This just in from our “why some people are more like this than that sometimes” department: Bad news works.
ScienceDaily:Negativity is contagious
BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Oct. 4 (UPI) -- Negative opinions cause the greatest attitude shifts, not just from good to bad, but also from bad to worse, a U.S. study found.
"Consumer attitudes toward products and services are frequently influenced by others around them. Social networks, such as those found on the (Internet at) Myspace and Facebook suggest that these influences will continue to be significant drivers of individual consumer attitudes as society becomes more inter-connected," study authors Adam Duhachek, Shuoyang Zhang and Shanker Krishnan, all of Indiana University, said in a statement. "Our research seeks to understand the conditions where group influence is strongest."
The researchers then revealed to participants whether their peers evaluated the product negatively or positively.
The findings, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that the opinions of others exert especially strong influence on individual attitudes when these opinions are negative.
Given the strong influence of negative information, marketers may need to expend extra resources to counter-act the effects of negative word of mouth in online chat rooms, blogs and in offline media, the researchers added.
Thanks a lot Mr. Rove. What else do you have?
Headline of the day
Large-scale Head Lice Finding Kits Effective
Just what they’re building with those kits, they wouldn’t say.
The "other" Headline of the day
Man says iPod set his pants on fire
Obviously, his play list consisted of the Hot 100.
That's pretty heavy...dude.
Japan sumo boss fired over death
The head of a Japanese sumo stable has been fired by the sport's national body over the treatment of a 17-year-old wrestler who died following practice.
Tokitsukaze, 57, had caused a public scandal and damaged the sport's reputation, the Sumo Association said.
He has admitted hitting trainee Tokitaizan with a bottle and working him hard before his death in June.
He is only the second stable master to be fired. It is the latest crisis to hit Japan's national sport.
Two months ago, grand champion Asashoryu was suspended after he was caught playing football while supposedly injured.
He has since been allowed to return to his native Mongolia for treatment for a stress disorder.
The teenage Tokitaizan, whose real name is Takashi Saito, died in hospital after collapsing during training.
Tokitsukaze admitted to the authorities that he hit the 17-year-old with a beer bottle and trained him until he was barely able to stand on the day before his death.
He is also said to have admitted that other senior wrestlers in the stable assaulted the teenager, one of them with a baseball bat.
"We have today agreed to relieve him of his duties," Sumo Association chairman Kitanoumi told a press conference.
"He has caused a public scandal and grievously damaged the honour of the Sumo Association."
Sumo has seen a decline in popularity as young Japanese turn to more modern pursuits such as football and baseball.
Young apprentices are also said to face tough treatment from senior wrestlers as part of their training.
Why didn’t the kid just sit on him?
What, no water boarding?
The BBC reports that the Vatican is to publish a book which is expected to shed light on the demise of the Knights Templar, a Christian military order from the Middle Ages.
The book is based on a document known as the Chinon parchment, found in the Vatican Secret Archives six years ago after years of being incorrectly filed. The official who found the paper says it exonerates the knights entirely.
The document is a record of the heresy hearings of the Templars before Pope Clement V in the 14th Century.
Prof Barbara Frale, who stumbled across the parchment by mistake, says that it lays bare the rituals and ceremonies over which the Templars were accused of heresy.
In the hearings before Clement V, the knights reportedly admitted spitting on the cross, denying Jesus and kissing the lower back of the man proposing them during initiation ceremonies.
However, many of the confessions were obtained under torture and knights later recanted or tried to claim that their initiation ceremony merely mimicked the humiliation the knights would suffer if they fell into the hands of the Muslim leader Saladin.
The leader of the order, Jacques de Moley, was one of those who confessed to heresy, but later recanted.
He was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314, the same year that the Pope dissolved the order.
However, according to Prof Frale, study of the document shows that the knights were not heretics as had been believed for 700 years.
In fact she says "the Pope was obliged to ask for pardons from the knights... the document we have found absolves them".
Details of the parchment will be published as part of Processus contra Templarios, a book that will be released by the Vatican's Secret Archive on 25 October.
First no Saint Christopher, the no Saint Anthony, now this. Well, thanks to Jacques deMoley, we’ll still get to keep Friday the 13th.
And I invented Al Gore, too.
Kim Jong Il: I’m an Internet expert
SEOUL, South Korea – The BBC reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il called himself an "Internet expert" during summit talks with South Korea's president this week, a news report said Friday.
The reclusive leader made the remark after South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun asked that South Korean companies operating at an industrial park in the North Korean city of Kaesong be allowed to use the Internet, Yonhap news agency reported, without citing any source.
"I'm an Internet expert too. It's all right to wire the industrial zone only, but there are many problems if other regions of the North are wired," Kim told Roh, according to Yonhap.
Kim reportedly asked former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for her e-mail address when she visited Pyongyang in 2000. A North Korean general cracked a joke about President Bush during high-level military talks with the South earlier this year, saying he read it on the Internet.
The North's leader is also a big fan of South Korean movies and TV dramas, and Roh gave him a bookcase of South Korean DVDs as a gift this week.
He also likes show tunes, long walks, counterfeiting and money laundering.
Soon they’ll be reading your thought balloons.
High tech "Meth Scanner" detects meth on clothes, skin
KVOA in Tucson reports that a company called CDEX Inc. thinks it's found a way to help fight meth.
It has developed a device which can instantly detect trace amounts of the drug.
Right now it's being tested in Greenlee County, northeast of Tucson.
"When you pull the trigger, UV light comes out of the lamps," says Wade Poteet, the principal scientist behind the scanner.
In an instant the scanner knows if a substance is meth or not. It detects traces of the drug down to one tenth of one millionth of a gram on clothes, skin, and other surfaces.
The sheriff's department showed us how it works on real meth seized as evidence.
"Just point and shoot. Keep it simple," Sexton says.
Eventually, future models of the scanner will be able to test other drugs as well, even explosives.
"We believe there are other applications, we've only begun to scratch the surface," Poteet says.
Production on the scanners is expected to start at the end of the year. Eventually they will cost between $500 and $600 dollars.
"There are benefits all the way around: we know what we got, we know how to charge people and who to keep ahold of," Sexton says.
The next step is to convince the courts of the science behind the detection. That way the justice system will accept it like it already does with radar guns.
“And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.”
It’s where we’re headed and it’s only going to get worse.
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