////////////////////This old world we're livin' in
Is mighty hard to beat
We get a thorn with every rose
But ain't the roses sweet
//////////////////////FCK IT=
So, in contrast to much of we monk on about in the therapeutic/spiritual process, sometimes it’s best to not examine too much how you’ll feeling; not think too much about what’s coming; not plan your way out of difficult situations; not dwell on what you’ve been through… sometimes it’s best just to keep going, keep swimming. You don’t have to be happy (because, in tough times you’re probably not), you don’t have to be ‘achieving’ anything, self-developing, reaching a higher level or anything, you just have to keep swimming.
Why does this work (in a therapeutic/spiritual context)? Well, you take the sting out of your attachment to all the things that are going on in your life. If you stop worrying about where you’re going, and just concentrate on the fact that you’re simply ‘going’, you’ll feel instantly better. You take the pressure off. You stop trying to control things, and you simply go with the flow. Life, whatever it’s throwing at you is ‘the flow’ and you can be happy to just to ‘go’.
//////////////////////
Saturday 23 August 2008
Tuesday 19 August 2008
CDS 190808-INTUBN DIFFY BBY BGM-SMH
BORN TO BE MILD
//////////sasialit=Why is abbreviated such a long word?
Why does monosyllabic have five syllables?
Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?
Why is a carrot more orange than an orange?
Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii?
Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?
Why are they called apartments, when they're all stuck together?
Why do scientists call it research when looking for something new?
Why do they call it a building? It looks like they're finished. Why
isn't it a built?
Why is it when you transport something by car, it's called a shipment,
but when you transport something by ship, it's called cargo?
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
If price and worth mean the same thing, why priceless and worthless
are opposites?
Is there another word for synonym?
Is it possible to be totally partial? --
///////////////////////////// Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
— Maya Angelou
/////////////////////////////////////Chapter II: Sankhya Yoga
(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)
II.38. Having made pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and
defeat the same, engage thou n battle for the sake of battle; thus
thou shalt not incur sin.
COMMENTARY: This is the Yoga of equanimity or the doctrine of
poise in action. If anyone does any action with the above mental
attitude or balanced state of mind he will not reap the fruits of
his action. Such an action will lead to the purification of his
heart and freedom from birth and death. Oe has to develop such a
balanced state of mind through continuous struggle and vigilant
efforts.
//////////////////////////////////////LEGAL REVENGE
/////////////////////////////////////////SW=
Profound Truth
Posted: 18 Aug 2008 03:23 PM CDT
“Profound truth, so difficult to perceive, difficult to understand, tranquilising and sublime, is not to be gained by mere reasoning and is perceived only by the wise.”
Rejoice
Posted: 17 Aug 2008 03:21 PM CDT
“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”
////////////////////////////////sr=
HomeSkepticism
by Richard Rockley
December, 2002
Skeptics frequently talk about Occam's Razor. They use it to choose between alternative explanations for something, especially where no one alternative has been either proven or disproven. But what is it?
Many people will tell you it says, "Choose the simplest solution". But it doesn't say choose the simplest solution. Opponents of Occam complain that it will not necessarily help you choose the correct solution. But Occam's Razor does not pretend to choose the correct solution. So what is it and what is its point?
Occam's Razor actually says:
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate",
which is translated as
"plurality should not be posited without necessity."
The words are those of the medieval English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349).
The archaic English needs to be interpreted for modern times. What it means is this:
Do not invent unnecessary entities to explain something.
An example
Suppose I have a cat. One night, I leave out a saucer of milk, and in the morning the milk has gone. No one saw who or what drank the milk. Lets say there are two possibilities:
1. The cat drank it
or
2. The milk fairy drank it
Occam tells us to reject option 2. This is because option 2 requires us to invent an unnecessary entity - the milk fairy. It is an invention because we have no proof that the milk fairy exists. And it is unnecessary because there is a plausible explanation that does not require the milk fairy - the cat. (We know he exists.)
Note: we haven't proven that the cat drank the milk. Or disproven the milk fairy option. Strictly speaking, we keep an open mind about both options. But Occam says that if you insist it could be the milk fairy, you have invented an unnecessary entity. And why would you do that?
Note also that strictly speaking, both solutions are equally simple. The cat hypothesis is only simpler in that you haven't had to invent a new, unproven entity. Also note that there are additional options that we could choose if we abandon Occam. For example, it could have been ghosts, or aliens, or the boogieman or Santa Claus. Why choose one of these over the others when there is an equal lack of proof for any of them?
Occam Applied
Occam can be applied to a myriad of supposed paranormal events, including ghosts, psychics, UFOs, people who talk with the dead, reincarnation, the soul, spoon benders, near death and out of body experiences. Usually, the paranormal explanation for these phenomena cannot be disproven, and this is often given as the reason we should consider the paranormal explanation. But Occam says go with the natural explanation for now, until any new evidence challenges it. But if there is a natural explanation and you believe, without proof, that the paranormal one is possible, you are inventing the milk fairy.
//////////sasialit=Why is abbreviated such a long word?
Why does monosyllabic have five syllables?
Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?
Why is a carrot more orange than an orange?
Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii?
Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?
Why are they called apartments, when they're all stuck together?
Why do scientists call it research when looking for something new?
Why do they call it a building? It looks like they're finished. Why
isn't it a built?
Why is it when you transport something by car, it's called a shipment,
but when you transport something by ship, it's called cargo?
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
If price and worth mean the same thing, why priceless and worthless
are opposites?
Is there another word for synonym?
Is it possible to be totally partial? --
///////////////////////////// Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
— Maya Angelou
/////////////////////////////////////Chapter II: Sankhya Yoga
(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)
II.38. Having made pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and
defeat the same, engage thou n battle for the sake of battle; thus
thou shalt not incur sin.
COMMENTARY: This is the Yoga of equanimity or the doctrine of
poise in action. If anyone does any action with the above mental
attitude or balanced state of mind he will not reap the fruits of
his action. Such an action will lead to the purification of his
heart and freedom from birth and death. Oe has to develop such a
balanced state of mind through continuous struggle and vigilant
efforts.
//////////////////////////////////////LEGAL REVENGE
/////////////////////////////////////////SW=
Profound Truth
Posted: 18 Aug 2008 03:23 PM CDT
“Profound truth, so difficult to perceive, difficult to understand, tranquilising and sublime, is not to be gained by mere reasoning and is perceived only by the wise.”
Rejoice
Posted: 17 Aug 2008 03:21 PM CDT
“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.”
////////////////////////////////sr=
HomeSkepticism
by Richard Rockley
December, 2002
Skeptics frequently talk about Occam's Razor. They use it to choose between alternative explanations for something, especially where no one alternative has been either proven or disproven. But what is it?
Many people will tell you it says, "Choose the simplest solution". But it doesn't say choose the simplest solution. Opponents of Occam complain that it will not necessarily help you choose the correct solution. But Occam's Razor does not pretend to choose the correct solution. So what is it and what is its point?
Occam's Razor actually says:
"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate",
which is translated as
"plurality should not be posited without necessity."
The words are those of the medieval English philosopher and Franciscan monk William of Ockham (ca. 1285-1349).
The archaic English needs to be interpreted for modern times. What it means is this:
Do not invent unnecessary entities to explain something.
An example
Suppose I have a cat. One night, I leave out a saucer of milk, and in the morning the milk has gone. No one saw who or what drank the milk. Lets say there are two possibilities:
1. The cat drank it
or
2. The milk fairy drank it
Occam tells us to reject option 2. This is because option 2 requires us to invent an unnecessary entity - the milk fairy. It is an invention because we have no proof that the milk fairy exists. And it is unnecessary because there is a plausible explanation that does not require the milk fairy - the cat. (We know he exists.)
Note: we haven't proven that the cat drank the milk. Or disproven the milk fairy option. Strictly speaking, we keep an open mind about both options. But Occam says that if you insist it could be the milk fairy, you have invented an unnecessary entity. And why would you do that?
Note also that strictly speaking, both solutions are equally simple. The cat hypothesis is only simpler in that you haven't had to invent a new, unproven entity. Also note that there are additional options that we could choose if we abandon Occam. For example, it could have been ghosts, or aliens, or the boogieman or Santa Claus. Why choose one of these over the others when there is an equal lack of proof for any of them?
Occam Applied
Occam can be applied to a myriad of supposed paranormal events, including ghosts, psychics, UFOs, people who talk with the dead, reincarnation, the soul, spoon benders, near death and out of body experiences. Usually, the paranormal explanation for these phenomena cannot be disproven, and this is often given as the reason we should consider the paranormal explanation. But Occam says go with the natural explanation for now, until any new evidence challenges it. But if there is a natural explanation and you believe, without proof, that the paranormal one is possible, you are inventing the milk fairy.
Sunday 17 August 2008
SOCIAL CONSCIENCE?-EVOLN EX=TO CONTINUE LVNG AND BREEDING
/////////////ere is the definition of fruit:
“The term fruit has different meanings depending on context. In botany, a fruit is the ripened ovary—together with seeds—of a flowering plant. In many species, the fruit incorporates the ripened ovary and surrounding tissues. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants disseminate seeds. In cuisine, when discussing fruit as food, the term usually refers to just those plant fruits that are sweet and fleshy, examples of which include plum, apple and orange. However, a great many common vegetables, as well as nuts and grains, are the fruit of the plant species they come from. No one terminology really fits the enormous variety that is found among plant fruits. Botanical terminology for fruits is inexact and will remain so.” (Wikipedia.org)
Are we clear now? Or are you just more confused? Don’t feel bad; many others are confused too. Here is what Science Bob has to say about this question: Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
Answer: “To really figure out if a tomato is a fruit or vegetable, you need to know what makes a fruit a fruit, and a vegetable a vegetable. The big question to ask is, DOES IT HAVE SEEDS?
If the answer is yes, then technically, you have a FRUIT. This, of course, makes your tomato a fruit. It also makes cucumbers, squash, green beans and walnuts all fruits as well. VEGETABLES such as, radishes, celery, carrots, and lettuce do NOT have seeds (that are part of what we eat) and so they are grouped as vegetables.”
By these definitions, a pumpkin is a fruit, botanically speaking. So are squash and zucchini.
Modern society commonly refers to all these fruits as vegetables:
* Pumpkin
* Squash
* Tomato
* Cucumbers
* Green beans
* Capsicum peppers
* Bell peppers
The definition of vegetable:
“Vegetable is a culinary term. Its definition has no scientific value and is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. All parts of herbaceous plants eaten as food by humans, whole or in part, are generally considered vegetables. Mushrooms, though belonging to the biological kingdom, fungi, are also commonly considered vegetables…Since ‘vegetable’ is not a botanical term, there is no contradiction in referring to a plant part as a fruit while also being considered a vegetable. Given this general rule of thumb, vegetables can include leaves (lettuce), stems (asparagus), roots (carrots), flowers (broccoli), bulbs (garlic), seeds (peas and beans) and of course the botanical fruits like cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, and capsicums.” (Wikipedia.org)
//////////////////////////////BEING SELFLESS IN A SELFISH WORLD
/////////////////////////////
“The term fruit has different meanings depending on context. In botany, a fruit is the ripened ovary—together with seeds—of a flowering plant. In many species, the fruit incorporates the ripened ovary and surrounding tissues. Fruits are the means by which flowering plants disseminate seeds. In cuisine, when discussing fruit as food, the term usually refers to just those plant fruits that are sweet and fleshy, examples of which include plum, apple and orange. However, a great many common vegetables, as well as nuts and grains, are the fruit of the plant species they come from. No one terminology really fits the enormous variety that is found among plant fruits. Botanical terminology for fruits is inexact and will remain so.” (Wikipedia.org)
Are we clear now? Or are you just more confused? Don’t feel bad; many others are confused too. Here is what Science Bob has to say about this question: Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?
Answer: “To really figure out if a tomato is a fruit or vegetable, you need to know what makes a fruit a fruit, and a vegetable a vegetable. The big question to ask is, DOES IT HAVE SEEDS?
If the answer is yes, then technically, you have a FRUIT. This, of course, makes your tomato a fruit. It also makes cucumbers, squash, green beans and walnuts all fruits as well. VEGETABLES such as, radishes, celery, carrots, and lettuce do NOT have seeds (that are part of what we eat) and so they are grouped as vegetables.”
By these definitions, a pumpkin is a fruit, botanically speaking. So are squash and zucchini.
Modern society commonly refers to all these fruits as vegetables:
* Pumpkin
* Squash
* Tomato
* Cucumbers
* Green beans
* Capsicum peppers
* Bell peppers
The definition of vegetable:
“Vegetable is a culinary term. Its definition has no scientific value and is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. All parts of herbaceous plants eaten as food by humans, whole or in part, are generally considered vegetables. Mushrooms, though belonging to the biological kingdom, fungi, are also commonly considered vegetables…Since ‘vegetable’ is not a botanical term, there is no contradiction in referring to a plant part as a fruit while also being considered a vegetable. Given this general rule of thumb, vegetables can include leaves (lettuce), stems (asparagus), roots (carrots), flowers (broccoli), bulbs (garlic), seeds (peas and beans) and of course the botanical fruits like cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, and capsicums.” (Wikipedia.org)
//////////////////////////////BEING SELFLESS IN A SELFISH WORLD
/////////////////////////////
CDS 170808-JALADAITYA PHELPS-7 GOLDS
///////////////
The halo of stars that envelops the outer Milky Way galaxy is like a "jumble of pasta" said one researcher, describing criss-crossed patterns of stellar streams revealed in new data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). These stars appear to have been ripped away from the dwarf galaxies that are companions to our own galaxy, creating messy, spaghetti-like streams of stars in the outer edge of the Milky Way. The SEGUE (Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration) of the Sloan Survey is mapping the structure and stellar makeup of the Milky Way Galaxy and has found numerous new small streams of stars mixed and tangled among larger streams that had been mapped out over the last decade. It appears the Milky Way's thievery is creating quite a mess.
/////////////////BURO MANUSH-ASUKH BISHUKH TO HOBEI
////////////////////DAHAM-1997-IMDB
//////////////////Elite" HIV wife may hold secret to AIDS vaccine
Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:02pm BST
Email | Print |
Share
| Single Page | Recommend (5)
[-] Text [+]
Photo
1 of 1Full Size
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A woman who has never shown symptoms of infection with the AIDS virus may hold the secret to defeating the virus, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
Infected at least 10 years ago by her husband, the woman is able somehow to naturally control the deadly and incurable virus -- even though her husband must take cocktails of strong HIV drugs to control his.
