance as a major payment vehicle, to keep people alive for short periods of time in very poor health condition. The decision to provide insured coverage for life saving treatments should be made on a cost/benefit basis, comparing the cost of the coverage with the overall anticipated benefit (added years of life, and expected quality of those years). Procedures that don't meet the test should be denied (unless the patient can pay the cost himself), and instead the insurance should merely provide for keeping the patient as comfortable as possible until death (e.g., pain killers, psychological support, etc.). This is the approach taken in a number of Northern European countries, which incidentally have excellent medical care systems. The far right's idea that everyone has an obligation to live as long as possible, no matter how miserable they are, is both ridiculous and anachronous.
Encourage International Cooperation Regarding Prescription Drugs
The US badly needs to cooperate with foreign countries to determine standards of accreditation for proprietary and generic drug makers. Accredited foreign manufacturers should be able to legally import their locally approved drugs to the US (right now the FDA forbids it). This would foster international competition with respect to drug prices, which would greatly benefit US consumers (right now, we pay far more than anyone else for drugs).
Conclusion
While our medical system is badly broken, it can be fixed with courage and hard work. The real impediment to a substantive correction is human nature, namely greed and cowardice:
Legislators that are too beholden to drug company political contributions to allow Medicare to negotiate pricing for medications Hospital administrators that are afraid of technological change Doctors that sometimes charge outrageous fees for minimal work Patients expecting to get the best of everything regardless of cost/benefit considerations Society being too afraid to let go of outdated religious conceptions Government being too cowardly to fast track promising drugs and open the market to imports Legislators being too greedy to repel the legal lobby and institute drastic medical tort reform
There is way too much hand wringing about insurance costs. The insurers are simply intermediaries, and they do not make extravagant returns on capital. The root cause of the problem is excessive cost at the provider level (hospitals, physicians, etc.). Until the etiology of the problem is solved, the symptoms will remain. The cure is a little like castor oil - it tastes terrible going down, but eventually you feel a lot better. Also, as with castor oil, you won't take it unless your mother forces you to. With all the vested interests here, real change won't occur unless Obama forces it down our collective throats.

