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Grandson Photos

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:09:42 GMT

clipped by: skwirlinator
clipper's remarks: Cutest baby award

Clip Source: www.facebook.com

Tags: family, grandson, photos, little skwirl

Animal senses humans don't have

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:25:56 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: You might think you're smart, but none of your senses rival the keenest abilities in the animal world. Animals see in the dark, sniff prey miles away, and detect electrical output from muscle twitches in hidden meals. Read on, so you don't become one of those meals.<<

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

Amazing Animal Abilities

Bats

avoid obstacles and nab insects on the wing by emitting ultrasonic squeaks and interpreting the echo the sound waves make after bouncing off objects in the environment

biological sonar

echolocation

Sharks

special cells in their brains

sensitive to the electrical fields other creatures generate

can find fish hiding under sand by the weak electric signals their twitching muscles emit

Boa

Temperature-sensitive organs

sense the body heat of their prey

perceive depth and strike with deadly accuracy

Hummingbirds

attuned to wavelengths of light outside the visible range

Cats

tapetum lucidum

a mirror-like membrane in the backs of their eyes

lets them hunt and move in almost complete darkness

Snakes

use its tongues to collect particles wafting in the air

odors get processed and translated into electrical signals

Moths

detect

pheromones

Rats

By whisking the hairs across objects

form mental pictures of their surroundings

Drum Fish

hear

using

air bladders

Migratory birds

a form of synesthesia

Inferring personality from e-mail addresses

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:19:12 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: Altogether, even the thinnest slice of CMC—the mere e-mail address—contains valid information about the personality of its owner.<<

Hmm...I don't know,I am just a moon elf...

Clip Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Computer mediated communication (CMC) plays a rapidly growing role in our social lives. Within this domain, e-mail addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another.

Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion.

Level of accuracy was explained using lens model analyses: Lay observers made broad use of perceivable e-mail address features in their personality judgments, features were slightly valid and observers were sensitive to subtle differences in validity between cues.

Tags: personality, stereotypes, internet

Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led to Threats

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 02:35:54 GMT

clipped by: ratilfar
clipper's remarks: Fight for religious freedom, but don't expect yours to be protected.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Specialist Hall’s lawsuit is the latest incident to raise questions about the military’s religion guidelines. In 2005, the Air Force issued new regulations in response to complaints from cadets at the Air Force Academy that evangelical Christian officers used their positions to proselytize. In general, the armed forces have regulations, Ms. Lainez said, that respect “the rights of others to their own religious beliefs, including the right to hold no beliefs.”

“They don’t trust you because they think you are unreliable and might break, since you don’t have God to rely on,” Specialist Hall said of those who proselytize in the military. “The message is, ‘It’s a Christian nation, and you need to recognize that.’ ”

Major Welborn declined to comment beyond saying, “I’d love to tell my side of the story because it’s such a false story.”

But Timothy Feary, the other soldier at the meeting, said in an e-mail message: “Jeremy is telling the truth. I was there and witnessed everything.”

Tags: freedom, religion, constitution, army, rights, legal

smart kids vs popular kids

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:26:42 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better.But I think the main reason is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

It's important for nerds to realize that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.<<

Interesting read.Written by someone who was considered to be a "nerd" at school.

Clip Source: www.paulgraham.com

there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time

it takes work to be popular

In a typical

school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds.

that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why?

Tags: school problems, bullies, psychology, essay, teenagers

Cancer cure using 'nano robots'

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:51:15 GMT

clipped by: Deepti
clipper's remarks: 'Heat therapy' - Targeted treatment

- Magnetic particles which have a coating that binds them to cancerous cells are injected into the patient.

- The particles are heated with a "light oven" which uses electromagnetic radiation to warm the particles by between 1 degree C and 5 degrees C.

- The heat produced kills the cancer cells without harming the healthy cells nearby

Clip Source: www.gulfnews.com

Patients could soon be treated by tiny magnets injected into the body and activated by remote control

The robotic particles will target diseased cells and destroy them using heat, leaving healthy cells unharmed

The treatment could mean an end to invasive surgery as well as powerful chemotherapy drugs

Scientists told the told Evening Standard on Saturday that trials of the technique will begin within two years

Several teams of scientists around the world are racing to be the first to perfect the technique. But the London researchers are the only ones to have built the crucial "light box" that activates the magnetic particles and are expected to be first to bring the technique to trials

Tags: cancer, robots, cure, trials

Top 15 Online Image Editors

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:01:10 GMT

clipped by: nykterida
clipper's remarks: Useful!

Clip Source: speckyboy.com

With the recent release of Adobe Photo Express, I thought I would have a look for other Online Image Editors and see how good they actually were. I was surprised at how many there were, some were simply rubbish, others really, really mind blowing good. So I compiled a list of the Top 15 Online Image Editors.
So, who needs Photoshop?