She is a so-called "elite suppressor," and studies of her immune cells have begun to offer clues to how her body does it, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said.
"This is the best evidence to date that elite suppressors can have fully pathogenic virus," said Dr. Joel Blankson, who led the study.
"The feeling was initially that they had defective virus," Blankson added in a telephone interview.
But the couple has been monogamous for at least 17 years, Blankson said, and tests show they are infected with the same strain of virus. What is different is the immune system of the wife, who cannot be named for privacy reasons.
"That's a good sign in terms of developing a therapeutic vaccine," Blankson said. Such a vaccine would not prevent infection but might be used to treat patients.
The AIDS virus infects at least 33 million people globally and more than a million in the United States. It has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the early 1980s.
'//////////////////Boys 'grow out of child asthma'
Boys are more likely than girls to grow out of childhood asthma when they hit their teenage years, research shows.
/////////////////////1977: Rock and roll 'king' Presley dies
Elvis Presley, whose singing and style revolutionized popular music in the 1950s, dies after collapsing at his home.
///////////////////////KIN AND COMMUNITY
////////////////////KIN TO COMMUNITY
//////////////////////IND-Inflation climbs to 12.44 per cent
NEW DELHI, Aug. 14: Showing no signs of abating, inflation shot to a 16-year high of 12.44 per cent during the week ended 2 August, on the back of higher food and fuel prices. As per the data released today, prices of most food articles went up, although some items like fruits showed downward trend. The inflation, as measured by the wholesale price index (WPI) stood at 12.01 per cent in the previous week and 4.70 per cent during the corresponding week last year. n SNS
/////////////////100 YEARS AGO TODAY
News Item
STONE-THROWING AT TRAINS
A Boy Sentenced To Be Whipped
Before Babu CD Ghose, Deputy Magistrate of Howrah, on Monday a Bengali lad, named Abinash Chunder Dhur, alias Akhoy Kumar Ghose, aged about 13 years, was charged with throwing a stone at a running train near the distant signal of Sonarpur. The stone, which was, it was alleged, intended for the European Traffic Inspector of the railway, who happened to be travelling in the train at the time, missed its mark and fell on the lines. The accused admitted having thrown a stone, but said that he had aimed the stone at a cow, which was grazing close by at the time. The pleader of the defence prayed that the Court would deal with the lad under the First Offenders Act and release him on his father’s security. It was pointed out by the prosecution that under the Railway Act the lad was above the age where an accused could be dealt with under the First Offenders Act; moreover it would be hardly fair to place a restraint on a father who may or may not have sufficient control over his son so as to serve as a check against such conduct. The Magistrate remarked that it was a serious matter and the nuisance was on the increase of late. This was not a fit case to be dealt with under the First Offenders Act. He accordingly sentenced the boy to a whipping of eight stripes by way of school discipline, and warned his father to be more careful of his son in the future.
//////////////
More than half the bones in your body are located in your hands and feet.
There is enough iron in the human body to make one small nail.
Women blink almost twice as much as men.
A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
Beards are the fastest growing hair. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it could grow to 30 feet over the course of his lifetime.
Every person has a unique tongue print.
Fingernails grow faster than toenails and your middle fingernail is the quickest one to grow. It takes about 150 days to grow out a full length fingernail.
Your brain continues to send out electrical wave signals approximately 37 hours after death.
The nervous system transmits messages to the brain at speeds of 180 miles per hour.
The human nose can remember 50,000 different smells.
The human eye can detect more than 10,000,000 different colors!
Your jawbone is the hardest bone in your body.
When you were born, you had 350 bones in your body, and after childhood 144 of these bones fused together.
Your brain stops growing when you are about 15 years old.
Laughing and coughing put more pressure on the spine than walking or standing.
Your stomach produces a new lining every 3 days in order to avoid digesting itself in its own production of acid.
About every seven years, your body replaces the equivalent of an entirely new skeleton.
The spinal cord is less then two feet in length and is the same diameter as your index finger, yet it contains over 10 billion nerve cells.
Blood type A can receive blood types A & O safely. Blood type B can receive types B & O. Blood type O can receive only O blood but are "universal donors" because O is acceptable to all other blood types. Blood type O is the most common blood type worldwide.
The eye muscle is the fastest reacting muscle of the whole body. It contracts in less than 1/100th of a second.
It takes approximately 200,000 frowns to create one permanent brow line.
Your eyesight is the sharpest in the middle of the day.
/////////////////Scientists discover 356 animal inclusions trapped in 100 million years old opaque amber
last modified 01-04-2008 16:22
Paleontologists from the University of Rennes (France) and the ESRF have found the presence of 356 animal inclusions in completely opaque amber from mid-Cretaceous sites of Charentes (France). The team used the X-rays of the European light source to image two kilogrammes of the fossil tree resin with a technique that allows rapid survey of large amounts of opaque amber. At present this is the only way to discover inclusions in fully opaque amber.
Scientists discover 356 animal inclusions trapped in 100 million years old opaque amber
Opaque amber has always been a challenge for paleontologists. Researchers cannot study it because the naked eye cannot visualize the presence of any fossil inclusion inside. In the Cretaceous sites like those in Charentes, there is up to 80% of opaque amber. It is like trying to find, in complete blindness, something that may or may not be there.
However, the paleontologists Malvina Lak, her colleagues from the University of Rennes and the ESRF paleontologist Paul Tafforeau, together with the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, have applied to opaque amber a synchrotron X-ray imaging technique known as propagation phase contrast microradiography. It sheds light on the interior of this dark amber, which resembles a stone to the human eye. “Researchers have tried to study this kind of amber for many years with little or no success. This is the first time that we can actually discover and study the fossils it contains”, says Paul Tafforeau.
///////////////////PRBLM OF EV TSING/PHYSCL ASSLT/RP
/////////////////// Fifty years later, the Noise just stops.
Everyone on Earth instantly goes insane.
Society crumbles. Crazed and senseless, mankind stops reproducing. One by one, everyone dies. The human race becomes extinct.
It is now very, very quiet.
/////////////Selathirupavar (Tamil): a word used to define a certain type of absence without official leave in face of duty
///////////////......SU=express my anger and denounce things I don't like (religious fanaticism, power hungry politicians, lying leaders, people who don't give a shit about anything) and share the love for environment, activism of all sort, humanity, poetry, respect and my geeky addiction to new technology.
/////////////////SICK SOCIETYS JUST LOOK OWN INTEREST
/////////////////SCIAM=High-Aptitude Minds: The Neurological Roots of Genius
Researchers are finding clues to the basis of brilliance in the brain
By Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic
Within hours of his demise in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was salvaged, sliced into 240 pieces and stored in jars for safekeeping. Since then, researchers have weighed, measured and otherwise inspected these biological specimens of genius in hopes of uncovering clues to Einstein’s spectacular intellect.
Their cerebral explorations are part of a century-long effort to uncover the neural basis of high intelligence or, in children, giftedness. Traditionally, 2 to 5 percent of kids qualify as gifted, with the top 2 percent scoring above 130 on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test. (The statistical average is 100. See the box on the opposite page.) A high IQ increases the probability of success in various academic areas. Children who are good at reading, writing or math also tend to be facile at the other two areas and to grow into adults who are skilled at diverse intellectual tasks [see “Solving the IQ Puzzle,” by James R. Flynn; Scientific American Mind, October/November 2007].
Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger—at least in certain locations. Part of Einstein’s parietal lobe (at the top of the head, behind the ears) was 15 percent wider than the same region was in 35 men of normal cognitive ability, according to a 1999 study by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario. This area is thought to be critical for visual and mathematical thinking. It is also within the constellation of brain regions fingered as important for superior cognition. These neural territories include parts of the parietal and frontal lobes as well as a structure called the anterior cingulate.
But the functional consequences of such enlargement are controversial. In 1883 English anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton dubbed intelligence an inherited feature of an efficiently functioning central nervous system. Since then, neuroscientists have garnered support for this efficiency hypothesis using modern neuroimaging techniques. They found that the brains of brighter people use less energy to solve certain problems than those of people with lower aptitudes do.
In other cases, scientists have observed higher neuronal power consumption in individuals with superior mental capacities. Musical prodigies may also sport an unusually energetic brain [see box on page 67]. That flurry of activity may occur when a task is unusually challenging, some researchers speculate, whereas a gifted mind might be more efficient only when it is pondering a relatively painless puzzle.
Despite the quest to unravel the roots of high IQ, researchers say that people often overestimate the significance of intellectual ability [see “Coaching the Gifted Child,” by Christian Fischer]. Studies show that practice and perseverance contribute more to accomplishment than being smart does.
Size Matters
In humans, brain size correlates, albeit somewhat weakly, with intelligence, at least when researchers control for a person’s sex (male brains are bigger) and age (older brains are smaller). Many modern studies have linked a larger brain, as measured by magnetic resonance imaging, to higher intellect, with total brain volume accounting for about 16 percent of the variance in IQ. But, as Einstein’s brain illustrates, the size of some brain areas may matter for intelligence much more than that of others does.
In 2004 psychologist Richard J. Haier of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues reported evidence to support the notion that discrete brain regions mediate scholarly aptitude. Studying the brains of 47 adults, Haier’s team found an association between the amount of gray matter (tissue containing the cell bodies of neurons) and higher IQ in 10 discrete regions, including three in the frontal lobe and two in the parietal lobe just behind it. Other scientists have also seen more white matter, which is made up of nerve axons (or fibers), in these same regions among people with higher IQs. The results point to a widely distributed—but discrete—neural basis of intelligence.
The neural hubs of general intelligence may change with age. Among the younger adults in Haier’s study—his subjects ranged in age from 18 to 84—IQ correlated with the size of brain regions near a central structure called the cingulate, which participates in various cognitive and emotional tasks. That result jibed with the findings, published a year earlier, of pediatric neurologist Marko Wilke, then at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and his colleagues. In its survey of 146 children ages five to 18 with a range of IQs, the Cincinnati group discovered a strong connection between IQ and gray matter volume in the cingulate but not in any other brain structure the researchers examined.
Scientists have identified other shifting neural patterns that could signal high IQ. In a 2006 study child psychiatrist Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health and his colleagues scanned the brains of 307 children of varying intelligence multiple times to determine the thickness of their cerebral cortex, the brain’s exterior part. They discovered that academic prodigies younger than eight had an unusually thin cerebral cortex, which then thickened rapidly so that by late childhood it was chunkier than that of less clever kids. Consistent with other studies, that pattern was particularly pronounced in the frontal brain regions that govern rational thought processes.
The brain structures responsible for high IQ may vary by sex as well as by age. A recent study by Haier, for example, suggests that men and women achieve similar results on IQ tests with the aid of different brain regions. Thus, more than one type of brain architecture may underlie high aptitude.
Low Effort Required
Meanwhile researchers are debating the functional consequences of these structural findings. Over the years brain scientists have garnered evidence supporting the idea that high intelligence stems from faster information processing in the brain. Underlying such speed, some psychologists argue, is unusually efficient neural circuitry in the brains of gifted individuals.
Experimental psychologist Werner Krause, formerly at the University of Jena in Germany, for example, has proposed that the highly gifted solve puzzles more elegantly than other people do: they rapidly identify the key information in them and the best way to solve them. Such people thereby make optimal use of the brain’s limited working memory, the short-term buffer that holds items just long enough for the mind to process them.
Starting in the late 1980s, Haier and his colleagues have gathered data that buttress this so-called efficiency hypothesis. The researchers used positron-emission tomography, which measures glucose metabolism of cells, to scan the brains of eight young men while they performed a nonverbal abstract reasoning task for half an hour. They found that the better an individual’s performance on the task, the lower the metabolic rate in widespread areas of the brain, supporting the notion that efficient neural processing may underlie brilliance. And in the 1990s the same group observed the flip side of this phenomenon: higher glucose metabolism in the brains of a small group of subjects who had below-average IQs, suggesting that slower minds operate less economically.
More recently, in 2004 psychologist Aljoscha Neubauer of the University of Graz in Austria and his colleagues linked aptitude to diminished cortical activity after learning. The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that detects electrical brain activity at precise time points using an array of electrodes affixed to the scalp, to monitor the brains of 27 individuals while they took two reasoning tests, one of them given before test-related training and the other after it. During the second test, frontal brain regions—many of which are involved in higher-order cognitive skills—were less active in the more intelligent individuals than in the less astute subjects. In fact, the higher a subject’s mental ability, the bigger the dip in cortical activation between the pretraining and posttraining tests, suggesting that the brains of brighter individuals streamline the processing of new information faster than those of their less intelligent counterparts do.
The cerebrums of smart kids may also be more efficient at rest, according to a 2006 study by psychologist Joel Alexander of Western Oregon University and his colleagues. Using EEG, Alexander’s team found that resting eight- to 12-hertz alpha brain waves were significantly more powerful in 30 adolescents of average ability than they were in 30 gifted adolescents, whose alpha-wave signal resembled those of older, college-age students. The results suggest that gifted kids’ brains use relatively little energy while idle and in this respect resemble more developmentally advanced human brains.
Some researchers speculate that greater energy efficiency in the brains of gifted individuals could arise from increased gray matter, which might provide more resources for data processing, lessening the strain on the brain. But others, such as economist Edward Miller, formerly of the University of New Orleans, have proposed that the efficiency boost could also result from thicker myelin, the substance that insulates nerves and ensures rapid conduction of nerve signals. No one knows if the brains of the quick-witted generally contain more myelin, although Einstein’s might have. Scientists probing Einstein’s brain in the 1980s discovered an unusual number of glia, the cells that make up myelin, relative to neurons in one area of his parietal cortex.
Hardworking Minds
And yet gifted brains are not always in a state of relative calm. In some situations, they appear to be more energetic, not less, than those of people of more ordinary intellect. What is more, the energy-gobbling brain areas roughly correspond to those boasting more gray matter, suggesting that the gifted may simply be endowed with more brainpower in this intelligence network.