Read More

Really Fixing Our Medical System

Without question, in many ways the US medical system is the envy of most of the world. We have some of the best medical colleges, many of the best physicians, and state of the art hospitals. Also, our drug companies are some of the most productive in the world.
In spite of the above, our medical system is seriously broken. Medical outcomes often trail behind other countries with ostensibly lower quality care, and costs are exorbitant. It is true that some very positive steps have already been taken to reduce costs, such as capping physician and hospital fees via PPO contracts, bulk negotiation for reduced drug costs by large providers and insurers, and reducing the cost of the "paper jungle" in hospitals via automation.
While the above is all positive, the system is still like an albatross around the neck of the ultimate payors (individuals and employers). While many hospitals are charitable and offer discounts to the uninsured, and many general practitioners take on geriatric patients knowing they will not be adequately reimbursed by Medicare, most people have a sense that the cost of the system is simply out of control. Even people covered by comprehensive PPO plans, where in-network providers accept strict fee caps imposed by the insurer, suffer from having to pay high premiums and steep out-of-pocket payments. Further, providers compensate for PPO and Medicare fee caps by shifting cost to insured's that are covered by insurance plans that they don't have a fee contract with. The end result is that almost everyone finds medical care too expensive.
I believe the system can be fixed, but it will require great political courage, as well as a willingness on the part of the American public to trash some currently held sacred beliefs. Nothing this complex can be solved by a simple or easy to swallow quick fix. It requires a comprehensive, and quite honestly, painful set of steps.
Detailed Plan
Force Hospitals To Adopt Smart Automation
I'm referring here to the type of advanced automation that minimizes duplication of services, administration of treatments that may be dangerous due to drug interactions, etc. In the US, professional firms (medical clinics, law offices, etc.) are notoriously IT illiterate. The Obama administration should provide tax incentives to spawn a cottage industry of consultants to help health care providers select and implement medical information management systems that really drive costs down by averting wasteful and dangerous decisions. Hospitals that fail to adopt smart automation within a certain period of time would become uncompetitive and driven out of business.
Reduce The Implementation Cost For New Drugs
Factoring in the cost of research, getting FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval, and marketing expense, it now costs a drug maker over $1 billion USD to bring a new drug to market. Only about 20% of this amount is for actual research. The rest is just regulatory approval (performing tests and submitting trial data) and marketing. The FDA needs to streamline and speed up the approval process, and then issue detailed public information so doctors and patients can make drug decisions without relying on the drug maker's expensive TV campaigns (which would hopefully become useless and cease). Admittedly, less stringent testing before approval will lead to some incremental public danger (drugs that would have been disapproved instead of being marketed for a time before losing accreditation due to poor effectiveness or dangers not flagged earlier), but this is a cost we will have to bear if we wish to reign in the rapidly growing cost of drugs.
Set Reasonable Caps On Doctor Compensation
In the US, the individual states regulate the insurance industry (not the federal government). The state insurance commissioners need to get together and set limits on per hour expenses that doctors can receive for specific procedures from insurance policies. Insurance policies that violate these caps should not be approved for public sale. The idea would be to set the caps high enough so that the medical profession continues to attract competent people, but not so high that some jerk gets $500,000 per year just for analyzing X-rays.
Get Really Tough On Tort Reform
While this is a hard on patients that suffer the results of medical malpractice, we need to limit malpractice awards from juries to actual economic damages, plus reasonable punitive damages in cases of gross negligence. Payments for "pain and suffering" need to be eliminated. Admittedly, this is controversial, as such damages are routinely awarded in non-medical civil cases where they are deemed appropriate by the jury. The problem is that juries are awarding enormous pain and suffering damages out of sympathy for the damaged patient, driving malpractice insurance costs through the roof, and thus contributing in a major way to the overall medical cost problem.
Take Religion Out Of Medicine
While we may have seemed to veer to the left in the last election, real decision making in the US is controlled by a small clique of wealthy, very conservative people. The religious right interprets the "right to life" as "the obligation to live." This has impacted medical care in a major way. Heroic, hugely expensive measures are taken, using insurance as a major payment vehicle, to keep people alive for short periods of time in very poor health condition. The decision to provide insured coverage for life saving treatments should be made on a cost/benefit basis, comparing the cost of the coverage with the overall anticipated benefit (added years of life, and expected quality of those years). Procedures that don't meet the test should be denied (unless the patient can pay the cost himself), and instead the insurance should merely provide for keeping the patient as comfortable as possible until death (e.g., pain killers, psychological support, etc.). This is the approach taken in a number of Northern European countries, which incidentally have excellent medical care systems. The far right's idea that everyone has an obligation to live as long as possible, no matter how miserable they are, is both ridiculous and anachronous.
Encourage International Cooperation Regarding Prescription Drugs
The US badly needs to cooperate with foreign countries to determine standards of accreditation for proprietary and generic drug makers. Accredited foreign manufacturers should be able to legally import their locally approved drugs to the US (right now the FDA forbids it). This would foster international competition with respect to drug prices, which would greatly benefit US consumers (right now, we pay far more than anyone else for drugs).
Conclusion
While our medical system is badly broken, it can be fixed with courage and hard work. The real impediment to a substantive correction is human nature, namely greed and cowardice:
Legislators that are too beholden to drug company political contributions to allow Medicare to negotiate pricing for medications Hospital administrators that are afraid of technological change Doctors that sometimes charge outrageous fees for minimal work Patients expecting to get the best of everything regardless of cost/benefit considerations Society being too afraid to let go of outdated religious conceptions Government being too cowardly to fast track promising drugs and open the market to imports Legislators being too greedy to repel the legal lobby and institute drastic medical tort reform
There is way too much hand wringing about insurance costs. The insurers are simply intermediaries, and they do not make extravagant returns on capital. The root cause of the problem is excessive cost at the provider level (hospitals, physicians, etc.). Until the etiology of the problem is solved, the symptoms will remain. The cure is a little like castor oil - it tastes terrible going down, but eventually you feel a lot better. Also, as with castor oil, you won't take it unless your mother forces you to. With all the vested interests here, real change won't occur unless Obama forces it down our collective throats.

Read More