Clipmarks |

50 Funniest Short Job Descriptions Ever

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:50:15 GMT

clipped by: carrerinyes
clipper's remarks: # Tell forty year-old men it’s okay to behave like fourteen year-old school girls: Printing Press Production Coordinator
# Provide arcane information on a need-to-know basis: Chief Accountant
# Shepherd clients through the process of setting their products on fire: Consumer Products Tester
# Manage urban renewal and pest control: B-52 Bomber pilot
# Persuade kids that it’s really fun being wet, cold and scared out of their minds: Sailing Instructor
# Draw up plans for something that will not be built according to those plans: Civil Engineer, Transportation Design
# Teach kids to be evil…or so they say: Video Game Creator
# Ensure that stupid people stay in the gene pool: Lifeguard

Clip Source: jobmob.co.il

50 Funniest Short Job Descriptions Ever

Over on the Dilbert Blog, Scott Adams gave his readers an assignment: “describe your own job in one sentence, preferably in a humorously derogatory way.” Here are the best replies from among the hundreds, with the top 10 at the end.

Take numbers on pieces of paper, rearrange them and put them on different pieces of paper: Tax Accountant

Help people lie consistently to their bosses: Business Intelligence Consultant

Make food that is as healthy before it goes in your body as when it comes back out: Fast Food Employee

Clean up an animal that makes more money then me in a year: Assistant Horse Trainer

Make people feel bad about their work: Quality Assurance Tester

Show people how beautiful the Earth would be without them: Mountain Landscape Photographer/Climber

Help people hate each other: Divorce Lawyer (Scott Adams’ favorite)

Make corporate propaganda feel like folksy truthisms: TV Ad Director

Sell gas: Energy and Telecom Business Analyst

I don't know what it is...

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 15:18:15 GMT

clipped by: BartendingBear
clipper's remarks: but it can't be good.

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

Tags: john, wayne, bobbit

What Happy People Don't Do

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 02:10:20 GMT

clipped by: Kelika

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.

That’s what unhappy people do.

Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.

But the researchers could not tell whether unhappy people watch more television or whether being glued to the set is what makes people unhappy. “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you more happy,” Dr. Robinson said.

Still, he said, the data show that people who spend the most time watching television are least happy in the long run.

We are becoming people of the screen.

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:11:55 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: interesting article.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Becoming Screen Literate

Everywhere we look,

we see screens.

These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens

We are headed toward screen ubiquity

Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word

Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology

elevated writing into a central position in the culture.

printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.

We are becoming people of the screen

On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective

truth is something you assemble yourself

from literacy to visuality

Tags: technology, society, change

Stunning photographs captured over six-month period

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:37:21 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Very impressive picture, and patience...

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Stunning photographs of landmark captured over six-month period

The spectacular picture shows each phase of the sun over Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge taken over a six month period.

It plots the sun's daily course as it rises and falls over Brunel's famous structure, which spans the 702ft (214m) Avon Gorge.

Incredibly, the eerie image was captured on a basic pin-hole camera made from an empty drinks can with a 0.25mm aperture and a single sheet of photographic paper.

Photographer Justin Quinnell strapped the camera to a telephone pole overlooking the Gorge, where it was left between December 19, 2007 and June 21, 2008 - the winter and summer solstices.

The lowest arc shows the first day of exposure on the winter solstice, while the top curves were captured in the middle of summer.

his father passed away on April 13 - halfway through the exposure.

He says the picture allows him to pinpoint the exact location of the sun in the sky at the moment his father passed away.

Tags: photography

Physicists Find Dark Matter, or Something Even More Strange

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:12:20 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Very interesting discovery if confirmed.

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

A new experiment may have found the first direct evidence of dark matter particles, a discovery that could begin to unravel one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Theorists believe that dark matter, made up of of weakly-interacting massive particles, composes 23 percent of the universe, but no one has ever directly detected one of these WIMPs.

Now, physicists have announced they've spotted electrons with just about the amount of energy they would have expected to be made by a particular kind of WIMP entering the visible world.