In a 2003 trial psychologist Jeremy Gray, then at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues scanned the brains of 48 individuals using functional MRI, which detects neural activity by tracking the flow of oxygenated blood in brain tissue, while the subjects completed hard tasks that taxed working memory. The researchers saw higher levels of activity in prefrontal and parietal brain regions in the participants who had received high scores on an intelligence test, as compared with low scorers.
In a 2005 study a team led by neuroscientist Michael O’Boyle of Texas Tech University found a similar brain activity pattern in young male math geniuses. The researchers used fMRI to map the brains of mathematically gifted adolescents while they mentally rotated objects to try to match them to a target item. Compared with adolescent boys of average math ability, the brains of the mathematically talented boys were more metabolically active—and that activity was concentrated in the parietal lobes, the frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate.
A year later biologist Kun Ho Lee of Seoul National University in Korea similarly linked elevated activity in a frontoparietal neural network to superior intellect. Lee and his co-workers measured brain activity in 18 gifted adolescents and 18 less intelligent young people while they performed difficult reasoning tasks. These tasks, once again, excited activity in areas of the frontal and parietal lobes, including the anterior cingulate, and this neural commotion was significantly more intense in the gifted individuals’ brains.
No one is sure why some experiments indicate that a bright brain is a hardworking one, whereas others suggest it is one that can afford to relax. Some, such as Haier—who has found higher brain metabolic rates in more astute individuals in some of his studies but not in others—speculate one reason could relate to the difficulty of the tasks. When a problem is very complex, even a gifted person’s brain has to work to solve it. The brain’s relatively high metabolic rate in this instance might reflect greater engagement with the task. If that task was out of reach for someone of average intellect, that person’s brain might be relatively inactive because of an inability to tackle the problem. And yet a bright individual’s brain might nonetheless solve a less difficult problem efficiently and with little effort as compared with someone who has a lower IQ.
Perfection from Practice
Whatever the neurological roots of genius, being brilliant only increases the probability of success; it does not ensure accomplishment in any endeavor. Even for academic achievement, IQ is not as important as self-discipline and a willingness to work hard.
University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman examined final grades of 164 eighth-grade students, along with their admission to (or rejection from) a prestigious high school. By such measures, the researchers determined that scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ. What is more, they reported in 2005, students with more self-discipline—a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain—were more likely than those lacking this skill to improve their grades during the school year. A high IQ, on the other hand, did not predict a climb in grades.
A 2007 study by Neubauer’s team of 90 adult tournament chess players similarly shows that practice and experience are more important to expertise than general intelligence is, although the latter is related to chess-playing ability. Even Einstein’s spectacular success as a mathematician and a physicist cannot be attributed to intellectual prowess alone. His education, dedication to the problem of relativity, willingness to take risks, and support from family and friends probably helped to push him ahead of any contemporaries with comparable cognitive gifts.
Note: This article was originally published with the title, "High-Aptitude Minds".
//////////////////Facial Frontier
The human face can reveal much about a person-- whether they like it or not
Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Tuesday, August 12, 2008
(See hardcopy for Photo Description)Illustration By Kagan McLeod
Consider the way a human face speaks with silent eloquence. In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes "the most sign-packed surface in the universe." Nothing else we see carries more meaning. Every face displays a pattern of dense emotional responses in the present and an archive of its owner's experience in the past. And each one is both unique and mysterious.
In his new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Yale University Press), Tallis sets out to make his readers into "astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for granted the head that looks at them from the mirror." He begins his examination with the face.
Faces, as Tallis sees them, are like texts, crammed with information. A friend of mine used to quote an old literary cliche, "Her face was a study." In recent times, however, faces have changed, making them harder to read. We are developing a face for our era. Botox is one reason.
Botox relaxes facial muscles and makes possible a smoothness where creases might otherwise appear, revealing the face's age. In return, Botox exacts a harsh payment. The user becomes relatively dull-looking, more like a copy than an original. Will we eventually speak of pre-Botox faces as artifacts in a once-loved but now abandoned style, like the Victorian novel?
Newsreader Standard is a considerably older face produced by our civilization. It's the universal mask, more or less the same from Tokyo to Brussels, through which we receive information on TV. By tradition, newsreaders show no emotion, so many of us every day spend time looking at faces that are by intention flat and generic, far from what we would regard (in private life) as human. Trying for an impassive manner, TV news people evoke an English term-- "po-faced," a shortening of poker-faced.
In ordinary life, what people want when they stare at the faces of others is acknowledgement. We want a sense that we exist. Tallis quotes Hegel's view that humans hunger above all for recognition by other humans. Connection is the key. Knowingly or not, we all yearn for it and may fall to pieces without it.
The Kingdom of Infinite Space celebrates routine biological processes that usually slip below the radar of consciousness. That's typical of Tallis. He habitually searches for reality that may be elusive until the right kind of imagination falls upon it.
He's a medical doctor by profession, a philosopher by inclination. In 2006, at the age of 60, he retired as a professor at the University of Manchester. He wanted more time to work on his books, but it's hard to imagine he will be more productive in his new life than in his old. Over three decades, getting up at 5 a. m. to write for two hours before going to the university, he turned out a longish shelf of books on everything from the inanities of postmodern literary criticism to artificial intelligence.
His subjects are life, death and consciousness, plus whatever else falls in his path. Four years ago, in Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents, he blamed the British government for the erosion of professionalism among doctors, along the way throwing well-aimed rocks at the unquestioning devotees of "alternative medicine," whose fatuous misunderstanding of medicine threatens to corrupt the whole profession. He's a published poet and one of the most incisive essayists in England.
So far as Tallis knows, there's nothing that's uninteresting about the head. After all, a head can sneeze, kiss, laugh, yawn, vomit and cry, sometimes with the owner's permission and sometimes not.
Blushing, for instance, enchants him. Sometimes, unbidden by our consciousness, blood flows to the face, turning it red. Why? Tallis doesn't forget to quote Mark Twain's curt summary, "Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to." As Tallis says, "We blush with embarrassment, with shyness, with uncertainty, with a sense of exposure." Blushing is common in children but peaks in adolescence when social anxiety and self-awareness also peak. It results from undesired social attention and heightened self-consciousness. But it is above all a question of self-betrayal. Here Tallis produces one of the metaphors that lighten his pages: "Blushing is a kind of glass-bottomed boat enabling us to look at the depths upon which our ordinary moments float."
That's one of many instances where a system of reflexes takes charge, as if to remind us that its power dwarfs the intentions of human beings who claim to be in control. A more spectacular case is vomiting.
"There can be few experiences so all-consuming as vomiting," Tallis points out. It begins without our consent and proceeds at its own rate, reminding us again that it has us in its grip. It's experienced as a kind of terror, "a shouted reminder that we are embodied in an organism that has its own agenda."
These are among the involuntary functions that are most awe-inspiring. On a lower level Tallis places yawning ("50% of people will yawn within five minutes of seeing someone else yawn").
He also examines willed behaviour, providing detailed data on kissing and possibly the first analysis ever of harrumphing.
Oxford defines a harrumph as an ostentatious clearing of the throat, expressing disapproval. Tallis says it's close to a suppressed bark, typically triggered by a newspaper item about a fashion or trend the harrumpher deplores. "Harrumphs are particularly associated with the idea of a member of the Establishment, whose overweight body provides the perfect instrument for manufacturing it," complete with jowls that shake while the sound emerges.
Few harrumphers practise this favourite tic in private. Like laughing, it's not often a solitary indulgence. (Tallis says we laugh 30 times more frequently when we are with others than when we are alone.)
The harrumph probably deserves more space than Tallis gives it. Is it dying out? Does it express social attitudes only of the old and cranky? I have heard people fail miserably when trying to produce a satisfactory harrumph. All they can manage is a pathetic snort. Harrumphing is no simple matter. There is a rumour they still teach it in the better private schools.
/////////////////When I speak of home, I speak of a place where-in default of a better-those I love are gathered together;and if that place were a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding." ~ Charles Dickens
//////////////////
The halo of stars that envelops the outer Milky Way galaxy is like a "jumble of pasta" said one researcher, describing criss-crossed patterns of stellar streams revealed in new data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). These stars appear to have been ripped away from the dwarf galaxies that are companions to our own galaxy, creating messy, spaghetti-like streams of stars in the outer edge of the Milky Way. The SEGUE (Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration) of the Sloan Survey is mapping the structure and stellar makeup of the Milky Way Galaxy and has found numerous new small streams of stars mixed and tangled among larger streams that had been mapped out over the last decade. It appears the Milky Way's thievery is creating quite a mess.
/////////////////BURO MANUSH-ASUKH BISHUKH TO HOBEI
////////////////////DAHAM-1997-IMDB
//////////////////Elite" HIV wife may hold secret to AIDS vaccine
Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:02pm BST
Email | Print |
Share
| Single Page | Recommend (5)
[-] Text [+]
Photo
1 of 1Full Size
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A woman who has never shown symptoms of infection with the AIDS virus may hold the secret to defeating the virus, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
Infected at least 10 years ago by her husband, the woman is able somehow to naturally control the deadly and incurable virus -- even though her husband must take cocktails of strong HIV drugs to control his.
She is a so-called "elite suppressor," and studies of her immune cells have begun to offer clues to how her body does it, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said.
"This is the best evidence to date that elite suppressors can have fully pathogenic virus," said Dr. Joel Blankson, who led the study.
"The feeling was initially that they had defective virus," Blankson added in a telephone interview.
But the couple has been monogamous for at least 17 years, Blankson said, and tests show they are infected with the same strain of virus. What is different is the immune system of the wife, who cannot be named for privacy reasons.
"That's a good sign in terms of developing a therapeutic vaccine," Blankson said. Such a vaccine would not prevent infection but might be used to treat patients.
The AIDS virus infects at least 33 million people globally and more than a million in the United States. It has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the early 1980s.
'//////////////////Boys 'grow out of child asthma'
Boys are more likely than girls to grow out of childhood asthma when they hit their teenage years, research shows.
/////////////////////1977: Rock and roll 'king' Presley dies
Elvis Presley, whose singing and style revolutionized popular music in the 1950s, dies after collapsing at his home.
///////////////////////KIN AND COMMUNITY
////////////////////KIN TO COMMUNITY
//////////////////////IND-Inflation climbs to 12.44 per cent
NEW DELHI, Aug. 14: Showing no signs of abating, inflation shot to a 16-year high of 12.44 per cent during the week ended 2 August, on the back of higher food and fuel prices. As per the data released today, prices of most food articles went up, although some items like fruits showed downward trend. The inflation, as measured by the wholesale price index (WPI) stood at 12.01 per cent in the previous week and 4.70 per cent during the corresponding week last year. n SNS
/////////////////100 YEARS AGO TODAY
News Item
STONE-THROWING AT TRAINS
A Boy Sentenced To Be Whipped
Before Babu CD Ghose, Deputy Magistrate of Howrah, on Monday a Bengali lad, named Abinash Chunder Dhur, alias Akhoy Kumar Ghose, aged about 13 years, was charged with throwing a stone at a running train near the distant signal of Sonarpur. The stone, which was, it was alleged, intended for the European Traffic Inspector of the railway, who happened to be travelling in the train at the time, missed its mark and fell on the lines. The accused admitted having thrown a stone, but said that he had aimed the stone at a cow, which was grazing close by at the time. The pleader of the defence prayed that the Court would deal with the lad under the First Offenders Act and release him on his father’s security. It was pointed out by the prosecution that under the Railway Act the lad was above the age where an accused could be dealt with under the First Offenders Act; moreover it would be hardly fair to place a restraint on a father who may or may not have sufficient control over his son so as to serve as a check against such conduct. The Magistrate remarked that it was a serious matter and the nuisance was on the increase of late. This was not a fit case to be dealt with under the First Offenders Act. He accordingly sentenced the boy to a whipping of eight stripes by way of school discipline, and warned his father to be more careful of his son in the future.
//////////////
More than half the bones in your body are located in your hands and feet.
There is enough iron in the human body to make one small nail.
Women blink almost twice as much as men.
A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
An average human drinks about 16,000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
Beards are the fastest growing hair. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it could grow to 30 feet over the course of his lifetime.
Every person has a unique tongue print.
Fingernails grow faster than toenails and your middle fingernail is the quickest one to grow. It takes about 150 days to grow out a full length fingernail.
Your brain continues to send out electrical wave signals approximately 37 hours after death.
The nervous system transmits messages to the brain at speeds of 180 miles per hour.
The human nose can remember 50,000 different smells.
The human eye can detect more than 10,000,000 different colors!
Your jawbone is the hardest bone in your body.
When you were born, you had 350 bones in your body, and after childhood 144 of these bones fused together.
Your brain stops growing when you are about 15 years old.
Laughing and coughing put more pressure on the spine than walking or standing.
Your stomach produces a new lining every 3 days in order to avoid digesting itself in its own production of acid.
About every seven years, your body replaces the equivalent of an entirely new skeleton.
The spinal cord is less then two feet in length and is the same diameter as your index finger, yet it contains over 10 billion nerve cells.
Blood type A can receive blood types A & O safely. Blood type B can receive types B & O. Blood type O can receive only O blood but are "universal donors" because O is acceptable to all other blood types. Blood type O is the most common blood type worldwide.
The eye muscle is the fastest reacting muscle of the whole body. It contracts in less than 1/100th of a second.
It takes approximately 200,000 frowns to create one permanent brow line.
Your eyesight is the sharpest in the middle of the day.
/////////////////Scientists discover 356 animal inclusions trapped in 100 million years old opaque amber
last modified 01-04-2008 16:22
Paleontologists from the University of Rennes (France) and the ESRF have found the presence of 356 animal inclusions in completely opaque amber from mid-Cretaceous sites of Charentes (France). The team used the X-rays of the European light source to image two kilogrammes of the fossil tree resin with a technique that allows rapid survey of large amounts of opaque amber. At present this is the only way to discover inclusions in fully opaque amber.
Scientists discover 356 animal inclusions trapped in 100 million years old opaque amber
Opaque amber has always been a challenge for paleontologists. Researchers cannot study it because the naked eye cannot visualize the presence of any fossil inclusion inside. In the Cretaceous sites like those in Charentes, there is up to 80% of opaque amber. It is like trying to find, in complete blindness, something that may or may not be there.
