JUST IN @ Time Inc.

Photo By Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images via WWDTime Warner Inc.named Digitas chief executive Laura Lang to run Time Inc., putting a digital advertising-agency veteran in charge of the publisher of such major titles as Time, People and Sports Illustrated.

In a memo to employees, Time Warner chief executive Jeff Bewkes said Ms. Lang “has a deep respect for content and the creative process, as well as an in-depth understanding of the digital and advertising worlds, which are critical to Time Inc.’s future.” Read on at WSJ.

DFR (Daily French Roast)

Anne is reading …

Gray matter in the brain’s control center is again linked to an ability to process reward, via Science Daily. The more gray matter you have in the part of the brain in charge of decision-making and thought-processing, the better your ability to evaluate rewards and consequences of your decision.

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have documented for the first time in a holistic brain-scan study how decisions involving rewards and non-reward options are made in the prefrontal cortex brains of cocaine users, compared to ‘healthy’ people who aren’t cocaine users.

Results of the research is very important as it may well apply to the impact of other lifestyle habits on our brain functions, including smoking and eating fast food.

Comfort Food, Obesity and Severe Brain Degeneration

Junk Food Creates Dopamine-Deficit Addiction in Rats

In Rats, High-Fat Diet Damages Short-Term Memory

Snack Around the Clock Chocolate

Responding to consistently positive research about the health benefits of chocolate, brands like Godiva are on the move. Although there is NO research that supports the claim that eating as much chocolate as possible will bring additional health benefits, chocolate manufacturers believe otherwise.

Today’s WSJ writes that Godiva is one company seeking new forms of chocolate for consumers “to munch mindlessly, and new places to buy them.’

“We want to get more Godiva into people’s mouths more often,” said Lauri Kien Kotcher, chief marketing officer for Godiva and senior vice president of global brand development. “It’s all about chocolate snacks, little chocolate treats. …When those things come, you just keep eating.”

More DFR

Princeton’s Art of Science Competition

CREDIT: Christophe Gissinger, Princeton University Art of Science CompetitionScience is very much under attack in America. Secularism (also a bad, bad word) embraces science and its challenges to creationism and a factual interpretation of the Bible, which not only science but the Vatican rejects.

Thinking people who believe in a higher spiritual power in the universe tend to embrace intelligent design. We reject creationism but do allow for the existence of a higher spiritual or energy power in the universe that humans can’t begin to understand or analyze. Social conservatives tend to dismiss intelligent design as heresy, socialist, communist, Nazism and every other bad, bad word we can think of. Simply stated, we are asked to suspend all beliefs in science and rational thinking and surrender to Biblical teachings — ignoring archaeological discoveries, carbon dating — you name it.

The organizers of this year’s Art of Science competition at Princeton University, the organizers tried to remove the concept ‘intelligent design’ from the polarizing muck of Biblical politics in Washington. Art of Science co-organizer Andrew Zwicker, head of science education at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and a lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program explained:

” … in the broadest sense, beautiful objects, both natural and the manufactured, have an intelligence to their form, their function, and thus, their design.”

Biomimicry is a concept very closely aligned with understanding the science of design in Mother Nature. (Note, Janine Benyus TED Talk is superb.)

First prize this year went to Christophe Gissinger (image above), a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics also with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory for his “Chaos and geomagnetic reversals,” which shows a computer model that illustrates the reversals of Earth’s magnetic field. More images via Live Science

Photoshop Under Control?

In the global revolt against excessive Photoshop redos and flaw-fixing that renders many models unrecognizable today, Dartmouth computer science professor Dr Hany Farid has invented a potential solve. Imagine a model or celebrity dictating as terms of a contract that in the five levels of retouching specified in Farid’s new model, only level two is permitted.

Retouching perfectionists — especially on women’s bodies — will be on anti-depressants for certain, but the new software just might be a way of rendering realistic images according to the wishes of the individual being ‘remade’, and not only another person’s vision of the perfect woman or man. Read on at NYT.