John Wefel of Louisiana State University and colleagues report in Nature

they could have detected "Kaluza-Klein" electron-positron pairs resulting from the annihilation of these WIMPS

The KK particles are predicted by multiple-dimension theories of the universe

The new discovery then, if confirmed, would provide evidence that the fabric of space-time has many "compact" dimensions beyond the four that humans perceive

Tags: cosmology, physics, dark matter, multiverse

The Secret to staying Madly in Love

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 11:35:34 GMT

clipped by: chestnut501
clipper's remarks: It's all in the head....

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

THE SECRET to staying madly in love for life is hidden at the heart of your brain - a finding that may lead to new strategies for keeping alive passionate partnerships, say New York scientists.

Researchers led by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine recruited 17 men and women who still love their spouses intensely after two decades of marriage, then scanned their brains as they saw their loved ones' photos. When they compared the results with scans of 17 people who had fallen in love in the previous year, they found that the same area of the brain, the ventral tegmental area, lit up.

One of the authors, Helen Fisher, told the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting this week: “If you ask people around the world whether romantic love can last, they'll roll their eyes and say ‘probably not'. Most textbooks say that too. We are proving them wrong.”

Forgotten But Not Gone: How The Brain Re-learns

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:17:39 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: "What surprised us most, however, was that the majority of the appendages which developed in response to the information blockade, continued to exist, despite the fact that the blockade was abolished ", project leader Mark Hübener explains. Everything seems to point to the fact that synapses are only disabled, but not physically removed. "Since an experience that has been made may occur again at a later point in time, the brain apparently opts to save a few appendages for a rainy day"

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of.

However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something.

What we do know is that changes in the contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it is much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn something completely new?

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have been able to show that new cell contacts established during a learning process stay put, even when they are no longer required.

The reactivation of this temporarily inactivated "stock of contacts" enables a faster learning of things forgotten.

Tags: brain, neuroscience, memory, learning

Obama Looks to Axe Daylight Time

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:38:56 GMT

clipped by: reimers

Clip Source: www.greendaily.com

In order to conserve energy, President-elect Barak Obama wants to eliminate daylight saving time.

Twice a year, a bunch of countries, including most of the United States, practice daylight saving time or DST, shifting one hour ahead in the spring and one hour back in the fall. While I go through the whole twice-a-year ritual of looking for clocks, I only vaguely understood the reason behind it. I knew it had to do with more sunlight during waking hours and I assumed it was to save energy.

Turns out, according to two academics on the NYT Op-Ed page, there is little scientific proof that this reduces energy consumption. It also turns out that this practice could be wasteful, a bit annoying, and a lot of people, including Obama, want to get rid of it.

A study in Indiana, a state that recently started DST, showed an overall increase of 1 percent in residential electricity use with occasional increases of 2 to 4 percent in late spring and early fall. So much for conserving energy.

THE IMPRINTED BRAIN THEORY

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 13:28:50 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Very interesting theory, with far reaching implications regarding the development of cognition and its relation to gender.

Clip Source: www.edge.org

What causes mental illnesses like schizophrenia and autism? We have long known that both tend to run in families and that if one of two identical twins has such a disorder, there is a much higher than average probability that the other will too.

But neither autism nor schizophrenia obeys classical Mendelian laws of inheritance in the way that Cystic Fibrosis or some types of colour blindness do.

However, there is also good evidence for social, environmental causes of mental illnesses.

The figure illustrates the idea. According to the so-called imprinted brain theory, the paradoxes can be explained in terms of the expression of genes, and not simply their inheritance. Imprinted genes are those which are only expressed when they are inherited from one parent rather than the other.

Tags: mental health, genetics, cognition, development

Less-Invasive Brain Interfaces

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 14:30:11 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.technologyreview.com

Using neural activity recorded from a sheet of electrodes laid directly on the surface of a patient's brain, scientists can predict the movement of fingers, as well as which of several sounds the patient is imagining.

Eventually, researchers hope to use the findings to develop intuitive neural prostheses, such as a robotic hand that moves its fingers with as little mental effort as it takes to move real ones, or a computer interface that detects imagined words.

To realize this vision, scientists are also developing smaller, more flexible technology, which could be more easily implanted and make better contact with the brain.

Details of the latest brain-computer interface technology were presented this week at the Society for Neurosciences conference in Washington, DC.

Clip Source: www.technologyreview.com

Schalk and others are studying ECoG as a possible alternative to electrodes implanted into brain tissue.

Clip Source: www.technologyreview.com

[Video]

Tags: brain, neurology, brain implants