However, the paleontologists Malvina Lak, her colleagues from the University of Rennes and the ESRF paleontologist Paul Tafforeau, together with the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, have applied to opaque amber a synchrotron X-ray imaging technique known as propagation phase contrast microradiography. It sheds light on the interior of this dark amber, which resembles a stone to the human eye. “Researchers have tried to study this kind of amber for many years with little or no success. This is the first time that we can actually discover and study the fossils it contains”, says Paul Tafforeau.
///////////////////PRBLM OF EV TSING/PHYSCL ASSLT/RP
/////////////////// Fifty years later, the Noise just stops.
Everyone on Earth instantly goes insane.
Society crumbles. Crazed and senseless, mankind stops reproducing. One by one, everyone dies. The human race becomes extinct.
It is now very, very quiet.
/////////////Selathirupavar (Tamil): a word used to define a certain type of absence without official leave in face of duty
///////////////......SU=express my anger and denounce things I don't like (religious fanaticism, power hungry politicians, lying leaders, people who don't give a shit about anything) and share the love for environment, activism of all sort, humanity, poetry, respect and my geeky addiction to new technology.
/////////////////SICK SOCIETYS JUST LOOK OWN INTEREST
/////////////////SCIAM=High-Aptitude Minds: The Neurological Roots of Genius
Researchers are finding clues to the basis of brilliance in the brain
By Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic
Within hours of his demise in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was salvaged, sliced into 240 pieces and stored in jars for safekeeping. Since then, researchers have weighed, measured and otherwise inspected these biological specimens of genius in hopes of uncovering clues to Einstein’s spectacular intellect.
Their cerebral explorations are part of a century-long effort to uncover the neural basis of high intelligence or, in children, giftedness. Traditionally, 2 to 5 percent of kids qualify as gifted, with the top 2 percent scoring above 130 on an intelligence quotient (IQ) test. (The statistical average is 100. See the box on the opposite page.) A high IQ increases the probability of success in various academic areas. Children who are good at reading, writing or math also tend to be facile at the other two areas and to grow into adults who are skilled at diverse intellectual tasks [see “Solving the IQ Puzzle,” by James R. Flynn; Scientific American Mind, October/November 2007].
Most studies show that smarter brains are typically bigger—at least in certain locations. Part of Einstein’s parietal lobe (at the top of the head, behind the ears) was 15 percent wider than the same region was in 35 men of normal cognitive ability, according to a 1999 study by researchers at McMaster University in Ontario. This area is thought to be critical for visual and mathematical thinking. It is also within the constellation of brain regions fingered as important for superior cognition. These neural territories include parts of the parietal and frontal lobes as well as a structure called the anterior cingulate.
But the functional consequences of such enlargement are controversial. In 1883 English anthropologist and polymath Sir Francis Galton dubbed intelligence an inherited feature of an efficiently functioning central nervous system. Since then, neuroscientists have garnered support for this efficiency hypothesis using modern neuroimaging techniques. They found that the brains of brighter people use less energy to solve certain problems than those of people with lower aptitudes do.
In other cases, scientists have observed higher neuronal power consumption in individuals with superior mental capacities. Musical prodigies may also sport an unusually energetic brain [see box on page 67]. That flurry of activity may occur when a task is unusually challenging, some researchers speculate, whereas a gifted mind might be more efficient only when it is pondering a relatively painless puzzle.
Despite the quest to unravel the roots of high IQ, researchers say that people often overestimate the significance of intellectual ability [see “Coaching the Gifted Child,” by Christian Fischer]. Studies show that practice and perseverance contribute more to accomplishment than being smart does.
Size Matters
In humans, brain size correlates, albeit somewhat weakly, with intelligence, at least when researchers control for a person’s sex (male brains are bigger) and age (older brains are smaller). Many modern studies have linked a larger brain, as measured by magnetic resonance imaging, to higher intellect, with total brain volume accounting for about 16 percent of the variance in IQ. But, as Einstein’s brain illustrates, the size of some brain areas may matter for intelligence much more than that of others does.
In 2004 psychologist Richard J. Haier of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues reported evidence to support the notion that discrete brain regions mediate scholarly aptitude. Studying the brains of 47 adults, Haier’s team found an association between the amount of gray matter (tissue containing the cell bodies of neurons) and higher IQ in 10 discrete regions, including three in the frontal lobe and two in the parietal lobe just behind it. Other scientists have also seen more white matter, which is made up of nerve axons (or fibers), in these same regions among people with higher IQs. The results point to a widely distributed—but discrete—neural basis of intelligence.
The neural hubs of general intelligence may change with age. Among the younger adults in Haier’s study—his subjects ranged in age from 18 to 84—IQ correlated with the size of brain regions near a central structure called the cingulate, which participates in various cognitive and emotional tasks. That result jibed with the findings, published a year earlier, of pediatric neurologist Marko Wilke, then at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and his colleagues. In its survey of 146 children ages five to 18 with a range of IQs, the Cincinnati group discovered a strong connection between IQ and gray matter volume in the cingulate but not in any other brain structure the researchers examined.
Scientists have identified other shifting neural patterns that could signal high IQ. In a 2006 study child psychiatrist Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health and his colleagues scanned the brains of 307 children of varying intelligence multiple times to determine the thickness of their cerebral cortex, the brain’s exterior part. They discovered that academic prodigies younger than eight had an unusually thin cerebral cortex, which then thickened rapidly so that by late childhood it was chunkier than that of less clever kids. Consistent with other studies, that pattern was particularly pronounced in the frontal brain regions that govern rational thought processes.
The brain structures responsible for high IQ may vary by sex as well as by age. A recent study by Haier, for example, suggests that men and women achieve similar results on IQ tests with the aid of different brain regions. Thus, more than one type of brain architecture may underlie high aptitude.
Low Effort Required
Meanwhile researchers are debating the functional consequences of these structural findings. Over the years brain scientists have garnered evidence supporting the idea that high intelligence stems from faster information processing in the brain. Underlying such speed, some psychologists argue, is unusually efficient neural circuitry in the brains of gifted individuals.
Experimental psychologist Werner Krause, formerly at the University of Jena in Germany, for example, has proposed that the highly gifted solve puzzles more elegantly than other people do: they rapidly identify the key information in them and the best way to solve them. Such people thereby make optimal use of the brain’s limited working memory, the short-term buffer that holds items just long enough for the mind to process them.
Starting in the late 1980s, Haier and his colleagues have gathered data that buttress this so-called efficiency hypothesis. The researchers used positron-emission tomography, which measures glucose metabolism of cells, to scan the brains of eight young men while they performed a nonverbal abstract reasoning task for half an hour. They found that the better an individual’s performance on the task, the lower the metabolic rate in widespread areas of the brain, supporting the notion that efficient neural processing may underlie brilliance. And in the 1990s the same group observed the flip side of this phenomenon: higher glucose metabolism in the brains of a small group of subjects who had below-average IQs, suggesting that slower minds operate less economically.
More recently, in 2004 psychologist Aljoscha Neubauer of the University of Graz in Austria and his colleagues linked aptitude to diminished cortical activity after learning. The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG), a technique that detects electrical brain activity at precise time points using an array of electrodes affixed to the scalp, to monitor the brains of 27 individuals while they took two reasoning tests, one of them given before test-related training and the other after it. During the second test, frontal brain regions—many of which are involved in higher-order cognitive skills—were less active in the more intelligent individuals than in the less astute subjects. In fact, the higher a subject’s mental ability, the bigger the dip in cortical activation between the pretraining and posttraining tests, suggesting that the brains of brighter individuals streamline the processing of new information faster than those of their less intelligent counterparts do.
The cerebrums of smart kids may also be more efficient at rest, according to a 2006 study by psychologist Joel Alexander of Western Oregon University and his colleagues. Using EEG, Alexander’s team found that resting eight- to 12-hertz alpha brain waves were significantly more powerful in 30 adolescents of average ability than they were in 30 gifted adolescents, whose alpha-wave signal resembled those of older, college-age students. The results suggest that gifted kids’ brains use relatively little energy while idle and in this respect resemble more developmentally advanced human brains.
Some researchers speculate that greater energy efficiency in the brains of gifted individuals could arise from increased gray matter, which might provide more resources for data processing, lessening the strain on the brain. But others, such as economist Edward Miller, formerly of the University of New Orleans, have proposed that the efficiency boost could also result from thicker myelin, the substance that insulates nerves and ensures rapid conduction of nerve signals. No one knows if the brains of the quick-witted generally contain more myelin, although Einstein’s might have. Scientists probing Einstein’s brain in the 1980s discovered an unusual number of glia, the cells that make up myelin, relative to neurons in one area of his parietal cortex.
Hardworking Minds
And yet gifted brains are not always in a state of relative calm. In some situations, they appear to be more energetic, not less, than those of people of more ordinary intellect. What is more, the energy-gobbling brain areas roughly correspond to those boasting more gray matter, suggesting that the gifted may simply be endowed with more brainpower in this intelligence network.
In a 2003 trial psychologist Jeremy Gray, then at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues scanned the brains of 48 individuals using functional MRI, which detects neural activity by tracking the flow of oxygenated blood in brain tissue, while the subjects completed hard tasks that taxed working memory. The researchers saw higher levels of activity in prefrontal and parietal brain regions in the participants who had received high scores on an intelligence test, as compared with low scorers.
In a 2005 study a team led by neuroscientist Michael O’Boyle of Texas Tech University found a similar brain activity pattern in young male math geniuses. The researchers used fMRI to map the brains of mathematically gifted adolescents while they mentally rotated objects to try to match them to a target item. Compared with adolescent boys of average math ability, the brains of the mathematically talented boys were more metabolically active—and that activity was concentrated in the parietal lobes, the frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate.
A year later biologist Kun Ho Lee of Seoul National University in Korea similarly linked elevated activity in a frontoparietal neural network to superior intellect. Lee and his co-workers measured brain activity in 18 gifted adolescents and 18 less intelligent young people while they performed difficult reasoning tasks. These tasks, once again, excited activity in areas of the frontal and parietal lobes, including the anterior cingulate, and this neural commotion was significantly more intense in the gifted individuals’ brains.
No one is sure why some experiments indicate that a bright brain is a hardworking one, whereas others suggest it is one that can afford to relax. Some, such as Haier—who has found higher brain metabolic rates in more astute individuals in some of his studies but not in others—speculate one reason could relate to the difficulty of the tasks. When a problem is very complex, even a gifted person’s brain has to work to solve it. The brain’s relatively high metabolic rate in this instance might reflect greater engagement with the task. If that task was out of reach for someone of average intellect, that person’s brain might be relatively inactive because of an inability to tackle the problem. And yet a bright individual’s brain might nonetheless solve a less difficult problem efficiently and with little effort as compared with someone who has a lower IQ.
Perfection from Practice
Whatever the neurological roots of genius, being brilliant only increases the probability of success; it does not ensure accomplishment in any endeavor. Even for academic achievement, IQ is not as important as self-discipline and a willingness to work hard.
University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman examined final grades of 164 eighth-grade students, along with their admission to (or rejection from) a prestigious high school. By such measures, the researchers determined that scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ. What is more, they reported in 2005, students with more self-discipline—a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain—were more likely than those lacking this skill to improve their grades during the school year. A high IQ, on the other hand, did not predict a climb in grades.
A 2007 study by Neubauer’s team of 90 adult tournament chess players similarly shows that practice and experience are more important to expertise than general intelligence is, although the latter is related to chess-playing ability. Even Einstein’s spectacular success as a mathematician and a physicist cannot be attributed to intellectual prowess alone. His education, dedication to the problem of relativity, willingness to take risks, and support from family and friends probably helped to push him ahead of any contemporaries with comparable cognitive gifts.
Note: This article was originally published with the title, "High-Aptitude Minds".
//////////////////Facial Frontier
The human face can reveal much about a person-- whether they like it or not
Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Tuesday, August 12, 2008
(See hardcopy for Photo Description)Illustration By Kagan McLeod
Consider the way a human face speaks with silent eloquence. In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes "the most sign-packed surface in the universe." Nothing else we see carries more meaning. Every face displays a pattern of dense emotional responses in the present and an archive of its owner's experience in the past. And each one is both unique and mysterious.
In his new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Yale University Press), Tallis sets out to make his readers into "astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for granted the head that looks at them from the mirror." He begins his examination with the face.
Faces, as Tallis sees them, are like texts, crammed with information. A friend of mine used to quote an old literary cliche, "Her face was a study." In recent times, however, faces have changed, making them harder to read. We are developing a face for our era. Botox is one reason.
Botox relaxes facial muscles and makes possible a smoothness where creases might otherwise appear, revealing the face's age. In return, Botox exacts a harsh payment. The user becomes relatively dull-looking, more like a copy than an original. Will we eventually speak of pre-Botox faces as artifacts in a once-loved but now abandoned style, like the Victorian novel?
Newsreader Standard is a considerably older face produced by our civilization. It's the universal mask, more or less the same from Tokyo to Brussels, through which we receive information on TV. By tradition, newsreaders show no emotion, so many of us every day spend time looking at faces that are by intention flat and generic, far from what we would regard (in private life) as human. Trying for an impassive manner, TV news people evoke an English term-- "po-faced," a shortening of poker-faced.
In ordinary life, what people want when they stare at the faces of others is acknowledgement. We want a sense that we exist. Tallis quotes Hegel's view that humans hunger above all for recognition by other humans. Connection is the key. Knowingly or not, we all yearn for it and may fall to pieces without it.
The Kingdom of Infinite Space celebrates routine biological processes that usually slip below the radar of consciousness. That's typical of Tallis. He habitually searches for reality that may be elusive until the right kind of imagination falls upon it.
He's a medical doctor by profession, a philosopher by inclination. In 2006, at the age of 60, he retired as a professor at the University of Manchester. He wanted more time to work on his books, but it's hard to imagine he will be more productive in his new life than in his old. Over three decades, getting up at 5 a. m. to write for two hours before going to the university, he turned out a longish shelf of books on everything from the inanities of postmodern literary criticism to artificial intelligence.
His subjects are life, death and consciousness, plus whatever else falls in his path. Four years ago, in Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents, he blamed the British government for the erosion of professionalism among doctors, along the way throwing well-aimed rocks at the unquestioning devotees of "alternative medicine," whose fatuous misunderstanding of medicine threatens to corrupt the whole profession. He's a published poet and one of the most incisive essayists in England.
