Clipmarks |

Comprehension Climbs When You Slooooow Doooown

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:54:41 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: clipversity, where art though?

It should take you two and a half seconds to read this sentence. Any faster and you won't absorb its meaning. The motor response of the retina, and the time it takes the image of a word to travel from the macula to the thalamus to the visual cortex for processing, limits the eye to about 500 words a minute. (That's peak efficiency; the average college student can expect a rate about half that.) "There is no such thing as speed reading," says Keith Rayner a cognitive psychologist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "Not if your definition of reading is comprehending text." Studies show that fast readers fare worse than slower ones when questioned about the text. So, to get smarter, slow down. It's even OK to move your lips.

Tags: brain, reading, slowing down, comprehension

'bizarre mix of mammal, bird and reptile, with very complex sexuality'

Thu, 08 May 2008 15:15:04 GMT

clipped by: righthand
clipper's remarks: The fact that the animal has five X and five Y chromosomes is "the weirdest thing about a very weird animal," said Ewan Birney, a co-author on the paper, based at the European Bioinformatics Institute, near Cambridge. "In theory it means there are 25 possible sexes, though in practice that doesn't happen."

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

A DNA study found the creatures to be a mix of mammal, bird and reptile with, even more strangely, 10 sex chromosomes

Platypus proves even odder than scientists thought

At first dismissed as a prank, and later cited as proof that God has a sense of humour, the duck-billed platypus has finally given up its evolutionary secrets

The creature, considered one of the strangest mammals in the world, has become the latest to have its genetic code sequenced, revealing it to be a bizarre mix of mammal, bird and reptile, with very complex sexuality. While humans have two sex chromosomes, the X and Y, the platypus has 10, with five of each kind

An international team of scientists extracted DNA from a female platypus, named Glennie, reading all 2.2bn pairs of her genetic "letters". Thought to have begun to diverge from other mammals 170m years ago, the platypus has been regarded as the nearest thing biologists have to a missing link between the earliest reptiles and mammals

That Art of Selling Naked

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:06:09 GMT

clipped by: Sheroug

Clip Source: inventorspot.com

Playboy is a global brand that entertains men around the world with boobs and blondes. You may think that it does not take much advertising creativity to sell photos of naked women. You would be wrong. Here's 10 Great Playboy Ads that Show the Art of Selling Naked:

Playboy Ad 1. Online - Global

This is a viral ad that was used on the internet to direct consumers to the Playboy website

Playboy Ad 2: Playboy Mirror Doormat - Unknown Country

Playboy Ad 3. Hairy and Happy - Brazil

This print ad from Brazil reads: "1975/2006. 31 years of Playboy in Brasil." The picture is worth 1,000 words.

Playboy Ad 4. Lay Me Down - Argentina

Playboy Ad 5. Playboy Supports PETA - Brazil

This PETA ad shows Playboy's support of the cause not only by their logo but also by the models. Skin for skin.

Playboy Ad 6. Every Man's Dream - Portugal

Playboy Ad 7. Wet White T-Shirts - Germany

Playboy Ad 8. Playboy without Nudity? - Germany

Playboy Ad 9. Attention Grabber - Germany

Playboy Ad 10. Get Your Hands on Playboy dot com

Tags: playboy, ads, creative

50% chance of making it!

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:23:06 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

“Human Nature” -How Will it Affect Our Species Chances of Long-term Survival?

It’s a given that Earth cannot survive indefinitely, if for no other reason than that the sun will eventually expand and roast the planet. Of course, many scientists believe that by the time that happens, life will have long since disappeared on this planet for other reasons—many of them involving manmade disasters. Are they just being pessimistic, or realistic, or both?

Human behavior is often inexplicably bizarre, destructive and counterintuitive, and yet we’ve made it this far. However, in the past, we haven’t had the technological means to cause mass destruction to life on the planet. Now we do, says Sir Martin Rees, and he thinks we’ll get around to using it to our own detriment sooner or later. In fact, the Royal Society Research Professor at Cambridge and Britain's Astronomer Royal says he believes humans have only a 50% chance of making it through just the next century alone.

Tags: human nature, survival, earth

Black hole had 18th century feeding frenzy

Wed, 07 May 2008 09:08:47 GMT

clipped by: pokkets

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Irene Klotz

About 300 years ago, the black hole lurking in the heart of the Milky Way woke from hibernation and entered a feeding frenzy, triggering a cascade of x-rays that reverberated off nearby clouds, researchers say.

The energy released by the event was so intense that echoes remain etched in an interstellar cloud today.

The findings, reported by Japanese astronomers, may explain why our galaxy's black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, is so laid-back compared to similarly sized monsters in other galaxies.

"Perhaps it's just resting after a major outburst," says Kyoto University's Tatsuya Inui, lead author of a paper in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Data taken between 1994 and 2005 revealed a quick-lived but intense flash of x-rays from a large cloud known as Sagittarius B2, which lies 300 light-years from the Milky Way's black hole.

Scientists believe the black hole's frenzy spewed out x-rays that blasted electrons off iron molecules in the cloud.

Music Reduced to Beautiful Math

Thu, 08 May 2008 11:56:48 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: "You can use these geometrical spaces to provide ways of visualizing musical pieces," Tymoczko told LiveScience. "These spaces give us a much better and comprehensive picture of the space of all possible chords."

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

It’s hard for anyone to say what music looks like, but a new mathematical approach sees classical music as cone-shaped and jazz as pyramid-like.

The connections between math and music are many, from the unproven Mozart effect (the idea that playing Mozart's music to children might improve their mathematical abilities) to the music of the spheres (the ancient belief that proportions in the movements of the planets could be viewed as a form of music). Now scientists have created a mathematical system for understanding music.

The team designed a geometrical technique for mapping out music in coordinate space. For music made of chords containing two notes, all musical possibilities take the shape of a Möbius strip, which basically looks like a twisted rubber band

The team found that the shape of possibilities using three-note chords is a three-dimensional ice cream cone, where types of chords, such as major chords and minor chords, are unique points on the cone.

Tags: music, math

Welcome To The Machine

Fri, 09 May 2008 13:34:20 GMT

clipped by: sahara
clipper's remarks: To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences. More than two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Penatgon's military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Recently Media Matters of America (MMA) reported that, according to a search of the Nexis database, "the three major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have still not mentioned the report at all." Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro and three dozen colleagues have sent a letter to the Department of Defense Inspector General calling for an investigation of this "propaganda campaign aimed at deliberately misleading the American public."

Clip Source: www.alternet.org

With 8,000 pages of documents online for the world to see, will the networks continue their media blackout?

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon's illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated U.S. law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers -- most of them with financial ties to war contractors -- into the TV networks as "message surrogates" for the Bush Administration.

Here is the official Pentagon website

and the New York Times:

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/

Will the Media Pay Attention?

Tags: media, propaganda, citizens, revolt

The woman who can remember everything

Fri, 09 May 2008 14:34:32 GMT

clipped by: valann 47

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

A woman who has baffled doctors with her ability to remember every detail of every day has broken her anonymity to speak of her condition.

Jill Price, 42, can remember every part of her life since she was 14 but considers her ability a curse as she cannot switch off.

She described her life as like a split-screen television, with one side showing what she is doing in the present, and the other showing the memories which she cannot hold back.

Every detail about every day since 1980 - what time she got up, who she met, what she did, even what she ate - is locked in her brain and can be released to come flooding back by common triggers like songs, smells or place names.

Her condition is so rare that scientists had to coin a term for her condition - hyperthymestic syndrome from the Greek thymesis, for remembering, and hyper, meaning well above normal.

Tags: memory, medical