Even though the data around productivity has proved pretty remorseless, humans have found the message hard to accept. It seems so logical that two units of work will produce twice the output. Logical but wrong. The critical measure of work isn't and never should be input but output. What matters isn't how many hours your team puts in, but the quality and quantity of work they produce.

Which is where sleep comes in. Although we might all like to imagine that we can work happily through the night, once again the data's all against us. Lose just one night's sleep and your cognitive capacity is roughly the same as being over the alcohol limit. Yet we regularly hail as heroes the executives who take the red eye, jump into a rental car, and zoom down the highway to the next meeting. Would we, I wonder, be so impressed if they arrived drunk?

The reason sleep is so important is because fatigue isn't simple. When we are tired, our performance doesn't degrade equally. Instead, when you lose a night's sleep, the parietal and occipital lobes in your brain become less active. The parietal lobe integrates information from the senses and is involved in our knowledge of numbers and manipulation of objects. The occipital lobe is involved in visual processing. So the parts of our mind responsible for understanding the world and the data around us start to slow down. This is because the brain is prioritizing the thalamus—the part of your brain responsible for keeping you awake. In evolutionary terms, this makes sense. If you're driven to find food, you need to stay awake and search, not compare recipes.

After 24 hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of six percent in glucose reaching the brain. (That's why you crave donuts and candy.) But the loss isn't shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 percent to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we most need for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.

I am constantly amazed at how many otherwise intelligent people insist on burning the midnight oil, producing important work (reports, essays, etc) late at night. Meanwhile, I get odd looks when I insist on trying to get at least 7.5 hours of sleep (preferably eight) each night.

In the last month of the election, negative ads ran nearly every minute of every day.

John Nichols and Robert McChesney take a very interesting in-depth look at the rise of Super PACs and their corrosive effects on US democracy.

Like the Laffer Curve it suggests that there is a point at which cutting government spending becomes self-defeating, it simply lowers growth, depresses tax revenues and pushes up social security spending by more than the government is cutting.

The question for policy-makers then, is are they past the point and at which the curve becomes downwards sloping? Will more austerity simply lead to higher deficits?

Judging by the tone of S&P’s downgrade of several European sovereigns last week, it certainly seems to think that many countries have passed this point.

Duncan Weldon from the TUC Touchstone blog raises an interesting point about Europe's austerity measures. But I wonder, as raised by commenter Migeru, whether this is just fighting pseudoscience with pseudoscience.

The South Australian Opposition’s policy on wind farms would threaten more than $3 billion of investment and push up power prices for South Australian householders if implemented in its current form, the renewable energy industry’s peak body said today.

More than 948 jobs would be at risk under the SA Liberal Party's wind turbine policy and electricity prices would rise. One wonders why the CEC started their media release with rubbish about investment.

(Let's not forget that the Liberal Party is in the pocket of the carbon lobby, who wants to destroy renewable energy and keep electricity prices high.)

Nuclear power is no magic solution, argues Pervez Hoodbhoy — it's not safe, or cheap, and it leads to weapons programmes.

A string of energy-starved developing countries have looked at nuclear power as the magic solution. No oil, no gas, no coal needed – it's a fuel with zero air pollution or carbon dioxide emissions. High-tech and prestigious, it was seen as relatively safe.

But then Fukushima came along. The disaster's global psychological impact exceeded Chernobyl's, and left a world that's now unsure if nuclear electricity is the answer.

I, like many others, was very disappointed to read in the latest Quarterly Essay, that Andrew Charlton has joined the poisonous bandwagon of pundits and wonks calling for Australia to build a nuclear industry as a response to climate change.

An Illinois man is suing Pepsi Co. because, he says, he found a mouse in his can of Mountain Dew. But Pepsi says the guy is pulling a Strange Brew, and here's how they know: If there really were a mouse in a Mountain Dew can, it would have dissolved into "a jelly-like substance" before the guy could find it. Seriously, this is their defense.

This means, unfortunately, that if there really was a mouse in your Mountain Dew, you'd never know...

This month, 37 state governors began their terms – 26 of them newly elected, and the rest re-elected. As the New York Times has reported, almost all of them have called for austerity programs that, if implemented, will amount to an attack on the living standards of working people and favor the interests of corporations and the wealthy:

The prescription? Slash spending. Avoid tax increases. Tear up regulations that might drive away business and jobs. Shrink government, even if that means tackling the thorny issues of public employees and their pensions…“The rhetoric has grown very similar,” said Scott D. Pattison, executive director of the nonpartisan National Association of State Budget Officers. “A lot of times, you can’t tell if it’s a Republican or Democrat, a conservative or a liberal.”