So far as Tallis knows, there's nothing that's uninteresting about the head. After all, a head can sneeze, kiss, laugh, yawn, vomit and cry, sometimes with the owner's permission and sometimes not.
Blushing, for instance, enchants him. Sometimes, unbidden by our consciousness, blood flows to the face, turning it red. Why? Tallis doesn't forget to quote Mark Twain's curt summary, "Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to." As Tallis says, "We blush with embarrassment, with shyness, with uncertainty, with a sense of exposure." Blushing is common in children but peaks in adolescence when social anxiety and self-awareness also peak. It results from undesired social attention and heightened self-consciousness. But it is above all a question of self-betrayal. Here Tallis produces one of the metaphors that lighten his pages: "Blushing is a kind of glass-bottomed boat enabling us to look at the depths upon which our ordinary moments float."
That's one of many instances where a system of reflexes takes charge, as if to remind us that its power dwarfs the intentions of human beings who claim to be in control. A more spectacular case is vomiting.
"There can be few experiences so all-consuming as vomiting," Tallis points out. It begins without our consent and proceeds at its own rate, reminding us again that it has us in its grip. It's experienced as a kind of terror, "a shouted reminder that we are embodied in an organism that has its own agenda."
These are among the involuntary functions that are most awe-inspiring. On a lower level Tallis places yawning ("50% of people will yawn within five minutes of seeing someone else yawn").
He also examines willed behaviour, providing detailed data on kissing and possibly the first analysis ever of harrumphing.
Oxford defines a harrumph as an ostentatious clearing of the throat, expressing disapproval. Tallis says it's close to a suppressed bark, typically triggered by a newspaper item about a fashion or trend the harrumpher deplores. "Harrumphs are particularly associated with the idea of a member of the Establishment, whose overweight body provides the perfect instrument for manufacturing it," complete with jowls that shake while the sound emerges.
Few harrumphers practise this favourite tic in private. Like laughing, it's not often a solitary indulgence. (Tallis says we laugh 30 times more frequently when we are with others than when we are alone.)
The harrumph probably deserves more space than Tallis gives it. Is it dying out? Does it express social attitudes only of the old and cranky? I have heard people fail miserably when trying to produce a satisfactory harrumph. All they can manage is a pathetic snort. Harrumphing is no simple matter. There is a rumour they still teach it in the better private schools.
/////////////////When I speak of home, I speak of a place where-in default of a better-those I love are gathered together;and if that place were a gypsy's tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding." ~ Charles Dickens
//////////////////
Monday 11 August 2008
ABHINAV BINDRA-SINGH IS KINNG
///////////////PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS=NR CBNAD STONE
//////////////VASANA TAKES AWAY RESULTS OF UPASANA
//////////////YOGI-IN CONTROL OVER BODY-MIND
///////////////Summer is the mother of the poor.
-- Italian Proverb
No one thinks of Winter when the grass is green.
-- Rudyard Kipling
//////////////////In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
- Ansel Adams
/////////////////Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
— Heraclitus
//////////////////
Horror film gene that makes some scream while others laugh
The secret of why horror films make some people scream in terror while others may simply laugh has been revealed.
By Stephen Adams
Last Updated: 9:41AM BST 11 Aug 2008
Comments 43 | Comment on this article
Previous
1 of 2 Images
Next
Jack Nicholson, portraying 'Jack Torrance' in the movie
Jack Nicholson, portraying 'Jack Torrance' in the movie 'The Shining' directed by Stanley Kubrick Photo: AP
A scene from The Exorcist: : Horror film gene that makes some scream while others laugh
The spinning heads and shaking beds of The Exorcist made some faint, others simply laughed Photo: MPTV
Scientists say different versions of a single gene linked to feelings of anxiety can explain the way in which some people simply cannot abide such movies, while others enjoy the suspense and the gore.
The findings may explain why it is that over the past 35 years people have had wildly different reactions to the classic horror film, The Exorcist.
While many screamed and some even fainted in cinemas at scenes of spinning heads and shaking beds, others simply laughed.
A particular variant of the 'COMT' gene affects a chemical in the brain that is linked to anxiety, they have found.
People who have two copies of one version of the gene are more easily disturbed when viewing unpleasant pictures, the scientists discovered.
That version of the gene weakens the effect of a signalling chemical in the brain that helps control certain emotions.
The scientists found that those carrying two copies of it were significantly more startled by frightening images than others.
By contrast, those who had one copy of the gene and one copy of another version were able to keep their emotions in check far more readily.
The study, published today in the scientific journal Behavioural Neuroscience, also found that those with two copies of the latter gene were also able to keep a lid on their anxiety more easily.
Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany made the discovery after testing 96 women.
Then they showing them three different types of pictures - emotionally "pleasant" ones of smiling babies and cute animals, "neutral" ones of items like electric plugs or hairdryers, and "aversive" ones of weapons or injured victims.
The Exorcist was banned by some councils in Britain upon its release here in 1974, but broke box office records in the US to become the biggest selling horror movie of its day.
Psychologist Christian Montag, one of the University of Bonn researchers, said he thought the gene variant linked to scaring more easily had only recently evolved, as it was not present in other primates like chimpanzees.
He said the propensity to scare more easily could have offered an evolutionary advantage to humans.
While bravery appears to be prized in the animal kingdom, recklessness could have been a disadvantage to humans with their larger mental capacity to go away and figure a problem out.
Mr Montag said: "It was an advantage to be more anxious in a dangerous environment."
However, he said a single gene variation could account for only some of people's anxiety differences, otherwise, up to half the population would be anxious, he said.
"This single gene variation is potentially only one of many factors influencing such a complex trait as anxiety," he said. "Still, to identify the first candidates for genes associated with an anxiety-prone personality is a step in the right direction."
COMT GENE-HORROR PERCEPTN
///////////////
//////////////VASANA TAKES AWAY RESULTS OF UPASANA
//////////////YOGI-IN CONTROL OVER BODY-MIND
///////////////Summer is the mother of the poor.
-- Italian Proverb
No one thinks of Winter when the grass is green.
-- Rudyard Kipling
//////////////////In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
- Ansel Adams
/////////////////Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
— Heraclitus
//////////////////
Horror film gene that makes some scream while others laugh
The secret of why horror films make some people scream in terror while others may simply laugh has been revealed.
By Stephen Adams
Last Updated: 9:41AM BST 11 Aug 2008
Comments 43 | Comment on this article
Previous
1 of 2 Images
Next
Jack Nicholson, portraying 'Jack Torrance' in the movie
Jack Nicholson, portraying 'Jack Torrance' in the movie 'The Shining' directed by Stanley Kubrick Photo: AP
A scene from The Exorcist: : Horror film gene that makes some scream while others laugh
The spinning heads and shaking beds of The Exorcist made some faint, others simply laughed Photo: MPTV
Scientists say different versions of a single gene linked to feelings of anxiety can explain the way in which some people simply cannot abide such movies, while others enjoy the suspense and the gore.
The findings may explain why it is that over the past 35 years people have had wildly different reactions to the classic horror film, The Exorcist.
While many screamed and some even fainted in cinemas at scenes of spinning heads and shaking beds, others simply laughed.
A particular variant of the 'COMT' gene affects a chemical in the brain that is linked to anxiety, they have found.
People who have two copies of one version of the gene are more easily disturbed when viewing unpleasant pictures, the scientists discovered.
That version of the gene weakens the effect of a signalling chemical in the brain that helps control certain emotions.
The scientists found that those carrying two copies of it were significantly more startled by frightening images than others.
By contrast, those who had one copy of the gene and one copy of another version were able to keep their emotions in check far more readily.
The study, published today in the scientific journal Behavioural Neuroscience, also found that those with two copies of the latter gene were also able to keep a lid on their anxiety more easily.
Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany made the discovery after testing 96 women.
Then they showing them three different types of pictures - emotionally "pleasant" ones of smiling babies and cute animals, "neutral" ones of items like electric plugs or hairdryers, and "aversive" ones of weapons or injured victims.
The Exorcist was banned by some councils in Britain upon its release here in 1974, but broke box office records in the US to become the biggest selling horror movie of its day.
Psychologist Christian Montag, one of the University of Bonn researchers, said he thought the gene variant linked to scaring more easily had only recently evolved, as it was not present in other primates like chimpanzees.
He said the propensity to scare more easily could have offered an evolutionary advantage to humans.
While bravery appears to be prized in the animal kingdom, recklessness could have been a disadvantage to humans with their larger mental capacity to go away and figure a problem out.
Mr Montag said: "It was an advantage to be more anxious in a dangerous environment."
However, he said a single gene variation could account for only some of people's anxiety differences, otherwise, up to half the population would be anxious, he said.
"This single gene variation is potentially only one of many factors influencing such a complex trait as anxiety," he said. "Still, to identify the first candidates for genes associated with an anxiety-prone personality is a step in the right direction."
COMT GENE-HORROR PERCEPTN
///////////////
CDS 110808-ABHINAV BINDRA WINS FIRST INDIVDL GOLD
//////////////////TBI ORI FD TO MATR SOON
//////////////////////////////
From Chapter II: Sankhya Yoga
(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)
II.27. For certain is death for the born, and certain is birth for
the dead; therefore, over the inevitable thou shouldst not grieve.
COMMENTARY: Birth is sure to happen for that which is dead; death
is sure to happen for that which is born. Birth and death are
certainly unavoidable. Therefore, you should not grieve over an
inevitable matter.
//////////////////////////
//////////////////////////////
From Chapter II: Sankhya Yoga
(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)
II.27. For certain is death for the born, and certain is birth for
the dead; therefore, over the inevitable thou shouldst not grieve.
COMMENTARY: Birth is sure to happen for that which is dead; death
is sure to happen for that which is born. Birth and death are
certainly unavoidable. Therefore, you should not grieve over an
inevitable matter.
//////////////////////////
Friday 8 August 2008
The butterfly often forgets it was a caterpillar. -- Swedish Proverb
The butterfly often forgets it was a caterpillar.
-- Swedish Proverb
It is a wise child that knows its own father.
//////////////////////
I see trees of green........ red roses too
I see em bloom..... for me and for you
And I think to myself.... what a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue..... clouds of white
Bright blessed days....dark sacred nights
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world.
The colors of a rainbow.....so pretty ..in the sky
Are also on the faces.....of people ..going by
I see friends shaking hands.....sayin.. how do you do
Theyre really sayin......i love you.
I hear babies cry...... I watch them grow
Theyll learn much more.....than Ill never know
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world
(instrumental break)
The colors of a rainbow.....so pretty ..in the sky
Are there on the faces.....of people ..going by
I see friends shaking hands.....sayin.. how do you do
Theyre really sayin...*spoken*(I ....love....you).
I hear babies cry...... I watch them grow
*spoken*(you know their gonna learn
A whole lot more than Ill never know)
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself .......what a wonderful world.
LOUISE ARMSTRONG-ISRAEL Kamakawiwo'ole
IZ LIVES
///////////////////////////That footage of the lion pouncing on the impala was amazing, wasn't it? Poor little thing... One might say that a natural process, driven by blind and mindless selection pressures, horrifying as they may be, might still be preferable to a universe in which such wanton cruelty and suffering are intentionally designed by a conscious creator.
/////////////////////DARWIN RELATED FOSSILS TO EVOLN-LONG DEAD SPECIES OF ANIMALS
//////////////////////BLIND NATURAL SELECTION PRESSURES
////////////////////REALITY OF MOST WILD ANIMALS IS STRUGGLING,SUFFERING AND DTH=NAURES HORRORS-BRUTAL REALITY OF NATR
/////////////////////MALTHUS INFLUENCED DARWIN-STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
///////////////////MOST ANIMALS DIE YOUNG
///////////////////PARENTS WITH HELPFUL VARIATIONS HAVE SIMILAR BABIES WHO SURVIVE
///////////////NS SCULPTS LF FORMS SUITED FOR OWN ECO NICHE
//////////////////PREDATOR-PREY ESCALATION ARMS RACES-EG EVOLN OF CAMOUFLAGE
///////////////HIV RESISTANT SEX WORKERS OF NAIROBI-NS FAVOURS WMN WITH RES TO HIV
///////////////NS IS UNSTOPPABLE FORCE IN BIOLOGY
//////////////////ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NS
/////////////////MARRG OF EVOLN WITH GENETICS
////////////////GENES DO NOT BLEND-INHERITED IN ENTIRETY OR NOT ALL
/////////////////MUTN-RANDOM MISTAKES-HERE NS ACTS
//////////////////GENETIC DIVERSITY OF SPECIES IS A CONTINUUM
/////////////////EVOLN VS RELIGN
/////////////////WE ARE A THREAD IN THE EVOLVED FABRIC OF LF
-- Swedish Proverb
It is a wise child that knows its own father.
//////////////////////
I see trees of green........ red roses too
I see em bloom..... for me and for you
And I think to myself.... what a wonderful world.
I see skies of blue..... clouds of white
Bright blessed days....dark sacred nights
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world.
The colors of a rainbow.....so pretty ..in the sky
Are also on the faces.....of people ..going by
I see friends shaking hands.....sayin.. how do you do
Theyre really sayin......i love you.
I hear babies cry...... I watch them grow
Theyll learn much more.....than Ill never know
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world
(instrumental break)
The colors of a rainbow.....so pretty ..in the sky
Are there on the faces.....of people ..going by
I see friends shaking hands.....sayin.. how do you do
Theyre really sayin...*spoken*(I ....love....you).
I hear babies cry...... I watch them grow
*spoken*(you know their gonna learn
A whole lot more than Ill never know)
And I think to myself .....what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself .......what a wonderful world.
LOUISE ARMSTRONG-ISRAEL Kamakawiwo'ole
IZ LIVES
///////////////////////////That footage of the lion pouncing on the impala was amazing, wasn't it? Poor little thing... One might say that a natural process, driven by blind and mindless selection pressures, horrifying as they may be, might still be preferable to a universe in which such wanton cruelty and suffering are intentionally designed by a conscious creator.
