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BBC News - Why do some people never get depressed?
Confronted with some of life's upsetting experiences - marriage breakdown, unemployment, bereavement, failure of any kind - many people become depressed. But others don't. Why is this? A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as "resilience". According to Manchester University psychologist Dr Rebecca Elliott, we are all situated somewhere on a sliding scale.
Planning a Conference
Planning a conference is really not as complicated as it may appear. If you plan to host a conference, approach this task as you would any large program with careful planning and proper organization. This information is designed to help you with this process - from determining who your audience is, to picking a theme, making all arrangements and finally evaluating the success of the conference from both the participants' and presenters' point of view.Carl Bernstein (pictured right, with Bob Woodward) says journalism is the ‘best obtainable version of the truth’. Photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS The truth is a moving target. You can see it in the fluidity of modern news – whether it comes from newspapers or Twitter – and attest to the ever-changing narratives as you try to work out what happened, when, who caused it and, crucially, what it all means. This is another way of saying that mistakes happen all day, every day.
Acknowledging mistakes is key to advancement – and not just in science | Alok Jha | Comment is free | The Guardian
Welcome to the best resource on the Internet for the IB Diploma Theory of Knowledge course
The human sciences are the one aspect of the TOK course that will have to live without an OED definition, as you will not find it listed there. It corresponds to humanities and social sciences, but also includes aspects of psychology and even mathematics, as one of the key things we are concerned with is how we gather information in our study of human behaviour – which involves thinking about statistics. Here is a (by no means all-inclusive) list of subjects that fall under the human sciences umbrella: Why do people behave like this? Clearly, to try to deal with each one of these is going to take several lifetimes, so let’s try to narrow down what we can focus on.
This year our four finalists have been selected by the judges, from over 1,000 entries. They are now busy designing and carrying out their experiments:
BBC - Radio 4 - So You Want to Be A Scientist - Home
Mathematicians and their trading programs are increasingly taking the place of professional investors in financial centres across the world Trading floors were once the preserve of adrenalin-fuelled dealers aggressively executing the orders of brokers who relied on research, experience and gut instinct to decide where best to invest. Long ago computers made dealers redundant, yet brokers and their ilk have remained the masters of the investment universe, free to buy and sell wherever they see fit . But the last bastion of the old order is now under threat. Investment decisions are no longer being made by financiers, but increasingly by PhD mathematicians and the immensely complex computer programs they devise.
BBC News - Quant trading: How mathematicians rule the markets
BBC News - New study says birds learn how to build nests
Footage of southern masked weaver birds formed the basis of the study Individual birds varied their technique from one nest to the next and there were instances of birds building nests from left to right as well as from right to left. As birds gained more experience, they dropped blades of grass less often.
Women on pill remember things differently - Telegraph
It looked at how women on the contraceptive pill or experiencing natural hormonal cycles remembered a car accident involving a mother and son. Women using hormonal contraceptives for as little as one month remembered more clearly the main steps in the traumatic event - that there had been an accident, that the boy had been rushed to the hospital, that doctors worked to save his life and successfully reattached both his feet, for instance. Women not using them remembered more details, such as a fire hydrant next to the car. Shawn Nielsen, a graduate researcher involved in the study, said those who use contraceptives like birth control pills remember the gist of an emotional event while women not using the contraceptives better retain details.Inventions Project TOK
This enables them to better cope with the extreme Arctic seasons of polar day, when the sun stays up all day, and polar night, when it does not rise. Light also influences these hormonal rhythms, but in most mammals, this "circuit" also involves the circadian clock, which can influence the release of hormones without the influence of light. This could be the case for a range of animals living at the poles of the earth or in the depths of the ocean He said that the reindeer may have "abandoned use of the daily clock that drives biological rhythms" in order to survive the extreme conditions in the Arctic. He and his colleagues studied reindeer living in Northern Norway, 500 km north of the Arctic circle.
BBC News - Reindeer body clock switched off
Millions of years of evolution in the dark have led to this Somalian cavefish losing its eyes, scales, and pigmentation. But an international team, whose research is published in the open access journal PloS Biology , shows that certain blind cave fish have a circadian rhythm that lasts almost two days. The cavefish, Phreatichthys andruzzii , has evolved for nearly two million years in the isolated darkness of caves beneath the Somali desert. Professor Nick Foulkes, of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, said that this particular species was chosen "because it was such an extreme example, having been isolated from a day-night cycle for so long". In the course of its evolution it has lost its eyes, colouration and scales, having no need for them in the pitch-black of an underground cave system. This is most obvious to us when we travel across time zones, as jet lag is caused by the delay in our circadian rhythm synchronising with the new daylight times.
BBC News - Fish living in dark caves still feel the rhythm of life
BBC News - Rodin's Thinker cast vandalised in Argentina
The sculpture is a popular tourist attraction in Buenos Aires A cast of Auguste Rodin's famous The Thinker sculpture has been vandalised in Buenos Aires. The bronze work, which is the third of 22 sculptures from the original mould, was spray-painted pink and given green hair and a shoulder tattoo.Sentiment mining showed a sharp change in tone around Egypt ahead of President Mubarak's ousting Kalev Leetaru, from the University of Illinois' Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, presented his findings in the journal First Monday. Mood and location The study's information was taken from a range of sources including the US government-run Open Source Centre and BBC Monitoring , both of which monitor local media output around the world. Reports were analysed for two main types of information: mood - whether the article represented good news or bad news, and location - where events were happening and the location of other participants in the story.
BBC News - Supercomputer predicts revolution
Theory of Knowledge
Internet Explorer users 'have below-average IQ' - Telegraph
It found that Internet Explorer users scored lower than average, while Chrome, Firefox and Safari users were very slightly above average. Camino, Opera and Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame were scored "exceptionally" high. "The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual's cognitive ability and their choice of web browser," AptiQuant concluded. "From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers." Some people have suggested that there may be other factors at work.Scientists warn of 'Planet of the Apes' scenario - Telegraph
Currently research involving great apes, such as chimpanzees, is outlawed in the UK. But it continues in many other countries including the US, and British scientists are permitted to experiment on monkeys. Professor Thomas Baldwin, a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences working group that produced the report, said the possibility of humanised apes should be taken seriously.consciousness