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The Teen Brain

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:55:21 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Human and animal studies, Jensen and Urion note, have shown that the brain grows and changes continually in young people—and that it is only about 80 percent developed in adolescents. The largest part, the cortex, is divided into lobes that mature from back to front. The last section to connect is the frontal lobe, responsible for cognitive processes such as reasoning, planning, and judgment. Normally this mental merger is not completed until somewhere between ages 25 and 30—much later than these two neurologists were taught in medical school.

There are also gender differences in brain development. As Urion and Jensen explain, the part of our brain that processes information expands during childhood and then begins to thin, peaking in girls at roughly 12 to 14 years old and in boys about two years later. This suggests that girls and boys may be ready to absorb challenging material at different stages, and that schools may be missing opportunities to reach them.

Clip Source: harvardmagazine.com

Your teenage daughter gets top marks in school, captains the debate team, and volunteers at a shelter for homeless people. But while driving the family car, she text-messages her best friend and rear-ends another vehicle.

How can teens be so clever, accomplished, and responsible—and reckless at the same time? Easily, according to two physicians at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School (HMS) who have been exploring the unique structure and chemistry of the adolescent brain.

“It’s a paradoxical time of development. These are people with very sharp brains, but they’re not quite sure what to do with them.”

Research during the past 10 years, powered by technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, has revealed that young brains have both fast-growing synapses and sections that remain unconnected.

This leaves teens easily influenced by their environment and more prone to impulsive behavior, even without the impact of souped-up hormones and any genetic or family

Tags: neuroscience, brain, development

The Omnigoogle

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:25:02 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.roughtype.com

“Some say Google is God,” Sergey Brin once said. “Others say Google is Satan.”

The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in. The many businesses that see the young company as an actual or potential competitor include software houses, advertising agencies, telephone companies, newspapers, TV networks, book publishers, movie studios, credit card processors, and Internet firms of all stripes. If your business involves information, you probably fear (and admire) Google.

breadth of Google’s influence and activity - just this past week it unveiled its own Web browser, introduced face-recognition software, and shot a satellite into orbit - can easily be interpreted as evidence that it is an entirely new kind of business

Tags: omni, google

Study: Credit Cards Cause More Spending

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:20:55 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Keep away from those nasty cards... and live in peace.

Clip Source: www.livescience.com

If you're trying to save money, leave your credit cards at home and pack cash only.

A four-part study found what many financial planners already knew: People spend more money when using credit cards compared to cash purchases. People also spend less when they look at their expenses in detail, the researchers found.

Consumers simply feel the pain of paying more when they part with cash, the researchers, led by Priya Raghubir at New York University, write in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.

Tags: credit cards, expenses, psychology, science

Is it in his kiss? oh no, it's in his voice

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:39:15 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: For that reason only the idiom "how low can you go?" was probably coined...

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Honest Lovers? Fallow Buck Groans Reveal Their Status And Size During The Rut

It is known that the phonic structure of calls produced by males during the breeding season may signal quality-related characteristics in many different types of animals.

shown for the first time that sexually selected vocalizations can signal social dominance in mammals other than primates

independent acoustic components – fundamental frequency (pitch) and formant frequencies – encode information on dominance status and body size, respectively

Fundamental frequency is a measure of the rate of vibration of the vocal folds

Formant frequencies result from filtering of vocalizations in the vocal tract

Similarly in humans, men with lower fundamental frequency (pitch) voices are perceived as more dominant and have higher reproductive success due to greater access to mates

evolved in response to male-male competition

Tags: biology, animals, mating

"A dishonorable lust for office"

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 03:03:07 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: The choice of Palin reveals a dishonourable lust for office, a disrespect for women generally and a dishonourable indifference to the future of his country.

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

McCain doesn’t know Palin at all, nor it seems did his vetting people; revelations keep emerging about her all the time. But he showed himself willing to hand the free world over to a stranger because his people think she is a psephological paragon.

