Showing posts with label North Carolina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Carolina. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Lack of sleep can make you overly optimistic, says study

Posted by PrfyVdlx at 7:31 PM Labels: , , , , , , ,
And if you stay awake playing games at the casino, you tend to be 'brave' betting more and more...
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Posted: 09 March 2011

Casino at Marina Bay Sands
WASHINGTON: When people do not get enough sleep, they tend to make overly optimistic decisions and may be more prone to risky gambling, US researchers said on Tuesday.

The study published in the journal Neuroscience provides scientific evidence for what casino managers have long known - that flashing lights and ringing slot machines encourage gamblers to keep going until their money is gone.

Scientists used magnetic resonance imagining (MRI) to examine the brains of people who had spent a night of disturbed and shortened sleep compared to their better-rested counterparts.

The scans showed increased activity in the parts of the brain that assess positive outcomes, and decreased activity in the areas that process negative outcomes.

"Using a risky decision-making task, we showed that sleep deprivation shifted most persons' bias from avoiding loss to pursuing gain," said the study by Duke University researchers in North Carolina and Singapore.

The study examined 29 healthy adult volunteers with an average age of 22, and asked them to perform a series of economic decision-making tasks after a normal night of sleep and again after a night of sleep-deprivation.

Sleep deprivation "appears to create an optimism bias; for example, participants behave as if positive consequences are more likely (or more valuable) and as if negative consequences are less likely (or less harmful)," it said.

Drinking caffeine, getting fresh air or exercising are not enough to combat the effects of fatigue, said lead author Vinod Venkatraman, a graduate student in Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke.

"Late-night gamblers are fighting more than just the unfavourable odds of gambling machines; they are fighting a sleep-deprived brain's tendency to implicitly seek gains while discounting the impact of potential losses," said Venkatraman.

- AFP/de


Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Lack of sleep can make you overly optimistic, says study
 
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Sunday, June 14, 2009

Cities gamble with millions

Posted by PrfyVdlx at 11:51 PM Labels: , , , , , , ,

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Biopolis is a product of a national race to attract the industry.

KANNAPOLIS (North Carolina) - Three buildings in an American blue-collar town north-east of Charlotte, one topped by a giant dome, form the beginnings of what has been nicknamed the Biopolis, a research campus dedicated to biotechnology.

At a cost of US$500 million ($724 million) and counting, the Biopolis, officially called the North Carolina Research Campus, is a product of a national race to attract the biotechnology industry, a current grail of economic development.

Cities like Shreveport, Louisiana, and Huntsville, Alabama, are also gambling millions in taxpayer dollars on if-we-build-it-they-will-come research parks and wet laboratories, which hold the promise of low-pollution workplaces and high salaries.

The state of Florida and Palm Beach County used US$510 million as bait for a research institute that will employ 545 people. New York City has invested more than US$45 million in bioscience infrastructure, and Kentucky matches federal research grants dollar for dollar.

But skeptics cite two major problems with the race for biotech: First, the industry is highly concentrated in established epicentres such as Boston and San Francisco, which offer not just scientific talent but also executives who know how to steer drugs through the arduous approval process.

Second, biotech is a relatively tiny industry with a lengthy product-development process, and even in its largest clusters offers only a fraction of the jobs of traditional manufacturing.

To build a viable biotech cluster, some areas have expanded the traditional definition of the industry beyond genetics to biofuels, agriculture, medical devices - even bioterrorism research.

A good strategy capitalises on a city's existing strength, said Mr Patrick Kelly, the vice-president of state government relations for the Biotechnology Industry Organisation.

In Kannapolis, the focus is on food and nutrition, not because of any expertise, but because of Mr David Murdock, the health-obsessed billionaire who first envisioned the

Biopolis.

Some critics say the Biopolis is largely a real estate venture that can only increase the value of hundreds of additional acres Mr Murdock owns in the area.

From TODAY, World – Friday, 12-Jun-2009

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