/////////////////////DARWIN RELATED FOSSILS TO EVOLN-LONG DEAD SPECIES OF ANIMALS
//////////////////////BLIND NATURAL SELECTION PRESSURES
////////////////////REALITY OF MOST WILD ANIMALS IS STRUGGLING,SUFFERING AND DTH=NAURES HORRORS-BRUTAL REALITY OF NATR
/////////////////////MALTHUS INFLUENCED DARWIN-STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE
///////////////////MOST ANIMALS DIE YOUNG
///////////////////PARENTS WITH HELPFUL VARIATIONS HAVE SIMILAR BABIES WHO SURVIVE
///////////////NS SCULPTS LF FORMS SUITED FOR OWN ECO NICHE
//////////////////PREDATOR-PREY ESCALATION ARMS RACES-EG EVOLN OF CAMOUFLAGE
///////////////HIV RESISTANT SEX WORKERS OF NAIROBI-NS FAVOURS WMN WITH RES TO HIV
///////////////NS IS UNSTOPPABLE FORCE IN BIOLOGY
//////////////////ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NS
/////////////////MARRG OF EVOLN WITH GENETICS
////////////////GENES DO NOT BLEND-INHERITED IN ENTIRETY OR NOT ALL
/////////////////MUTN-RANDOM MISTAKES-HERE NS ACTS
//////////////////GENETIC DIVERSITY OF SPECIES IS A CONTINUUM
/////////////////EVOLN VS RELIGN
/////////////////WE ARE A THREAD IN THE EVOLVED FABRIC OF LF
CITIUS,ALTIUS,FORTIUS-BEIJING OLYMPICS 2008-204 COUNTRIES
/////////////// Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
— Sam Keen
////////////////
— Sam Keen
////////////////
Tuesday 5 August 2008
EVIL-WICEDNESS OR INEPTITUDE
////////////////OKY DOKEY ARTICHOKEY
/////////////////THAT SEEMS TO BE THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
//////////////////NATR=Is religion good for your health?
Religion arose to protect us from disease, US researchers claim. Philip Ball unpicks the idea.
Philip Ball
Science and religion, anyone? Come now, stifle those yawns. A paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B1 this week claims to offer a fresh perspective, with the startling suggestion that religion is a way to protect us from disease.
The general idea behind this theory — that religion is mainly a social construct — is actually much older than the authors, Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, acknowledge. It harks back to classic works by two of sociology’s founding fathers, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, who, around the start of the twentieth century, offered explanations of how religions around the world have shaped and been shaped by the societies in which they are embedded.
crossFantastically baroque, but does religion carry a health benefit?Daniel BOITEAU / Alamy
This idea has fallen out of fashion, but that may tell us more about our times than about its validity. The increasing focus on individualism in the Western world since Durkheim wrote that “God is society, writ large” is reflected in the current enthusiasm for what has been dubbed neurotheology: attempts to locate religious experience in brain activity and a genetic predisposition for certain mental states. Such studies might ultimately tell us why some people have religious tendencies, but they say very little about why this predisposition gives rise to a relatively small number of institutionalized religions.
Similarly, the militant atheists who gnash their teeth at the sheer irrationality of religious belief will be doomed to do so forever unless they recognize Durkheim’s point that, rather than being some pernicious mental virus propagating through cultures, religion has social capital and thus possible adaptive value2. Durkheim argued that religion once was, and still is in many cultures, the cement of society that maintains order. This cohesive function is as evident today in much of American society as it is in Tehran or Warsaw.
Keep out
But of course there is a flipside. A tightly-knit group tends to exclude outsiders, and this is no less true of religions than of any other club. Fincher and Thornhill now propose a specific reason for why some societies may benefit from religious insularity — it is, they say, a way to avoid disease.
The more a society disperses and mixes with other groups, the more it risks contracting new diseases — in other words, strangers are bad for your health. “There is ample evidence,” Fincher and Thornhill write, “that the psychology of xenophobia and ethnocentrism is importantly related to avoidance and management of infectious disease.”
Fincher and Thornhill have previously shown that the diversity of language within a society, for example, seems to correlate with the diversity of infectious disease3, suggesting that linguistic differences are a manifestation of disease avoidance strategies.
Now they have found that religious diversity is also greater in parts of the world where the risk of catching something nasty from outsiders, who are likely to have different immunity patterns, is higher.
They studied 339 societies from Asia, America, Africa and Australia, and found that people living in areas with a greater diversity of infectious disease (and thus a higher risk of contagion from outsiders) tend to have smaller 'social ranges': on average, they live their lives across smaller areas. And populations with smaller social ranges had more religious diversity.
Fantastically baroque and socially costly
It’s an intriguing observation. But as with all correlation studies, cause and effect are hard to untangle. One could equally argue that avoiding contact with other social groups simply prevents the spread of some cultural traits at the expense of others, and so merely preserves an intrinsic diversity that has a tendency to arise anywhere.
This, indeed, is the basis of some theoretical models for how cultural exchange and transmission occurs4. Where opportunities for interaction are fewer, ‘island cultures’ are more likely to coexist rather than being consumed by a dominant one.
And the theory of Fincher and Thornhill tells us nothing about religion per se, other than its simple function of keeping ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ apart.
In fact, compared with other ‘in-group’ markers such as family names or styles of art and music, religion is a fantastically baroque and socially costly means of separating friend from presumed foe. As ethnic conflicts have long proved, humans are remarkably and fatefully adept at identifying the smallest signs of difference.
What we have here, then, is very far from a theory of how and why religions arise and spread. But it does suggest that there are hidden biological influences on the dynamics of cultural diversification. It is also a useful reminder that religion is not so much a personal belief as, in Durkheim’s words, a ‘social fact’.
/////////////////
/////////////////THAT SEEMS TO BE THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
//////////////////NATR=Is religion good for your health?
Religion arose to protect us from disease, US researchers claim. Philip Ball unpicks the idea.
Philip Ball
Science and religion, anyone? Come now, stifle those yawns. A paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B1 this week claims to offer a fresh perspective, with the startling suggestion that religion is a way to protect us from disease.
The general idea behind this theory — that religion is mainly a social construct — is actually much older than the authors, Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, acknowledge. It harks back to classic works by two of sociology’s founding fathers, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, who, around the start of the twentieth century, offered explanations of how religions around the world have shaped and been shaped by the societies in which they are embedded.
crossFantastically baroque, but does religion carry a health benefit?Daniel BOITEAU / Alamy
This idea has fallen out of fashion, but that may tell us more about our times than about its validity. The increasing focus on individualism in the Western world since Durkheim wrote that “God is society, writ large” is reflected in the current enthusiasm for what has been dubbed neurotheology: attempts to locate religious experience in brain activity and a genetic predisposition for certain mental states. Such studies might ultimately tell us why some people have religious tendencies, but they say very little about why this predisposition gives rise to a relatively small number of institutionalized religions.
Similarly, the militant atheists who gnash their teeth at the sheer irrationality of religious belief will be doomed to do so forever unless they recognize Durkheim’s point that, rather than being some pernicious mental virus propagating through cultures, religion has social capital and thus possible adaptive value2. Durkheim argued that religion once was, and still is in many cultures, the cement of society that maintains order. This cohesive function is as evident today in much of American society as it is in Tehran or Warsaw.
Keep out
But of course there is a flipside. A tightly-knit group tends to exclude outsiders, and this is no less true of religions than of any other club. Fincher and Thornhill now propose a specific reason for why some societies may benefit from religious insularity — it is, they say, a way to avoid disease.
The more a society disperses and mixes with other groups, the more it risks contracting new diseases — in other words, strangers are bad for your health. “There is ample evidence,” Fincher and Thornhill write, “that the psychology of xenophobia and ethnocentrism is importantly related to avoidance and management of infectious disease.”
Fincher and Thornhill have previously shown that the diversity of language within a society, for example, seems to correlate with the diversity of infectious disease3, suggesting that linguistic differences are a manifestation of disease avoidance strategies.
Now they have found that religious diversity is also greater in parts of the world where the risk of catching something nasty from outsiders, who are likely to have different immunity patterns, is higher.
They studied 339 societies from Asia, America, Africa and Australia, and found that people living in areas with a greater diversity of infectious disease (and thus a higher risk of contagion from outsiders) tend to have smaller 'social ranges': on average, they live their lives across smaller areas. And populations with smaller social ranges had more religious diversity.
Fantastically baroque and socially costly
It’s an intriguing observation. But as with all correlation studies, cause and effect are hard to untangle. One could equally argue that avoiding contact with other social groups simply prevents the spread of some cultural traits at the expense of others, and so merely preserves an intrinsic diversity that has a tendency to arise anywhere.
This, indeed, is the basis of some theoretical models for how cultural exchange and transmission occurs4. Where opportunities for interaction are fewer, ‘island cultures’ are more likely to coexist rather than being consumed by a dominant one.
And the theory of Fincher and Thornhill tells us nothing about religion per se, other than its simple function of keeping ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ apart.
In fact, compared with other ‘in-group’ markers such as family names or styles of art and music, religion is a fantastically baroque and socially costly means of separating friend from presumed foe. As ethnic conflicts have long proved, humans are remarkably and fatefully adept at identifying the smallest signs of difference.
What we have here, then, is very far from a theory of how and why religions arise and spread. But it does suggest that there are hidden biological influences on the dynamics of cultural diversification. It is also a useful reminder that religion is not so much a personal belief as, in Durkheim’s words, a ‘social fact’.
/////////////////
CDS 050808
Up, Up and Away ...
Half the world is living with double-digit inflation, as boom gives way to bust.
//////////////////As we snooze, our brain is busily processing the information we have learned during the day.
Sleep makes memories stronger, and it even appears to weed out irrelevant details and background information so that only the important pieces remain.
Our brain also works during slumber to find hidden relations among memories and to solve problems we were working on while awake.
In 1865 Friedrich August Kekulé woke up from a strange dream: he imagined a snake forming a circle and biting its own tail. Like many organic chemists of the time, Kekulé had been working feverishly to describe the true chemical structure of benzene, a problem that continually eluded understanding. But Kekulé’s dream of a snake swallowing its tail, so the story goes, helped him to accurately realize that benzene’s structure formed a ring. This insight paved the way for a new understanding of organic chemistry and earned Kekulé a title of nobility in Germany.
Although most of us have not been ennobled, there is something undeniably familiar about Kekulé’s problem-solving method. Whether deciding to go to a particular college, accept a challenging job offer or propose to a future spouse, “sleeping on it” seems to provide the clarity we need to piece together life’s puzzles. But how does slumber present us with answers?
The latest research suggests that while we are peacefully asleep our brain is busily processing the day’s information. It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying and filing them, so that they will be more useful the next day. A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow us to recall them for use more effectively the next morning. And sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of a memory. When a picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, sleep can save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the unnecessary details fade—perhaps even helping us find the meaning in what we have learned.
Not Merely Resting
If you find this news surprising, you are not alone. Until the mid-1950s, scientists generally assumed that the brain was shut down while we snoozed. Although German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had evidence in 1885 that sleep protects simple memories from decay, for decades researchers attributed the effect to a passive protection against interference. We forget things, they argued, because all the new information coming in pushes out the existing memories. But because there is nothing coming in while we get shut-eye, we simply do not forget as much.
Features
The Hidden Power of Scent
Perspectives
Monkey Brains Hint at Evolutionary Root of Language Processing
Ask the Brains
Can one neuron release more than one neurotransmitter? Why is it comforting to discuss problems with others?
Then, in 1953, the late physiologists Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago discovered the rich variations in brain activity during sleep, and scientists realized they had been missing something important. Aserinsky and Kleitman found that our sleep follows a 90-minute cycle, in and out of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. During REM sleep, our brain waves—the oscillating electromagnetic signals that result from large-scale brain activity—look similar to those produced while we are awake. And in subsequent decades, the late Mircea Steriade of Laval University in Quebec and other neuroscientists discovered that individual collections of neurons were independently firing in between these REM phases, during periods known as slow-wave sleep, when large populations of brain cells fire synchronously in a steady rhythm of one to four beats each second. So it became clear that the sleeping brain was not merely “resting,” either in REM sleep or in slow-wave sleep. Sleep was doing something different. Something active.
Sleep to Remember
The turning point in our understanding of sleep and memory came in 1994 in a groundbreaking study. Neurobiologists Avi Karni, Dov Sagi and their colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel showed that when volunteers got a night of sleep, they improved at a task that involved rapidly discriminating between objects they saw—but only when they had had normal amounts of REM sleep. When the subjects were deprived of REM sleep, the improvement disappeared. The fact that performance actually rose overnight negated the idea of passive protection. Something had to be happening within the sleeping brain that altered the memories formed the day before. But Karni and Sagi described REM sleep as a permissive state—one that could allow changes to happen—rather than a necessary one. They proposed that such unconscious improvements could happen across the day or the night. What was important, they argued, was that improvements could only occur during part of the night, during REM.
////////////////////All too often the difference between success and failure, progress and regress, happiness and depression--and, yes, balance and imbalance--is simply a matter of perspective.
Paul Wilson
Business executive and author
Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.
Samuel Lover (1797-1868)
Novelist and songwriter
/////////////////////////
Half the world is living with double-digit inflation, as boom gives way to bust.
//////////////////As we snooze, our brain is busily processing the information we have learned during the day.
Sleep makes memories stronger, and it even appears to weed out irrelevant details and background information so that only the important pieces remain.
Our brain also works during slumber to find hidden relations among memories and to solve problems we were working on while awake.
In 1865 Friedrich August Kekulé woke up from a strange dream: he imagined a snake forming a circle and biting its own tail. Like many organic chemists of the time, Kekulé had been working feverishly to describe the true chemical structure of benzene, a problem that continually eluded understanding. But Kekulé’s dream of a snake swallowing its tail, so the story goes, helped him to accurately realize that benzene’s structure formed a ring. This insight paved the way for a new understanding of organic chemistry and earned Kekulé a title of nobility in Germany.
Although most of us have not been ennobled, there is something undeniably familiar about Kekulé’s problem-solving method. Whether deciding to go to a particular college, accept a challenging job offer or propose to a future spouse, “sleeping on it” seems to provide the clarity we need to piece together life’s puzzles. But how does slumber present us with answers?
The latest research suggests that while we are peacefully asleep our brain is busily processing the day’s information. It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying and filing them, so that they will be more useful the next day. A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow us to recall them for use more effectively the next morning. And sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of a memory. When a picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, sleep can save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the unnecessary details fade—perhaps even helping us find the meaning in what we have learned.
