We’ve all had the experience of a good mood turning sour after watching a news bulletin full of distant, but gloomy, events. It can ruin a whole evening by casting a pall of low-level misery over everything else.

Obviously there are health implications in this phenomenon usually observable through higher blood pressure and faster pulse rate. But can it also affect your wealth?

Jason Zweig believes that “the more you look at stock prices, the more illusory ‘trends’ you see.” His thesis is that Neuro-Economics “can help you understand your reactions and get richer”.

All this appears in his book, Your Money and Your Brain — Become a Smarter, More Successful Investor, the Neuroscience Way.

Neuro-Economics is a blend of neuroscience, economics and psychology designed to interpret the brain’s reaction to economic stimuli like falling stock prices. Apparently, within 12 milliseconds (one-25th of the time it takes to blink an eye), the news activates the amygdala, a part of the brain that initiates fear and anger. Falling stock prices incite the same brain circuits as the roar of a wild beast.

In those moments, if you make a snap decision, the likelihood is that you will sell your shares. You will also believe you have made a rational decision because the process happens so fast you are unaware of it.

However, all data shows that if you hang onto your shares, you will do much better in the long run. So what’s happening here?

The conclusion is that, the impulse to stay continuously informed about your shares in times of market turmoil leads to nothing but trouble — not to mention high blood pressure and pulse rate.

“Furthermore, the more often you update the prices of your stocks, the more often you will perceive ‘trends’ that are most likely to be just illusions.”

Neuroscience shows that it takes only two iterations of a stimulus for your brain to form an automatic and uncontrollable anticipation of another repetition. However, it’s more likely than not that the “news” was just noise.

Zweig’s advice to investors is : “Stop clicking on market websites. Stay away from the Bloomberg terminal. If you read the FT, pass over the market news and spend your time on the opinion pages instead. You will surely be happier — and almost certainly end up richer.”

Now that sage advice applies not only to economics and investments, but it can also be extrapolated into other areas as well.

It’s generally agreed that 90 percent of what we worry about never happens. It follows that 90 percent of speculation and prognoses never happen either. Keeping up with news, current affairs, politics, and many other topics, will prove to be nothing but hot air and a lot of bothersome timewasting. We should save our equanimity for the actuality of our own lives and never make decisions on the basis of incoming “news”.

This book neatly adds convergence to a couple of trends. All those books that tell us how to save time, e.g. The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, and the current crop of books showing how great scare stories like mad-cow disease and apocalyptic warnings of the end of the world, never turn out the way the doomsters predict.

The Simpsons really is good for your health and your wealth.

Astonishingly, in Britain every child in the land is entitled to Child Benefit, a regular payment from the Government (read taxpayer), whether the family needs the money or not. This faux largesse means that around 70 percent of the population receives some sort of benefit from the political system.

Add to that astounding fact the dismal truth that the present administration couldn’t assemble a flat-pack whelk stall without it falling down, and you have a recipe for big trouble, especially when it insists on putting all data into massive computer databases.

Recap : a £20billion ($42bn) nationwide computer records system for the National Health Service is still not operational after years of tinkering. Experts say it will never work. Similar projects for agriculture, passports and other ministries have met with the same fate at vast cost to the taxpayer.

Bombshell : yesterday we were told that the personal data of nearly half the nation has “gone missing”. In the newly merged department of Inland Revenue and Customs, a “junior official” downloaded the personal details, including bank account data and National Insurance numbers, of 25 million people and placed all of it on two unencrypted CDs.

The next step almost beggars belief if it hadn’t happened on the current Government’s watch. The official then put the CDs in an envelope and posted it. The package wasn’t even registered so couldn’t be tracked or traced. Naturally, it’s now “lost in the post” or I wouldn’t be telling this tale of woe.

Alternatively, it may have been stolen to order by organized crime. We have been told the official concerned is now under guard in a “safe house” to protect him or her against the media — and presumably criminals seeking “to make him an offer he can’t refuse”.