Governors across the country openly intend to use the fiscal crisis of the states to break the power of public employees’ unions. In Ohio, incoming Republican governor John Kasich has called for outlawing teachers’ right to strike, stripping 14,000 state-financed child care and home health care workers of their collective bargaining rights, and the repeal of prevailing wage laws concerning public contracts. Legislatures in 16 states are planning to pursue legislation that would require public sector union members to “opt in” before their unions could spend dues money on political campaigns. None of this is surprising – public sector unions have long been a target of the right and Democratic centrists – but the anti-union campaign is also being waged against private sector unions as well. Officials in ten states plan to introduce legislation to repeal the agency shop, potentially spreading “right-to-work” laws in areas outside the traditionally anti-union South and West. State fiscal crises have given neoliberals in both parties the opportunity to drive a stake in the heart of the labor movement and complete the neoliberal counterrevolution launched almost 40 years ago.

All of these developments shed light on the role of government in coordinating and pursuing the interests of capitalists in a bourgeois democracy. My own state of New York provides a particularly interesting and instructive example of this phenomenon. Corporations and conservatives have long complained about the power of public and private sector unions in state government (at over 25%, New York has the highest unionization rate in the U.S.), but have not had an effective organization to pursue their agenda at the state level until recently. As a candidate and now as governor, Democrat Andrew Cuomo has not only called for business to organize but has actively facilitated the process as well, resulting in the formation of the rather dramatically named Committee to Save New York, whose board is composed primarily by the representatives of wealthy financial and real estate interests – including Felix Rohatyn, the key player in the neoliberal resolution of the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis.

Few people outside the US would probably be aware of the dire financial situations facing most US cities and states. Since the global financial crisis, almost every state in the US has plunged into a "financial crisis".

Interestingly, Andrew Cuomo, the conservative Democratic NY governor has felt the pressure from the Occupy Movement and is now considering progressive taxation reform, including higher tax rates for the wealthy.

Most Americans believe the biggest problem with taxes is that wealthy people don’t pay their fair share, according to poll results published Tuesday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

The feeling of outrage over the privileged classes is growing, according to the poll results, which only confirm the widespread anger that has helped fuel this fall's Occupy protests on Wall Street and nationwide.

However, when its broken down by voting intention (Democrat/Republican), the numbers change significantly.

Analysing over 150,000 tweets posted from January 12 to 19, 2011 using the hashtags #sidibouzid’ or ‘tunisia’ and over 200,00 tweets posted from January 24 to 29, 2011, containing the hashtags ‘#egypt’ or ‘#jan25,′ a huge wealth of information on how content on Twitter is being received, depending on who’s doing the tweeting.

In both Egypt and Tunisia, bloggers, journalists and activists were the most prominent in disseminating information, accounting together for 43% of the accounts tweeting about Egypt and 44% tweeting about Tunisia, versus just 7% representing mainstream media accounts in each of the countries.

This sheds an interesting light on how Twitter is being used in journalism . While all major mainstream media outlets have a strong presence on Twitter, some with millions of followers, when it comes to how information spreads through Twitter – when it’s coming from personal, individual accounts, it is likely to reach a larger audience.

In the case of both Tunisia and Egypt, it is possible that having journalists on the ground, reporting directly from their Twitter accounts made for more immediate impressions. While any journalist probably has to be cautious about what they say on Twitter, the immediacy of reaching their readers through tweets, in the heat of the moment, is far more honest.

Read a bit lower in the article, where it talks about how journalists interact with each other. Very interesting.

In each case the information spread, was digested (which takes some time, contrary to pundits who insist that absence of an immediate polling decline means the attacks “aren’t working”) and mulled over. As that happened, the candidates, who to one degree or another benefited from the electorate’s lack of information about them, tumbled.

This post, by conservative Jennifer Rubin, explains the eventual collapse in support for the extreme-right wing Republicans, Perry, Cain and now Gingrich.

Her point should be noted by pundits in Australia: opinion polls don't react instantly to events. The drivers of poll changes aren't "what happened this week", but rather they are accumulations of impressions gained over weeks or months that "trickle down and across the electorate".

One of the most frustrating things about political commentary in these times of instant polling and the 24 hour news cycle is that pundits and the Press Gallery journalists are only able to interpret political events through the prism of a week. Poll changes are all about last week's events. Unfortunately, this is not how public opinion is formed.