Today in Globe Business
Financial executives spent big on Brown
In a six-day span just before the US Senate election, Republican Scott Brown collected nearly $450,000 from donors who work at financial companies, a sign the industry is prepared to spend heavily in the upcoming midterm elections to beat back new controls and taxes President Obama wants to impose.
The donations, from hundreds of financial executives, far exceeded what Brown received from doctors and others in the health care industry in the final days of the campaign. While Brown saw donations from all quarters explode in mid-January, as polls showed him closing fast on opponent Martha Coakley, the donations from financial workers coincided with several key developments that would affect their companies.
On Jan. 14, five days before the Senate election, President Obama proposed a fee on large financial firms to recoup the cost of the government’s bailout of the industry, and he angrily demanded that those firms cut executive bonuses.
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Imagine an electrical power network that talks to customers - and listens to them. Or one that practically heals itself, that can sense when a fallen tree has severed a power line and reroute power so the fewest number of customers possible lose electricity.
Or one that gives customers control of their own energy use through the Internet, remotely turning off appliances or running the washing machine at night, when demand is low.
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On financial decisions, older isn't always wiser
Contrary to the popular notion that young people are reckless, while older people avoid risks, new research shows that in an investment task that involves balancing risk to make the most money, older people make more mistakes than their younger counterparts.
That does not mean older adults are bad investors who should not be entrusted with financial decisions. But the research - in which participants were placed in a brain scanner while they chose stocks and bonds - found that as age increases, so do the mistakes people make. The scans also showed that in older adults, there was more “noise’’ in a brain region thought to be involved in computing value.
“Older adults aren’t terrible at this, it’s just that they sometimes make more mistakes, especially when they were choosing the risky assets,’’ said Gregory R. Samanez-Larkin, a psychology graduate student at Stanford University and lead author of the study, published last week in the Journal of Neuroscience.
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INNOVATION ECONOMY: High-tech nod to wanderers and would-be mayors
Highlights from Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog. For the full blog, updated daily, visit http://www.boston.com/business/technology/innoeco/.
Boston’s shadow mayors. Did you realize that John Harvard’s Brew House, the Weston tollbooths, and the Back Bay Filene’s Basement all have mayors? None were popularly elected, but none were tainted by under-the-table campaign contributions, either. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you’re not a Foursquare user yet.
The mobile phone application turns your daily peregrinations into a competition: Every time you go somewhere (your neighborhood Dunkin’ Donuts, or TD Garden), you use the Foursquare app or mobile website to “check in,’’ getting credit for being there. The person who has checked in the most at a particular location becomes the mayor, at least until someone else steals the title.
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