Not Merely Resting
If you find this news surprising, you are not alone. Until the mid-1950s, scientists generally assumed that the brain was shut down while we snoozed. Although German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had evidence in 1885 that sleep protects simple memories from decay, for decades researchers attributed the effect to a passive protection against interference. We forget things, they argued, because all the new information coming in pushes out the existing memories. But because there is nothing coming in while we get shut-eye, we simply do not forget as much.
Features
The Hidden Power of Scent
Perspectives
Monkey Brains Hint at Evolutionary Root of Language Processing
Ask the Brains
Can one neuron release more than one neurotransmitter? Why is it comforting to discuss problems with others?
Then, in 1953, the late physiologists Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman of the University of Chicago discovered the rich variations in brain activity during sleep, and scientists realized they had been missing something important. Aserinsky and Kleitman found that our sleep follows a 90-minute cycle, in and out of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. During REM sleep, our brain waves—the oscillating electromagnetic signals that result from large-scale brain activity—look similar to those produced while we are awake. And in subsequent decades, the late Mircea Steriade of Laval University in Quebec and other neuroscientists discovered that individual collections of neurons were independently firing in between these REM phases, during periods known as slow-wave sleep, when large populations of brain cells fire synchronously in a steady rhythm of one to four beats each second. So it became clear that the sleeping brain was not merely “resting,” either in REM sleep or in slow-wave sleep. Sleep was doing something different. Something active.
Sleep to Remember
The turning point in our understanding of sleep and memory came in 1994 in a groundbreaking study. Neurobiologists Avi Karni, Dov Sagi and their colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel showed that when volunteers got a night of sleep, they improved at a task that involved rapidly discriminating between objects they saw—but only when they had had normal amounts of REM sleep. When the subjects were deprived of REM sleep, the improvement disappeared. The fact that performance actually rose overnight negated the idea of passive protection. Something had to be happening within the sleeping brain that altered the memories formed the day before. But Karni and Sagi described REM sleep as a permissive state—one that could allow changes to happen—rather than a necessary one. They proposed that such unconscious improvements could happen across the day or the night. What was important, they argued, was that improvements could only occur during part of the night, during REM.
////////////////////All too often the difference between success and failure, progress and regress, happiness and depression--and, yes, balance and imbalance--is simply a matter of perspective.
Paul Wilson
Business executive and author
Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.
Samuel Lover (1797-1868)
Novelist and songwriter
/////////////////////////
Saturday 2 August 2008
THE YELLOW PAINT-RL STEVENSON
/////////// ...........thought the end was very fitting. It just goes to show that nothing, not even a magic yellow paint, can better you if you put forth no effort to be good in the first place. the story was nicely written and the moral was very easy to understand.
////////////////////
////////////////////
FORESHADOWING
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which an author drops subtle hints about plot developments to come later in the story. An example of foreshadowing might be when a character displays a gun or knife early in the story. Merely the appearance of a deadly weapon, even though it is used for an innocuous purpose — such as being cleaned or whittling wood — suggests terrible consequences later on (also known as Chekhov's gun).
//////////////////////
The low cost laptop revolution
A luxury no longer, Chris Long, looks at the drive towards low cost laptops.
OLPC
The One Laptop Per Child project was the catalyst for a revolution
In the old days, you would buy a desktop computer to do your work on and if you had a lot of money, maybe a laptop too to take travelling with, pure luxury.
Today the desktop market is declining and everyone is buying notebooks.
And while juggernauts like the traditional notebook cost a similar amount to an equivalent desktop, you would pay a hefty premium for anything smaller.
Well now it is think small, think cheap, think very cheap.
Until recently laptops have been marketed as high value almost designer items, where stylish people use them in interesting places, maybe with an expensive coffee.
At the other end of the spectrum the mobile market has shown that there is a desire for very portable data capture or web surfing devices.
We didn't anticipate such a big response from the market, from the customers
Emily Lee, Asus
It has been a while coming though, but now the technology planets have aligned we have found ourselves in a cheap computer revolution where we have small notebooks selling for as little as £100.
Perhaps the biggest winner in this area has been Asus's Eee PC which stumbled into a massive success with its extraordinarily cheap £250 notebook.
$100 laptop
Emily Lee of Asus, explained: "We didn't anticipate such a big response from the market, from the customers.
"It really hit a gap."
The catalyst for this revolution has been the One Laptop Per Child project or OLPC. It has been dubbed the $100 laptop, despite costing nearly twice that.
Gaynor Dewit of VIA Technologies told Click: "The OLPC had several effects, in terms of pricepoint, it slashed the market open for that type of device.
"It also had people talking about the emerging markets but actually in reality in the western world, what it talked about was cheaper PCs.
"The whole concept, whilst $100 was not feasible, certainly blew the market open and started people talking about this and really it was one of the catalysts for the whole Eee PC platform style thing to take off."
Laptop
Laptops used to only be at the high-end of the market
Although others suggest it is not quite such a direct line between the easy PC and the OLPC
Rupert Goodwins, editor of ZDNet said: "It was a very, very bold statement which unfortunately hasn't come to pass as predicted but it did make a lot of people go back and look at the education market and they thought 'well, perhaps there is something here, we can't hit $100 but we'll try and we'll make it say $300 or $200', and all the arguments for there being computers in classrooms are true even in countries that are relatively well off.
Cheap boast
"So that was where the Asus came for the education market that wasn't being addressed properly, the OLPC demonstrated that.
"The Asus Eee came from a different engineering idea, marketwise it was very similar."
Another early player in the low cost market was Intel with its Classmate PC also aimed at developing communities, and this is one of the few times you will see a big company executive boasting about how cheap their product is.
The keyboard is liquid-proof, you can spill the milk on it.
John E Davies, Intel
John E Davies of Intel, explained: "We have a smaller screen, we run less memory, we get the costs out of the system any way we can.
"It also needs to be rugged, kids will drop these on the floor, they will break and so it is all solid state parts, it's flash, there's no hard disc there.
"The keyboard is liquid-proof, you can spill the milk on it, it will survive that, it will survive the backpack test."
New market
There are lots more devices on the way - from many other manufactures as they jump on the low cost bandwagon. Perhaps most notably the Elonex One which is being sold in the UK for £99.
True it is a low powered device with a seven inch (17.5cm) detachable screen that runs Linux, but it is easily powerful enough surf the net while sipping an expensive coffee.
Asus are talking about selling 5 million Eee PCs by the end of the year, which is enough to kick start a market.
Ultimately then, it would seem for these low costs devices to be a real success they have to be produced for everyone, not simply developed as hybrid devices to bring computers to the third world.
///////////////////The protagonist or main character is the central figure of a story. It is not necessarily clear what being this central figure exactly entails. The terms protagonist, main character and hero are variously (and rarely well) defined and depending on the source may denote different concepts. The word "protagonist" derives from the Greek πρωταγωνιστής (protagonistes), "one who plays the first part, chief actor"[1][2].
Basically, the term protagonist is defined to be either always synonymous with the term main character, or it is defined as a different concept, in which case a single character still may (and usually will) serve the function of both the protagonist and main character, or the functions may be split.
////////////////////OF MICE AND MEN=Two migrant field workers in California during the Great Depression – George Milton, an intelligent and cynical man; and Lennie Small, an ironically named man of large stature and immense strength but limited mental abilities – come to a ranch near Soledad southeast of Salinas, California to "work up a stake". They hope to one day attain their shared dream of settling down on their own piece of land. Lennie's part of the dream, which he never tires of hearing George describe, is merely to tend to (and touch) soft rabbits on the farm. George protects Lennie at the beginning by telling him that if Lennie gets into trouble George won't let him "tend them rabbits"; they are fleeing from their previous employment in Weed where they were run out of town after Lennie's love of stroking soft things resulted in an accusation of attempted rape when he touched a young woman's dress. In a textbook example of foreshadowing, Lennie kills his pet mouse, and a puppy, by stroking them too roughly.
At the ranch, the dream appears to move closer to reality. Candy, the aged, one-handed ranch-hand, even offers to pitch in with Lennie and George so they can buy the farm by the end of the month. The dream crashes when Lennie accidentally kills the young and attractive wife of Curley, the ranch owner's son, while trying to stroke her hair. A lynch mob led by Curley gathers. George, realizing he is doomed to a life of loneliness and despair like the rest of the migrant workers, and wanting to spare Lennie a painful death at the hands of the vengeful and violent Curley, shoots Lennie in the back of the head before the mob can find him after they had recited their dreams of owning their own land.[1][2][3]
//////////////////////
//////////////////////
The low cost laptop revolution
A luxury no longer, Chris Long, looks at the drive towards low cost laptops.
OLPC
The One Laptop Per Child project was the catalyst for a revolution
In the old days, you would buy a desktop computer to do your work on and if you had a lot of money, maybe a laptop too to take travelling with, pure luxury.
Today the desktop market is declining and everyone is buying notebooks.
And while juggernauts like the traditional notebook cost a similar amount to an equivalent desktop, you would pay a hefty premium for anything smaller.
Well now it is think small, think cheap, think very cheap.
Until recently laptops have been marketed as high value almost designer items, where stylish people use them in interesting places, maybe with an expensive coffee.
At the other end of the spectrum the mobile market has shown that there is a desire for very portable data capture or web surfing devices.
We didn't anticipate such a big response from the market, from the customers
Emily Lee, Asus
It has been a while coming though, but now the technology planets have aligned we have found ourselves in a cheap computer revolution where we have small notebooks selling for as little as £100.
Perhaps the biggest winner in this area has been Asus's Eee PC which stumbled into a massive success with its extraordinarily cheap £250 notebook.
$100 laptop
Emily Lee of Asus, explained: "We didn't anticipate such a big response from the market, from the customers.
"It really hit a gap."
The catalyst for this revolution has been the One Laptop Per Child project or OLPC. It has been dubbed the $100 laptop, despite costing nearly twice that.
Gaynor Dewit of VIA Technologies told Click: "The OLPC had several effects, in terms of pricepoint, it slashed the market open for that type of device.
"It also had people talking about the emerging markets but actually in reality in the western world, what it talked about was cheaper PCs.
"The whole concept, whilst $100 was not feasible, certainly blew the market open and started people talking about this and really it was one of the catalysts for the whole Eee PC platform style thing to take off."
Laptop
Laptops used to only be at the high-end of the market
Although others suggest it is not quite such a direct line between the easy PC and the OLPC
Rupert Goodwins, editor of ZDNet said: "It was a very, very bold statement which unfortunately hasn't come to pass as predicted but it did make a lot of people go back and look at the education market and they thought 'well, perhaps there is something here, we can't hit $100 but we'll try and we'll make it say $300 or $200', and all the arguments for there being computers in classrooms are true even in countries that are relatively well off.
Cheap boast
"So that was where the Asus came for the education market that wasn't being addressed properly, the OLPC demonstrated that.
"The Asus Eee came from a different engineering idea, marketwise it was very similar."
Another early player in the low cost market was Intel with its Classmate PC also aimed at developing communities, and this is one of the few times you will see a big company executive boasting about how cheap their product is.
The keyboard is liquid-proof, you can spill the milk on it.
John E Davies, Intel
John E Davies of Intel, explained: "We have a smaller screen, we run less memory, we get the costs out of the system any way we can.
"It also needs to be rugged, kids will drop these on the floor, they will break and so it is all solid state parts, it's flash, there's no hard disc there.
"The keyboard is liquid-proof, you can spill the milk on it, it will survive that, it will survive the backpack test."
New market
There are lots more devices on the way - from many other manufactures as they jump on the low cost bandwagon. Perhaps most notably the Elonex One which is being sold in the UK for £99.
True it is a low powered device with a seven inch (17.5cm) detachable screen that runs Linux, but it is easily powerful enough surf the net while sipping an expensive coffee.
Asus are talking about selling 5 million Eee PCs by the end of the year, which is enough to kick start a market.
Ultimately then, it would seem for these low costs devices to be a real success they have to be produced for everyone, not simply developed as hybrid devices to bring computers to the third world.
///////////////////The protagonist or main character is the central figure of a story. It is not necessarily clear what being this central figure exactly entails. The terms protagonist, main character and hero are variously (and rarely well) defined and depending on the source may denote different concepts. The word "protagonist" derives from the Greek πρωταγωνιστής (protagonistes), "one who plays the first part, chief actor"[1][2].
Basically, the term protagonist is defined to be either always synonymous with the term main character, or it is defined as a different concept, in which case a single character still may (and usually will) serve the function of both the protagonist and main character, or the functions may be split.
////////////////////OF MICE AND MEN=Two migrant field workers in California during the Great Depression – George Milton, an intelligent and cynical man; and Lennie Small, an ironically named man of large stature and immense strength but limited mental abilities – come to a ranch near Soledad southeast of Salinas, California to "work up a stake". They hope to one day attain their shared dream of settling down on their own piece of land. Lennie's part of the dream, which he never tires of hearing George describe, is merely to tend to (and touch) soft rabbits on the farm. George protects Lennie at the beginning by telling him that if Lennie gets into trouble George won't let him "tend them rabbits"; they are fleeing from their previous employment in Weed where they were run out of town after Lennie's love of stroking soft things resulted in an accusation of attempted rape when he touched a young woman's dress. In a textbook example of foreshadowing, Lennie kills his pet mouse, and a puppy, by stroking them too roughly.
At the ranch, the dream appears to move closer to reality. Candy, the aged, one-handed ranch-hand, even offers to pitch in with Lennie and George so they can buy the farm by the end of the month. The dream crashes when Lennie accidentally kills the young and attractive wife of Curley, the ranch owner's son, while trying to stroke her hair. A lynch mob led by Curley gathers. George, realizing he is doomed to a life of loneliness and despair like the rest of the migrant workers, and wanting to spare Lennie a painful death at the hands of the vengeful and violent Curley, shoots Lennie in the back of the head before the mob can find him after they had recited their dreams of owning their own land.[1][2][3]
//////////////////////
CDS 020808-HYPOTHALAMIC HAMARTOMA-LAUGHING TUMOUR
////////////////SILENCE OF THE BEES-CCD-NO SUBSTITUTE FOR POLLINATION-IAPV=ISRAEL ACUTE PARLS VIRUS
///////////////////FIRST BENGALI MRCPS-DWARKANATH BOSE,BHOLANATH BOSE,BASANTA KR BOSE,KADAMBINI GANGULY,JAMINI SEN
/////////////////////LAST YRS ARE CRAP YRS ANYWAY
//////////////////////RAFOD-AOD-MMBAI BLSTS 1993
///////////////////////Words on Tao
Tao is the way without a way;
It is the path with no tracks.