Outcome : this morning there’s huge panic all over the UK as people wake to find their bank accounts and personal identities compromised in the most dangerous way possible.

Once again we see the perils of allowing a central administration to accumulate vast quantities of information through a system of universal benefits more in tune with the Soviet era than the distributed nature of data in the age of the internet.

People who advocate such policies should never again be entrusted with a modern nation’s cash and data.

But don’t hold your breath. No politician has resigned — only a hapless civil servant.

Plus ca change …

I’m looking for anyone who can bring a little vorsprung durch technik to a “simple” Wordpress problem.

We have a site with 23,000 spam comments in the moderation panel. Wordpress only allows zapping 20 at a time, or a huge process of downloading the whole mess bucket, which invariably hangs the computer.

I’m seeking a quick way to zap the lot, maybe serverside using the MySQL panel. Has any bright spark got a handle on this?

Reward in Heaven.

We’ve long been Cringely fans here at Syntagma, even when the sage gets it all wrong. Well, a perfect world is not very interesting, is it.

Next week we are promised an earth-shattering moment from the frog. In his own words :

“And speaking of clever inventions, I want to give fair warning that next week I will make an announcement in this space so astounding that even my 83-year-old mother may pay attention. I intend to change the world a little bit and — as always — will need your help if I am to be successful.”

We’ll be queuing up for the column next Friday, Cringe old chap.

It better be good!

The internet is dead and boring according to Mark Cuban, internet A-lister, venture capitalist and TV impresario. He believes it has become a “utility” and therefore a bit like electricity or water — yawn-inducing!

As always this kind of argument concentrates on the medium not the message. For example, ten years ago childrens’ books were dead in the water — today’s kids are “visual”, brought up on screen games and videos. They couldn’t get into textual stuff at all.

Then the Harry Potter books arrived on the scene. Not only did they revolutionize the sales of children’s books, they also hugely boosted another old medium, the movies.

We’re always saying here in Syntagma that the medium is boring — it should be. All mediums should be unobtrusive, allowing creativity to flourish. The message is the thing. Find exciting new content and even the most ancient technologies, like books, magazines, television and film, come to life in a splurge of fresh excitement and initiative.

The internet is a platform. At present, there’s nothing to match it as a pipe for instant content. Most content is rubbish, of course, but the opportunities are there for anyone who can grab the public’s attention or imagination.

The medium is not the message. The message allows the medium to thrive. Quality content makes the internet valuable. Find that, and you’re in business.

I like to post a serious, reflective piece on Sundays, so today I’m going to write about my discovery of the first machine-washable cellphone.

Incidentally, I never use the term “mobile” phone because they’re not actually mobile — they don’t have wheels or wings. They are in fact “portable” phones, but nobody would know what I was talking about, so I’ll settle for the American “cell” instead. Actually, that’s what they were called in Britain before “mobile” became standard, so don’t think I’ve gone all transatlantic.

The trouble with summer is that the drastic reduction in the amount of clothing worn means that objects get put in unusual places. Last week I went on a long, sticky walk in the heat with my nearly-new Motorola cellphone in a shirt breast pocket. When I got back I took the shirt off and put it straight into the washing machine and switched it on.

An hour later I was passing the laundry room only to be assailed by an ominous clanking sound as the machine went into top spin mode. A vision of the phone leapt into my mind’s eye.

I hastily retrieved the now very shiny object from the tangle of damp clothing and found it was totally dead. Being an optimist I opened the clamshell and left it in the sun to dry out.

Two days later it was still dead. I’d been using my old Model-T Ford phone for two days and was ready to take a decision to buy a new one.

A couple of hours later, I returned with a brilliant Sony-Ericsson portable phone. It had cost me a heavily-discounted £105 ($210), so I was pleased.

