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Teach a Kid to Argue - Figures of Speech
Why would any sane parent teach his kids to talk back? Because, this father found, it actually increased family harmony. (First published in Disney’s Wondertime Magazine. The article was nominated for a 2007 National Magazine Award.) Those of you who don’t have perfect children will find this familiar: Just as I was withdrawing money in a bank lobby, my 5-year-old daughter chose to throw a temper tantrum, screaming and writhing on the floor while a couple of elderly ladies looked on in disgust. (Their children, apparently, had been perfect.)A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet." Deborah Gordon , a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years.
biologist and computer scientist discover the 'anternet' | School of Engineering
A group of leading neuroscientists has used a conference at Cambridge University to make an official declaration recognising consciousness in animals. The declaration was made at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference and signed by some of the leading lights in consciousness research, including Christof Koch and David Edelman. You can read the full text as a pdf file, however, the main part of the declaration reads: We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.
Animals conscious say leading neuroscientists
It always strikes me as curious that some posts get a lot of love on Twitter, while others get many more shares on Facebook: What accounts for this difference? Some of it is surely site-dependent: maybe one blogger has a Facebook page but not a Twitter account, while another has these roles reversed. But even on sites maintained by a single author, tweet-to-likes ratios can vary widely from post to post.
Tweets vs. Likes: What gets shared on Twitter vs. Facebook? - Edwin Chen's Blog
An Unexpected Ass Kicking
You can read the followup to this post here. I sat down at yet-another coffee shop in Portland determined to get some work done, catch up on some emails and write another blog post . About 30 minutes into my working, an elderly gentleman at least 80 years old sat down next to me with a hot coffee and a pastry. I smiled at him and nodded and looked back at my computer as I continued to work. “Do you like Apple? As he gestured to the new Macbook Air I had picked up a few days prior.BLS Jobs By Industry Treemap
Logging Oil and gas extraction Mining (not oil and gas) Support activities for mining
Evolutionary processes in DarwinTunes. Songs are represented as tree-like structures of code. Each generation starts with 100 songs; however, for clarity, it only follows one-fifth of them. Twenty songs are randomly presented to listeners for rating, and the remaining 80 survive until the next generation; thus, at any time, the population contains songs of varying age. Of the 20 rated songs, the 10 best reproduce and the 10 worst die. Reproductives are paired and produce four progeny to replace themselves and the dead in the next generation.
Computer program ‘evolves’ music from noise
Introduction - Download - Tutorial - Details & Options - Donate Dual N-Back exercise featured in Brain Workshop was the subject of an April 2008 peer-reviewed scientific study which shows that practicing the Dual N-Back task for 20 minutes 4-5 days per week will improve your working memory (short term memory) and fluid intelligence . This Wired article has a good summary of its benefits. If you've never tried Dual N-Back before, here's a quick tutorial to get you started. Dual 1-Back It's best to begin with Dual 1-Back, the simplest mode.
Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game
Amazing optical illusion or "glitch in the Matrix"? - The Feed Blog
(CBS News) Watching this video is a bit like seeing a "glitch in the Matrix". Is it impressive? Without a doubt.
The famed Columbia Gorge has seams of these turbines threading across its landscape. Hasn’t our fascination with understanding and teaching about systems been connected to the dichotomy between the world we live in (a dynamic, always-moving ) and how we represent it to students (reduced, lineal, static)? This map gives a sense of how winds move and behave as a single thing. Here, then, from Google is a beautiful thing.
QuickThing15: dazzling wind map « itsallonething
Update 1:06pm PDT: A Dutch artist named Floris Kaayk has admitted that “Human Birdwings” was an elaborate hoax 8 months in the making . Update 2:15 pm PDT: We have a follow-up report documenting inconsistencies both in the video and Smeets’ online resumes. Update 11:15 am PDT: The headline of this post has been changed to reflect that we have not confirmed Smeets’ claim. Editor’s note (March 21, 8:15 am PDT): The authenticity of this video has been questioned ( Gizmodo , The Register ), but Wired’s preliminary analysis by physicist Rhett Allain found nothing in the video that indicates it must be a fake .
Man Successfully Flies With Custom-Built Bird Wings | Wired Science
Spider silk spun into violin strings
5 March 2012 Last updated at 00:59 GMT By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News More than 300 spiders were used to generate the thousands of strands of silk making up each string A Japanese researcher has used thousands of strands of spider silk to spin a set of violin strings. The strings are said to have a "soft and profound timbre" relative to traditional gut or steel strings.Assistant Professor of Genetics and Developmental Biology Stormy Chamberlain works on stem cells at the University of Connecticut's Stem Cell Institute in 2010 in Farmington, Connecticut. Embryonic stem cells are extraordinarily versatile cells, found in early-stage embryos, that can differentiate into any tissue of the body. The first use of embryonic stem cells in humans eased a degenerative form of blindness in two volunteers and showed no signs of any adverse effects, according to a study published by The Lancet on Monday. Publication in the peer-reviewed journal marks an important step for embryonic stem cells, which were hailed as a miracle cure after they were discovered in 1998 but then ran into technical and political hurdles. The results of the cautious first-stage test, designed to evaluate whether the treatment is safe, had been previously announced by Massachusetts biotech firm Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) Inc.
Study: Stem cells may aid vision in blind people
Watch flying robots build a 6-meter tower
A quadrotor just before a precision landing on a brick (credit: Markus Waibel/ETH Zurich) ETH Zurich roboticists and architects used a fleet of quadcopters to build a 6 meter (20 feet) twisting tower out of 1500 foam bricks, IEEE Spectrum Automaton reports . The ceiling of the room where the assembly is taking place was equipped with a motion-capture system. A computer uses the vision data to keep track of the quadcopters and tell them where to go. First, the robots grab foam bricks from a special brick dispenser on the ground.Kepler-22b is the first confirmed planet in the “habitable zone,” the area around a star where a planet could exist with liquid water on its surface, that has been discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission . The planet’s radius is about 2.4 times that of the Earth. It is located about 600 light years away.