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Speak English Please: No more buzzwords

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:02:58 GMT

clipped by: kmcolo

LONDON, England (AP) -- British bureaucrats have been warned: no more synergies, stakeholders or sustainable communities.

The Local Government Association, whose members include hundreds of district, town and county councils in England and Wales, on Friday sent out a list of 100 "non-words" that it said officials should avoid if they want to be understood.

The list includes the popular but vague term "empowerment;" "coterminosity," a situation in which two organizations oversee the same geographical area; and "synergies," combinations in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Officials were told to ditch the term "revenue stream" for income, as well as the imprecise "sustainable communities." The association also said councils should stop referring to local residents as "customers" or "stakeholders."

"Why do we have to have 'coterminous, stakeholder engagement' when we could just 'talk to people' instead?" he said.

Tags: jargon, english, language, buzzwords

10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:57:23 GMT

clipped by: righthand

Clip Source: www.alternet.org

The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency

Printed on July 3, 2008

warrantless wiretapping;

Valerie Plame; Scooter Libby's sentence commuted;

Bush believes Rafael Palmeiro is innocent;

soldiers face neglect at Walter Reed;

signing statements;

the Kyoto treaty ripped up;

; loyalty oaths;

the fake turkey;

a staged teleconference with troops

staged FEMA press conference,

extraordinary rendition,

support for junk science;

endorsement of neo-creationist "intelligent design";

inaction against global warming;

record oil prices;

record budget deficits;

record trade deficits;

two recessions;

no-bid contracts;

bin Laden still at large;

the Federal Marriage Amendment;

stem cell research vetoed;

waterboarding ban vetoed

"Last throes";

"Old Europe";

"It's hard work";

"Bring it on";

"Yo, Blair!";

"I'm the decider"

"I'm the commander guy"

"I'm a war president";

"This is the guy who tried to kill my dad"

"Let the Eagle Soar"

John Bolton

Kenny Boy

"So?"

Blair talks Bush out of bombing al-Jazeera

John Roberts

Sam Alit

Tags: bush, president

B- membrane: The computer of tomorrow

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:40:00 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Wow!

Clip Source: www.odditycentral.com

The computer of tomorrow

Conceived by Korean designer Won-Seok-Lee, the “B-membrane” is one of the most interesting PC prototypes I’ve ever seen.

The B-membrane looks nothing like a conventional computer, more like a spaceship or space station, but it is indeed a PC, able to project an image of your desktop on any surface you can point its omni-directional projector at, thus rendering even the slimmest LCD monitor useless. It also has a membrane keyboard and mouse that appear only when you need them too, and an optical drive.

The B-membrane isn’t useless even when it is shut-down, its smart projector turns it into an ambient light-effects system to spice up the look of your crib.

Tags: pc, computer, lcd, monitor, projection, desktop, invention, pioneer, korea, won-seok-lee

A Giant Solar Tower Could Power the Future

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:10:31 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: On a sunny day, the air at the top of the tower would be 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), whereas the air in the greenhouse could reach 160 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius). As this hot air escapes up the tower at 34 mph (15 meters per second), it spins 32 turbines that generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.

Even with all this power, the solar tower is less than one tenth as efficient as solar cells in converting the sun's energy into electricity.

The advantage for a solar tower is that its materials are much less expensive.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

A new energy concept called a solar tower could generate enough electricity for 200,000 homes.

Looking like a giant smokestack, it would release no noxious fumes — just sun-heated air.

Demonstrated more than 20 years ago, the basic design calls for solar collectors to warm the air near Earth's surface and then channel it up the tall central tower. Turbines placed at the bottom make electricity from the updraft.

EnviroMission has designed a kilometer-high solar tower (0.62 miles) and is now looking at possible sites in the southwestern United States.

The solar tower is an updated version of a solar chimney — a centuries-old technique for providing ventilation to a home by creating a natural updraft from sun-heated air.

The optimum configuration is an 800- to 1,000-meter tower (twice the height of the Empire State Building) surrounded by a greenhouse canopy 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) in radius on the ground.

Tags: energy, solar energy, renewable energy

Unintelligent Design

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 18:14:29 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth.
The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design -- including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to "supplement" classes on evolution with talk of creationism -- is one simple basic fact. The human species isn't intelligently designed.

When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.

Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts -- where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent survelllance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords),

Tags: evolution, creationism, intelligent design

Scientists Map the 10 Billion Neurons of Human Cerebral Cortex

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:33:06 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: This research goes a long way in validating Ray Kurzweil's predictions, that we will soon be able to scan the brain accurately enough to create a working simulation of it. The implications are literally vast.

Clip Source: www.dailygalaxy.com

The study of the human brain is one of the most fascinating, and incredibly meta, subjects in existence.

The almost Escherian experiments of one brain studying another brain (which is thinking about being studied by the first) have up to now been held back by one thing: the brain's owner is kind of using it so you can't poke too hard.

Now a new scanning technique has allowed scientists to probe deeper than ever into the secrets of the mind.

The non-invasive technique of Diffusive Spectrum Imaging (DSI) has enabled an international team of scientists to get inside the human head without breaking anything

The system has mapped the mass of ten billion neurons that make up the human cerebral cortex - and found a central switchboard hiding inside, a densely-packed region of connections which works hard even when the rest of the brain is chilling out.

As well as understanding our minds, the work could be a vital step in building new ones

Tags: brain, neuroscience, brain scanning, brain imaging

A Really Long Strange Trip

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:21:20 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Despite the long-held promise that such substances might reveal the secrets of the conscious mind, the study of hallucinogenic compounds has always been controversial. Once a thriving area of research, projects like these ground to a halt in the late 1960s when a media frenzy over rampant recreational use led the federal government to criminalize both psilocybin and LSD.

Clip Source: www.newsweek.com

How some dedicated scientists and former flower children managed to bring hallucinogenic drug research back to mainstream labs after more than 30 years.

It's been more than a year since , a professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola College, ingested psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.

He claims that the series of three eight-hour highs

have made him a calmer, less fearful person

It gave me this sense that space and time are human constructions that can collapse

The ultimate reality is something beyond those constructions, and more importantly, everything in the world is connected."

These are familiar sentiments to , the scientist who led a study of 36 volunteers, most of whom detailed similar experiences after taking the hallucinogenic compound.

In a report published on July 1st in the Journal of Pharmacology, more than 60 percent of those intrepid volunteers reported substantial increases in life satisfaction a year after the experiment.

Tags: hallucinigens, drug research, society and drugs

Intuition can be explained

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:34:31 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: However, these memories are stored only if they affect us. In other words, for experience to be built up, there must be commitment.

This means, according to Lars-Erik Björklund, that we can never read or calculate our way to all the knowledge and abilities we need in our professional life. Practical experience is indispensable and needs to be reevaluated.

Clip Source: artfiles.art.com

Clip Source: www.liu.se

Intuition, or tacit knowledge, is difficult to measure, so it is often denigrated.

A dissertation in education research shows that there is a neurobiological explanation for how experience-based knowledge is created.

The fact that people with long experience are often better at what they do, that practice makes perfect, is nothing new. But no good explanations have been put forward as to why this is the case.

A few years ago neuroscientists discovered that the human brain has dual systems for receiving and analyzing sensory impressions, one conscious and one unconscious.

In the unconscious, that is the non-declarative system, our sensory impressions are compared with previously stored images.

We all have an inner picture book of stored experiences based on what has happened to us previously in life. We also remember the outcome -¬ did it end well or badly? With the aid of these stored sensory impressions, we unconsciously assess the situation at hand and can predict the outcome.

Tags: intuition, neuroscience, psychology, experience