1. Adobe Photoshop Express

2. Flauntr

3. Pixer.us

4. Snipshot

5. Picnik

6. improveyourimages.com

7. Splashup

8. OIE - Online Image Editor

9. Cellsea

10. Creating Online

And the rest…

11. Online Image Editor (http://www.online-image-editor.com/).

12. Image Editor (http://www.imageeditor.net/).

13. Alilg Online Image Editor (http://www.alilg.com/software/free-online-photo-editor/).

14. Foto Flexerr (http://fotoflexer.com/).

15. Phixir (http://www.phixr.com/).

…maybe I’ll stick with Photoshop.

Tags: editors, images, online, resources, useful, cool, software, web2.0, adobe, photography

179 ways of saying "I love you"

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:12:43 GMT

clipped by: dakotayii
clipper's remarks: It's huge -

Mohawk - Kanbhik

Clip Source: www.yuni.com

The English dictionary describes love as deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.

Here 'I love you' as defined in relationships between people, with translations from many different languages and dialects.

Afrikaans - Ek is lief vir jou

Arabic - Ana Ahebak / Ana Bahibak

Bahasa Malayu (Malaysia) - Saya cinta mu

Bangladeschi - Ami tomake walobashi

Bavarian - tuI mog di

Bosnian - Ja te volim (formally) or volim-te Turkish seni seviyorum

Cambodian (to the female) - bon saleng oun

Catalan - T'estim (mallorcan)

Cherokee - Tsi ge yu i

Chinese - Ngo oi ney a (Cantonese)

Corsican - Ti tengu caru (to male)

Dutch - Jeg elsker dig

Filipino - Mahal ka ta

Gaelic - Tá mé i ngrá leat

Greek - S'agapo

Icelandic - Eg elska thig

Iranian - Mahn doostaht doh-rahm

Nigeria (Hausa) - Ina sonki

Hindi - Main tumsey pyaar karta hoon / Maine Pyar Kiya

Tags: fun

"Mad, Bad and Sad"

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:04:54 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: If male doctors conspired to define madness, responding to behaviors that flouted the social conventions of their culture, female patients, in the attempt to understand themselves and their context, and maybe even to create or bolster identity, colluded with those same doctors to satisfy the changing definitions of madness. “Often enough,” Appignanesi notes, “extreme expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders mirrored the time’s order.”

While “Mad, Bad and Sad” echoes and enlarges upon Elaine Showalter’s book “The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980,” Showalter’s perspective is more exclusively feminist, arguing that psychiatry as practiced on women is a history of their subjugation and control by men. But as Appignanesi makes clear, women have had no little role in creating and fulfilling the definitions of their madness.<<

"Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present" by Lisa Appignanesi.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Diagnosis: Female

One of the consistently fascinating and disturbing aspects of “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors” is Lisa Appignanesi’s assiduous tracking of the modishness of what might be mistaken for a sui generis discipline.

It seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her.

“Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women — romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination — comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering.

Tags: psychiatry, feminism, books, review

Emotional Self Harm

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:08:02 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: So don't give in to Clipmarks addiction!

Clip Source: blogs.psychologytoday.com

We give in to feel good. Give in to what? Food, shopping, drinking, smoking, gambling, and, you guessed it, procrastination.

People will engage in behaviors that may be self-destructive (gambling, excessive shopping, overeating, smoking, procrastinating) if the behaviors make them feel better in the short term.

If we focus on our feelings in the short term, we'll undermine ourselves in the long run.

In fact, we may spend a lifetime acting like a 3-year-old, and rationalizing it to ourselves the whole time. I don't feel like it. I need to feel better in order to act. First, I need to feel better.

No you don't.

We give in to the impulse to walk away in order to feel good right now. Learning theorists would even add that we have now reinforced this behavior as the decrease in anxiety is rewarding.

Of course, this short-term strategy has long-term costs

Tags: maturity, feelings, emotional intelligence

Why does food get stale over time?

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:02:55 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

When we think of food going stale, we typically think of products such as bread. You might think that bread starts to stale days after it is made. But the process of staling actually begins as soon as the loaf leaves the oven and begins to cool. How quickly bread goes stale depends on what ingredients are in it, how it was baked, and the storage conditions.

Breads are essentially networks of wheat flour protein (gluten) molecules and starch molecules. Suspended inside this scaffolding are pockets of carbon dioxide gas that are produced during fermentation by yeast. This creates a foamlike texture.

The most important event in the process of staling is when starch molecules crystallize. The starch molecules need water molecules to form their crystal structure

They get the water molecules from the gluten. As a result, the network changes, becoming rigid at room temperature and below. This state, however, is reversed with the introduction of heat; stale bread can be freshened by warming it

Tags: food, stale, water