I had thought that McCain was, for a politician, an honourable man.

But who can think so now? In choosing a woman he doesn’t know or understand, purely for electoral advantage, he reveals a dishonourable lust for office, a disrespect for women generally and a dishonourable indifference to the future of his country.

Palin is an ill-educated, inexperienced hypocrite. The Republicans are trying to sell her to the voters as something she isn’t, and McCain hardly cares what she is. It’s a bad day for my native land.

John McCain’s choice of Governor Sarah Palin was the last straw.

Tags: palin, mccain

On Stupidity

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:52:42 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Similar critiques in UK. It may be itself an example of populism - simplifying things overmuch - and certainly the full two articles require careful reading.

Clip Source: chronicle.com

"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,"

H.L. Mencken

The most influential book in that genre is surely Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), in which he argues that the American dislike for educational elitism derives from a number of interlocking cultural legacies, including religious fundamentalism, populism, the privileging of "common sense" over esoteric knowledge, the pragmatic values of business and science, and the cult of the self-made man.

If the situation was bad in Hofstadter's time, it's grown steadily worse over the past 40 years. The anti-intellectual legacy he described has often been used by the political right — since at least the McCarthy era — to label any complication of the usual pieties of patriotism, religion, and capitalism as subversive, dangerous, and un-American. And, one might add, the left has its own mirror-image dogmas.

Tags: anti-intellectualism

Mystery of the 'couple' buried arm in arm 1,000 years ago

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:25:07 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Mystery of the 'couple' buried arm in arm 1,000 years ago: Not husband and wife but Saxon warriors

For a thousand years they have lain side by side in a rough earth grave, one throwing a skeletal arm across the other.

Believed to be Saxon warriors, they are thought to have died together and been buried together as brothers in arms.

Their return to the limelight after so many centuries comes as archaeologists work on a 90-acre site near Ramsgate in Kent before it is developed into a salad-growing complex.

At first they were taken to be a man and wife, buried some time during the Saxon period between 410 and 1066, but now that opinion has changed.

'The body on the right is definitely male.

'They are exceptionally tall, both over six feet. The one on the left has got some female traits to it but it does seem to be male.

Another poignant grave is from the Roman era and is that of a young girl - thought to be in her early teens - who died in childbirth.

Tags: saxons, skeletons, kent, uk, mystery

Fear Is The Cheapest Room In The House

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 02:01:22 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.earthlight.org

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.’ Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: ‘People react to fear, not love. They don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.’

To give into despair is to succumb to fear, the ultimate source of all human violence.

A vibrant and functional democracy depends on the honest dissemination of information. The corporate media, in its rightward drift and easy compliance to political power, is failing the general populace

Don’t let consumption define who we are. True peace is to see ourselves as citizens, not simply consumers.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable." If we commit ourselves to creating peaceful change by not giving into despair and a culture of fear, we practice the spiritual ecology of peace.

A human brain in action ..

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 05:40:59 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: stressbuster1.com

McCain backdrop - Walter Reed School Middle School not Medical Center

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:54:16 GMT

clipped by: Kelika

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

It was an unexpected burst of glory, and the 1,600 students at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood were basking in it Friday.

None of the youngsters knew for certain why a 50-foot-wide image of the front of their school was projected Thursday night behind Sen. John McCain as he accepted the Republican Party presidential nomination. But there were plenty of theories.

Sixth-grader Joshua Popue offered the explanation most commonly being floated Friday both at the Irvine Avenue campus and in political circles: Somebody in the McCain campaign mistook Walter Reed Middle School for the military's troubled Walter Reed Army Medical Center when preparing the Republicans' high-tech video background wall.

"McCain messed up. He was talking about Walter Reed hospital, and he used our picture by mistake," said 11-year-old Joshua.

Skyla Swafford, 12, took a more charitable view.

"They picked us because our school is one of the nicer schools in the city. They keep it clean and sanitary,"