You start walking the way of Tao when you erase anything - good or bad - you learned about Tao.
*
Tao is pure intuition.
*
Close your eyes and you'll see the Way (Tao).
*
Nobody knows the Tao as it is not an open book!
*
Stop doing and achieve the Tao.
//////////////////////Chapter II: Sankhya Yoga
(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)
II.17. Know That to be indestructible, by Which all this is
pervaded. None can cause the dstruction of That, the Imperishable.
COMMENTARY: Brahman or Atman pervades all the objects like ether.
Even if the pot is broken, the ether that is within and without
the pot cannot be destroyed. Even so, if the bodies and all other
objects perish, Brahman or the Self that pervades them cannot
perish. It is the living Truth, 'Sat'.
Brahman has no parts. There cannot be either increase or
diminution in Brahman. People are ruined by loss of wealth. But
Brahman does not suffer any loss in that way. It is
inexhaustible. Therefore, note can bring about the disappearance
or destruction of the Self. It always exists. It is always all-
full and self contained. It is Existence Absolute. It is immutable.
PANGON
///////////////////Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Posted: 31 Jul 2008 09:00 PM CDT
~ Ambrose Redmoon
//////////////////////GEORGE CARLIN-1937-2008-COMEDIAN USING MAX F WORD
/////////////////////Are grunting respirations a sign of serious bacterial infection in children?
Bilavsky E, Shouval DS, Yarden-Bilavsky H, Ashkenazi S, Amir J.
Department of Pediatrics C, Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel, Petah Tiqva, and Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Aim: To assess the significance of grunting respirations in children and their potential association with serious bacterial infections, and to identify characteristics unique to this patient group. Patients and Methods: A prospective case-control design was used. Data were collected on all children who were hospitalized with grunting respirations in our department of paediatrics over a 13-month period. The enrolled patients were divided into three groups: previously healthy children aged 3 months or less, previously healthy children aged more than 3 months and children with chronic illness at any age. The findings were compared to matched controls hospitalized for similar symptoms but without grunting respirations. Results: Grunting respirations were documented in 149 of the 3334 admissions (4.5%) during the period of study. The incidence was higher in children aged 3 months or less (7.5%) and lower in children older than 3 months (3.9%). Fever and respiratory symptoms were common (83.9% and 65.1%, respectively). Heart rate was the only vital sign that was significantly different between the study and control groups. Serious bacterial infection occurred more frequently in the study group (31.5% vs. 14.8%, p < 0.001, OR 2.14, 95% CI 1.36-3.36). Comparisons between the groups showed that grunting respirations were a sign of serious bacterial infection in previously healthy children older than 3 months (p = 0.007, OR 1.95, 95% CI 1.21-3.13) and in children with a chronic disease of any age (p = 0.033, OR 7.0, 95% CI 1.0-49.7 respectively), but not in previously healthy children younger than 3 months (p = 1). Conclusion: The incidence and importance of grunting respirations in hospitalized children depend on patient's age and previous medical status. A finding of grunting respirations in a previously healthy child aged over 3 months or in a chronically ill child should alert the physician to seek further evidence of bacterial infection, especially pneumonia.
ALSO MYOCARDITIS
///////////////////////Study identifies mechanism linking stress to physical illness, aging
By
Elaine Schmidt
| 7/15/2008
Key to early aging?
FINDINGS:
Every cell contains a tiny clock called a telomere, which shortens each time the cell divides. Short telomeres are linked to a range of human diseases, including HIV, osteoporosis, heart disease and aging. Previous studies have shown that an enzyme within the cell, called telomerase, keeps immune cells young by preserving their telomere length and ability to continue dividing. UCLA scientists found that the stress hormone cortisol suppresses immune cells' ability to activate their telomerase. This may explain why the cells of persons under chronic stress have shorter telomeres.
"When the body is under stress, it boosts production of cortisol to support a 'fight or flight' response," said study author Rita Effros. "If the hormone remains elevated in the bloodstream for long periods of time, though, it wears down the immune system. We are testing therapeutic ways of enhancing telomerase levels to help the immune system ward off cortisol's effect. If we're successful, one day a pill may exist to strengthen the immune system's ability to weather chronic emotional stress."
/////////////////////
Tsunami-Causing Earthquake Trimmed Bulge off Earth's Middle
By Michael Schirber, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 12 January 2005 06:21 am ET
Buzz up!
Add to delicious del.icio.us
Digg It! Digg It!
Save to Newsvine Newsvine
Add to reddit reddit
0 Comments | 1 Recommend
Tsunami Strikes Sri Lanka: On December 26, 2004, tsunamis swept across the Indian ocean, spawned by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Aside from Indonesia, the island nation of Sri Lanka likely suffered the most casualties, with the death toll reported at 21,715 on December 29th. DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird satellite captured an image of the devastation around Kalutara, Sri Lanka (top), on December 26, 2004, at 10:20 a.m. local time—about an hour after the first in the series of waves hit. A Quickbird image taken on January 1, 2004 (lower), shows the normal ocean conditions. Water is flowing out of the inundated area and back into the sea, creating turbulence offshore. Some near-shore streets and yards are covered with muddy water. It is possible that the image was acquired in a “trough†between wave crests. Imagery of nearby beaches shows that the edge of the ocean had receded about 150 meters from the shoreline. Click on image to enlarge. Credit: Images Copyright DigitalGlobe
Full Size
Previous Image Next Image
1 of 2
Tsunami Strikes Sri Lanka: On December 26, 2004, tsunamis swept across the Indian ocean, spawned by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Aside from Indonesia, the island nation of Sri Lanka likely suffered the most casualties, with the death toll reported at 21,715 on December 29th. DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird satellite captured an image of the devastation around Kalutara, Sri Lanka (top), on December 26, 2004, at 10:20 a.m. local time—about an hour after the first in the series of waves hit. A Quickbird image taken on January 1, 2004 (lower), shows the normal ocean conditions. Water is flowing out of the inundated area and back into the sea, creating turbulence offshore. Some near-shore streets and yards are covered with muddy water. It is possible that the image was acquired in a “trough†between wave crests. Imagery of nearby beaches shows that the edge of the ocean had receded about 150 meters from the shoreline. Click on image to enlarge. Credit: Images Copyright DigitalGlobe
Launched in 1992, the ocean-monitoring Topex/Poseidon satellite mission is a joint effort between NASA and the French Space Agency that monitors global ocean circulation and climate interactions between the sea and atmosphere.
The Dec. 26 earthquake off the coast of Indonesia was the fourth largest in one hundred years. Scientists have determined that this major shift in the Earth's plates changed the planet's shape - enough to shorten the day by fractions of a second and to shift the North Pole by an inch.
The general shape of the Earth is slightly oblate - that is, it is not a perfect sphere but is slightly squished down, making it about 26 miles wider at the equator than between the poles. This shape, however, is not rigid, with climate being a major distorting force.
//////////////////////
///////////////////FIRST BENGALI MRCPS-DWARKANATH BOSE,BHOLANATH BOSE,BASANTA KR BOSE,KADAMBINI GANGULY,JAMINI SEN
/////////////////////LAST YRS ARE CRAP YRS ANYWAY
//////////////////////RAFOD-AOD-MMBAI BLSTS 1993
///////////////////////Words on Tao
Tao is the way without a way;
It is the path with no tracks.
You start walking the way of Tao when you erase anything - good or bad - you learned about Tao.
*
Tao is pure intuition.
*
Close your eyes and you'll see the Way (Tao).
*
Nobody knows the Tao as it is not an open book!
*
Stop doing and achieve the Tao.
//////////////////////Chapter II: Sankhya Yoga
(Krishna speaking to Arjuna)
II.17. Know That to be indestructible, by Which all this is
pervaded. None can cause the dstruction of That, the Imperishable.
COMMENTARY: Brahman or Atman pervades all the objects like ether.
Even if the pot is broken, the ether that is within and without
the pot cannot be destroyed. Even so, if the bodies and all other
objects perish, Brahman or the Self that pervades them cannot
perish. It is the living Truth, 'Sat'.
Brahman has no parts. There cannot be either increase or
diminution in Brahman. People are ruined by loss of wealth. But
Brahman does not suffer any loss in that way. It is
inexhaustible. Therefore, note can bring about the disappearance
or destruction of the Self. It always exists. It is always all-
full and self contained. It is Existence Absolute. It is immutable.
PANGON
///////////////////Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Posted: 31 Jul 2008 09:00 PM CDT
~ Ambrose Redmoon
//////////////////////GEORGE CARLIN-1937-2008-COMEDIAN USING MAX F WORD
/////////////////////Are grunting respirations a sign of serious bacterial infection in children?
Bilavsky E, Shouval DS, Yarden-Bilavsky H, Ashkenazi S, Amir J.
Department of Pediatrics C, Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel, Petah Tiqva, and Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Aim: To assess the significance of grunting respirations in children and their potential association with serious bacterial infections, and to identify characteristics unique to this patient group. Patients and Methods: A prospective case-control design was used. Data were collected on all children who were hospitalized with grunting respirations in our department of paediatrics over a 13-month period. The enrolled patients were divided into three groups: previously healthy children aged 3 months or less, previously healthy children aged more than 3 months and children with chronic illness at any age. The findings were compared to matched controls hospitalized for similar symptoms but without grunting respirations. Results: Grunting respirations were documented in 149 of the 3334 admissions (4.5%) during the period of study. The incidence was higher in children aged 3 months or less (7.5%) and lower in children older than 3 months (3.9%). Fever and respiratory symptoms were common (83.9% and 65.1%, respectively). Heart rate was the only vital sign that was significantly different between the study and control groups. Serious bacterial infection occurred more frequently in the study group (31.5% vs. 14.8%, p < 0.001, OR 2.14, 95% CI 1.36-3.36). Comparisons between the groups showed that grunting respirations were a sign of serious bacterial infection in previously healthy children older than 3 months (p = 0.007, OR 1.95, 95% CI 1.21-3.13) and in children with a chronic disease of any age (p = 0.033, OR 7.0, 95% CI 1.0-49.7 respectively), but not in previously healthy children younger than 3 months (p = 1). Conclusion: The incidence and importance of grunting respirations in hospitalized children depend on patient's age and previous medical status. A finding of grunting respirations in a previously healthy child aged over 3 months or in a chronically ill child should alert the physician to seek further evidence of bacterial infection, especially pneumonia.
ALSO MYOCARDITIS
///////////////////////Study identifies mechanism linking stress to physical illness, aging
By
Elaine Schmidt
| 7/15/2008
Key to early aging?
FINDINGS:
Every cell contains a tiny clock called a telomere, which shortens each time the cell divides. Short telomeres are linked to a range of human diseases, including HIV, osteoporosis, heart disease and aging. Previous studies have shown that an enzyme within the cell, called telomerase, keeps immune cells young by preserving their telomere length and ability to continue dividing. UCLA scientists found that the stress hormone cortisol suppresses immune cells' ability to activate their telomerase. This may explain why the cells of persons under chronic stress have shorter telomeres.
"When the body is under stress, it boosts production of cortisol to support a 'fight or flight' response," said study author Rita Effros. "If the hormone remains elevated in the bloodstream for long periods of time, though, it wears down the immune system. We are testing therapeutic ways of enhancing telomerase levels to help the immune system ward off cortisol's effect. If we're successful, one day a pill may exist to strengthen the immune system's ability to weather chronic emotional stress."
/////////////////////
Tsunami-Causing Earthquake Trimmed Bulge off Earth's Middle
By Michael Schirber, LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 12 January 2005 06:21 am ET
Buzz up!
Add to delicious del.icio.us
Digg It! Digg It!
Save to Newsvine Newsvine
Add to reddit reddit
0 Comments | 1 Recommend
Tsunami Strikes Sri Lanka: On December 26, 2004, tsunamis swept across the Indian ocean, spawned by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Aside from Indonesia, the island nation of Sri Lanka likely suffered the most casualties, with the death toll reported at 21,715 on December 29th. DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird satellite captured an image of the devastation around Kalutara, Sri Lanka (top), on December 26, 2004, at 10:20 a.m. local time—about an hour after the first in the series of waves hit. A Quickbird image taken on January 1, 2004 (lower), shows the normal ocean conditions. Water is flowing out of the inundated area and back into the sea, creating turbulence offshore. Some near-shore streets and yards are covered with muddy water. It is possible that the image was acquired in a “trough†between wave crests. Imagery of nearby beaches shows that the edge of the ocean had receded about 150 meters from the shoreline. Click on image to enlarge. Credit: Images Copyright DigitalGlobe
Full Size
Previous Image Next Image
1 of 2
Tsunami Strikes Sri Lanka: On December 26, 2004, tsunamis swept across the Indian ocean, spawned by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Aside from Indonesia, the island nation of Sri Lanka likely suffered the most casualties, with the death toll reported at 21,715 on December 29th. DigitalGlobe’s Quickbird satellite captured an image of the devastation around Kalutara, Sri Lanka (top), on December 26, 2004, at 10:20 a.m. local time—about an hour after the first in the series of waves hit. A Quickbird image taken on January 1, 2004 (lower), shows the normal ocean conditions. Water is flowing out of the inundated area and back into the sea, creating turbulence offshore. Some near-shore streets and yards are covered with muddy water. It is possible that the image was acquired in a “trough†between wave crests. Imagery of nearby beaches shows that the edge of the ocean had receded about 150 meters from the shoreline. Click on image to enlarge. Credit: Images Copyright DigitalGlobe
Launched in 1992, the ocean-monitoring Topex/Poseidon satellite mission is a joint effort between NASA and the French Space Agency that monitors global ocean circulation and climate interactions between the sea and atmosphere.
The Dec. 26 earthquake off the coast of Indonesia was the fourth largest in one hundred years. Scientists have determined that this major shift in the Earth's plates changed the planet's shape - enough to shorten the day by fractions of a second and to shift the North Pole by an inch.
The general shape of the Earth is slightly oblate - that is, it is not a perfect sphere but is slightly squished down, making it about 26 miles wider at the equator than between the poles. This shape, however, is not rigid, with climate being a major distorting force.
//////////////////////
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)