[A press release from Michigan State University; more information is available in TIME’s Healthland blog] Moral dilemma: Would you kill one person to save five? Published: Dec. 01, 2011 EAST LANSING, Mich. — Imagine a runaway boxcar heading toward five people who can’t escape its path. Now imagine you had the power to reroute the boxcar onto different tracks with only one person along that route. Would you do it? That’s the moral dilemma posed by a team of Michigan State University researchers in a first-of-its-kind study published in the research journal Emotion. Research participants were put in a three…

[From Internet Evolution; a condensed report from the book is available here] Book Details Potential of Virtual Reality Written by Michael Mascioni 12/1/2011 As the digital and physical worlds increasingly blend together, new opportunities to improve end-user experiences are emerging. Theorist Joe Pine and management advisor Kim Korn outline an array of hybrid physical/virtual forms that are transforming and enriching the end-user experience in their book Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., San Francisco: 2011). Pine and Korn describe eight different combinations of virtuality and reality, which are illustrated by compelling case study examples.…

[From Creative Boom] The Virtual Hospital Posted by Katy Cowan on Wednesday 30th November 2011. Computer-generated tours of virtual hospitals can help patients with intellectual disabilities overcome fears and to understand treatments they are about to undergo, according to a new study. The research was led by Professor Val Hall, professor of midwifery at the Centre for Health Research, University of Brighton. She was one of four experts who studied the virtual hospital as a means of helping patients and providing medical staff with a toolkit to better assess a patient’s capacity to give consent to treatment. The findings, published…

[From ZDnet’s Tech Broiler blog] Retail in 2021: When clicks have buried bricks Summary: Ten years from now, virtually all shopping will take place at home. By Jason Perlow | November 29, 2011 Edgewater, New Jersey. Mindy Konsumer was in waking sleep when she heard the sound of birds tweeting. They progressively got louder, and louder and louder. She pulled the covers over her head. “Ugh. Why did Josef set it to those horrible birds again instead of my wind chimes?” “Bitch, deactivate the alarm. I’m up.” YES MINDY. GOOD MORNING. IT IS MONDAY, 8:30AM, THE 29TH OF NOVEMBER, 2021.…

[From Transportation Nation] Choose Your Own Rail Adventure By Matt Dellinger | 11/28/2011 “I remember the first time I saw a train go by,” a choked-up grown man says in the video trailer for Railworks’s Train Simulator 2012. He goes on, with a weepy nostalgia that rivals the treacliest Chevy commercial. “My dad took me to the crossing one hot summer evening….. I could see the engineer in his cab. Gotta be the best seat in the world.” Though Amtrak ridership reached a record high, and House Transportation Chairman John Mica has recently warmed to the idea of Amtrak-led high…

[From The New York Times’ Media Decoder blog, where the post includes two videos including the ad and additional images] The Blogger Who Found Jenny Not on the Block By Noam Cohen November 24, 2011 A new ad featuring the pop star Jennifer Lopez behind the wheel of a Fiat 500 as she reflects on her Bronx upbringing may have done the impossible – shock a jaded public well accustomed to fakery in TV advertising. The ad uses a body double for the scenes in the Bronx, which have been carefully spliced with material shot with Ms. Lopez in Los…