Word: idea
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...Lotteries have the powerful incentive of providing a variable reinforcement, with big payouts sometimes and smaller ones others," says Volpp. "For the deposit contract, the idea is that people are very averse to losing money. It's good to have some skin in the game...
...also in the hope of staving off diseases like cancer and heart disease. Though these recent trials - including two big studies in November that showed no benefit of vitamins E and C for heart disease, or vitamin D and calcium against invasive breast cancer - don't support that idea, they don't rule out the possibility that getting vitamins from dietary sources rather than supplements could have a more powerful preventive effect, or that taking different doses of supplements might be more beneficial...
Still, the cash-for-fat idea proved powerful, and Volpp envisions ways it could be improved so that the weight loss sticks. If you run the programs for 12 to 18 months, for example, subjects start to reap the physical rewards of trimming down. "Their knees and back no longer ache. They start to look better in clothes," he says. "Those benefits become their own reinforcements, so you can turn off the incentive program." Employers and insurers could adopt a similar program, with monthly premiums falling along with the numbers on the scale. "We all tend to discount amorphous health...
...Poznan, negotiations have gotten muddy. Thus far, no one can agree on what the rights of indigenous people who actually live among the trees should be in a forestry carbon market, while Brazil - home to 40% of the world's remaining rain forests - seems against the entire idea of avoided deforestation. (Brazil favors a plan that would have rich countries contribute to a global fund that would work to prevent deforestation, instead of using the carbon market.) There are legitimate criticisms of avoided deforestation - but something firm on forestry needs to come out of Poznan. (See pictures of trees...
...shed much light on whether we can put any trust in the truth of the New Testament. It seems to me that the great vehemence with which the Vatican attacked Dan Brown's fictional work The DaVinci Code was not because of concern about his story, but because the idea behind it illuminated, with exceptional clarity, the very real possibility that, whatever the truth may be, it may not be what we have been told by the Roman Catholic Church. And this is hardly a minor issue, since the New Testament is the entire basis for all major branches...