I was about to throw the nearly-new, bedraggled phone away when I decided to check it one more time. In the process, I wiped over the battery terminals, which were suspiciously cloudy, and turned it on. Hey presto, it jumped into life as if nothing had happened. It was like a corpse leaping out of a coffin in the rudest of health.

So now I’ve got two new phones and never know which one to use.

I doubt though that phone salespeople will be persuaded to use the line : “It’s completely machine-washable, Sir/Madam, and comes up like new time and time again. In fact, it’s superior to cotton, wool and polyester. We recommend Daz washing powder for the brightest wash.”

Well done Motorola. Hello Moto!

The Gmail account I use for Google Alerts is awash with spam. This morning I awoke to nearly 3000 choice items of trash, a fair chunk sitting in my inbox, presumably because the spam filters couldn’t cope. Many were of the “Mailer Daemon” type, with faux bounced emails.

Let’s assume it’s a temporary glitch, although I’ve noticed more spam in my G-inboxes lately, as have others. However, if Google is “only human”, we’ve been sold a pup.

Makes you wonder, though, about the mentality of some of the spammers. A lot of spam is just so pathetic it can’t possibly serve any purpose to the sender beyond a malicious satisfaction at having thrown a gremlin in the works.

Other spam is clearly coordinated and comes from a single source. The spammer is playing a numbers game. Since the cost per email is virtually nil, he (why do I assume it’s a “he”?) only needs a small percentage to be opened, releasing “active content” (viruses, trojans, worms) onto the receiver’s computer. The mail containing attachments is the most dangerous.

It will then only be a matter of time before the host machine is acting as a zombie clone, spreading havoc and denial of service to specially targeted organizations, like banks or Government departments. In May, the Russian Government is alleged to have brought down the communications systems of Estonia is a similar move.

Spammers come in all shapes and sizes.

Other ploys are to harvest your personal information and report back to base, usually in Asia or behind the old Iron Curtain, which seems to be sprouting new shoots in the dying oil age.

Similarly, spam comments on blog-type websites are a real nuisance. Syntagma Media gets up to 500 a day on some of our sites. With more than 40 active sites, that’s a real problem.

Comment spam is different. Most is search engine oriented — attempting to get a backlink to improve rankings on barebones Adsense sites. It’s all about traffic and the numbers game. The “no-follow” rule doesn’t seem to put these people off, but then Yahoo! appears to ignore it, and many publishers just switch it off.

Others are just links to porn sites or phishing setups where your personal information is tricked from you to create cloned credit cards and raid bank accounts.

What a wearisome prospect it is to be online these days. It only shows how powerful the benefits of the internet are that we put up with the overt dishonesty to make use of it.

At last a major player is joining me in my spluttering campaign against social networking spam. The campaign so far has consisted of not joining any of them, so is not quite up to Emily Pankhurst’s Suffragette movement yet.

The plain fact is, there are not enough years in the day to play around with this stuff — unless, of course, you are paid to review it, in which case I forgive you.

If your job involves something else, though, this is just another dose of poison to limit what you are able to achieve in your real work.

The Low Information Diet is the only way to get things done. #

Wake up, or perish by information overload — a death far worse than slow Chinese torture or garotting with piano wire.

Last month I did a little piece on Tony Blair’s departure from office. I mentioned in passing that he was a something of a techno-dummy [British understatement].

I remember him at the British launch of Windows XP stumbling through a speech of eye-watering ineptitude. When he came to the bit where he had to explain what XP was, his wife had to step in and describe the product. Sooo embarrassing.

Anyway, now that he’s left office, more news of his monumental ignorance reaches Syntagma’s ears. It seems he’s bought his first cell/mobile phone — ever. It’s a red Motorola, which sounds like a freebie from Richard Branson to me.

After taking lessons in how to use the thing, he eventually managed to send a text message. The reply came back :

“Who are you?”

Perhaps “Take me to your leader” might have been better.

Back to the drawing board, Tone. No iPhone for Christmas for you.