Mirror Neurons, Virtual training, Crowds, Misunderstanding, Long Tail, & Copyright

The Mirror Neuron Revolution: Explaining What Makes Humans Social - Scientific American

Mirror Neurons collapse the distinction between seeing and doing.

Virtual training at Fort Benning

While much of a recruit's introduction to the Army is the same as it has always been--firing ranges, long marches, obstacle courses, and the like--the Army is increasingly utilizing new technologies to help soldiers learn their jobs.

The crowd within - Economist

This suggests that the brain is constantly creating hypotheses about the world and checking them against reality. Those that pass muster are adopted. Guessing the answers to questions you do not know the correct answer to, but have some idea of what the right answer ought to look like, could tap into such a system. A hive mind buzzing with ideas, as it were, but inside a single skull.

$37 billion - US and UK businesses count the cost of employee misunderstanding - Cognisco

UK and US employees are costing businesses $37 billion (£18.7 billion) 2 every year because they do not fully understand their jobs, according to a new IDC white paper commissioned by Cognisco, the world's leading intelligent employee assessment specialist.

Approximately two thirds of the total cost of misunderstanding reported by organisations was attributed to loss of business due to unplanned downtime (32 percent), poor procurement practice (17 percent) and settlements for industrial tribunals (16 percent). Other costs incurred include regulatory penalties and tax or revenue penalties.

Long-tail economics favors the blockbuster, Harvard study finds - c/net

Remember the long tail? It was the omnipresent theory that suggested there were oodles of cash to be made by monetizing a market's disparate tastes via the Web.

Why sell a million copies of Led Zeppelin's Coda, when you can make a thriving business of selling two to three copies of your neighbor's garage band to Rick, two copies of a Nigerian band's tunes to Susan, and so on? As new research highlighted in Harvard Business Review suggests, the answer may well be that the real money is in the blockbuster, not the long tail, after all.

Your Mashup Is Probably Legal - Slashdot

"We've been conditioned to think that if you pull something off the web and use it, you're committing some sort of copyright infringement. But increasingly, the law is moving in the opposite direction. Provided you are making a truly new use of the content, you are free to make money off those copyrighted images and video and sound.