Clipmarks | Survival Clips

HUNTRESS by AUDIOTHOR

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:22:06 GMT

clipped by: skwirlinator
clipper's remarks: Audio Fiction

Clip Source: www.audiothor.com

Welcome to Audiothor

Allow yourself to escape to a world of audio adventure.

Episode One - 38 Minutes Episode Two - 50 Minutes

HUNTRESS by AUDIOTHOR........PURE ENTERTAINMENT.

HUNTRESS PART 2 - NOW AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD

Using acclaimed voice acting, spatial stereo sound effects and an original music soundtrack, this Earth-shattering audio series tells the story of Roxanne Hawkins, 'Roxy' to her friends', who, while out shopping in London with her Mother, witnesses a meteorite bombardment which devastates the city.

It is the aggressive prelude to an alien invasion.

With the world conquered and Humankind being hunted to the verge of extinction, can the young mind of this little girl become a weapon in the fight for survival?

Huntress recently reviewed in DEATHRAY magazine

EXCLUSIVE
THIS AUDIOSTORY DOWNLOAD IS ONLY AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE

Two years in the making, Huntress is a science fiction audio story told through the eyes of a girl called Roxy. Now, you can join her on her adventure.

Tags: audiothor, scifi, fiction, story, audio, download

The World in Six Songs...

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:06:56 GMT

clipped by: einbar

Clip Source: www.theispot.com

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

In his new book, The World in Six Songs, cognitive psychologist and former record producer Daniel Levitin argues that all music, from orchestral classics to thrash metal and tribal dance, can be grouped into just six categories: friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, ritual and love.

Friendship

songs have served to reinforce social bonds throughout human history.

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

Give Peace A Chance - John Lennon

[Video]

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Give Peace a Chance became an anthem for the anti-war movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Joy

joyful singing is a sign of positive mental health

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah

[Video]

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Comfort

many people continue to use music to ease their worries and soothe their emotional pain.

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

Everybody Hurts

[Video]

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Ceremony

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

Elgar conducting Pomp and Circumstance March no.1

[Video]

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Love

Presumably the popularity of love-based music stems from the universal need to mate and reproduce, a need that in many species overpowers all others, including the urge for individual survival.

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

The Beatles - I Want To Hold Your Hand (Love Version)

[Video]

Minding Mistakes: How the Brain Monitors Errors and Learns from Goofs

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:03:20 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Where in the brain does the ERN originate? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, among other imaging methods, researchers have repeatedly found that error recognition takes place in the medial frontal cortex, a region on the surface of the brain in the middle of the frontal lobe, including the anterior cingulate. Such studies implicate this brain region as a monitor of negative feedback, action errors and decision uncertainty—and thus as an overall supervisor of human performance.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The brain contains neural machinery for recognizing errors, correcting them, and optimizing behavior.

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a major role in our ability to learn from our mistakes.

Genetic variants that affect dopamine signaling may partly explain differences between people in the extent to which they learn from errors or negative consequences.

Certain patterns of cerebral activity often foreshadow errors, opening up the possibility of preventing blunders with portable devices that can detect error-prone brain states.

Although people understandably would like to avoid serious errors, most goofs have a good side: they give the brain information about how to improve or fine-tune behavior. In fact, learning from mistakes is likely essential to the survival of our species.

Hints of the brain’s error-detection apparatus emerged serendipitously in the early 1990s.

error-related negativity, or ERN

ERN may appear after various types of errors, unfavorable outcomes or conflict situations

Tags: brain, neuroscience, behavior

Russian judge: sexual harrassment is good because it produces children

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:04:31 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Glad I'm not a Russian woman, is all I can say.

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Sexual harassment okay as it ensures humans breed, Russian judge rules

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

Tags: gender, sex, discrimination, civil_rights, law, russia, international, news

Corruption seen as grave threat to Iraqi democracy

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:52:41 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: At first I thought that the Iraquis had been quick learners, but it is a way of survival in countries where incomes are low due to greed

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Corruption is a grave and gathering threat to Iraq's fragile democracy and its strides in curtailing bloodshed, a senior U.S. official in Baghdad said.

Unchecked, corruption "threatens the stability of the democracy, because people won't support a government that is widely viewed as corrupt through and through," Ambassador Lawrence Benedict, anti-corruption coordinator at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, said in an interview this week.

"Senior officials in the Iraqi government have characterized corruption as the second insurgency -- that's pretty strong language in a place like this," Benedict said. "Iraqis view it a serious problem, and we certainly share that view."

Widespread graft is drawing scrutiny as Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite-led government seeks to match success on the battlefield with government reforms and political progress.

After more than five years of war, violence across Iraq has dropped to levels not seen since 2004.

AI Vs IA, a different level of survival?

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:13:19 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Singularity is near.
What does the human fear?

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master?

Dr. Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist in San Diego whose science fiction has won five Hugo Awards

He can write space operas with the best of them, but he also suspects that intergalactic sagas could become as obsolete as their human heroes.

The problem is a concept described in Dr. Vinge’s seminal essay in 1993, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” which predicted that computers would be so powerful by 2030 that a new form of superintellligence would emerge.

These people in ‘Rainbows End’ have the attention span of a butterfly,” he said.

I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute

the future: intelligence amplification, or I.A., in which humans get steadily smarter by pooling their knowledge with one another and with computers, possibly even wiring the machines directly into their brains

urging his fellow humans to get smarter

Trying hard not to become obsolete

Tags: ai, ia, future

Love is a memory tool :)

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:38:40 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: i believe that there can be love which is not based on survival mechanism. Though rare...

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Behavior: Nothing Says ‘Focus’ Like Memory of Love

In a new study, people shown images of attractive men and women paid less attention to them if they had just been reminded about the person they loved.

For the study, the researchers looked at more than 100 college students who said they were in committed relationships.

One group was asked to write short essays about “a time in which they experienced strong feelings of love for their current partner.” The other volunteers were asked to write about a time when they were extremely happy.

When attractive faces of the opposite sex appeared, the students were slower to identify the shapes. But those who had written about their loved ones were less distracted.

Long-term relationships, the researchers said, offer benefits for reproduction, in part because both parents can play a role in rearing the children.

Tags: behavior, love, evolution

Study shows when to manage species

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:53:50 GMT

clipped by: pokkets

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Stephen Pincock

Conservationists should carry on managing the environment as if a seemingly vanished species is still around, rather than rushing to check whether it is extinct, say researchers.

The research, headed by Dr Iadine Chades from the University of Queensland, appears online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Research group leader, Professor Hugh Possingham, says animals or plants that have not been seen for some time are known to scientists as "cryptic species".

"A lot of threatened species are cryptic," he says. "The question is how do you know how to best protect them?"

The researchers found that assuming the species is still around, even though it has not been seen for some time, is the most cost-effective strategy.

The bottom line, however, was that money should be spent first in managing the environment to give a threatened species the best chance of survival, rather than engaging in efforts to survey for its presence, the researchers say.

Epidemic of Poverty Killing UK Children

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 07:31:16 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

'Poverty is now one of the greatest dangers faced by our children,

If poverty were an infection, we would be in the midst of a full-scale epidemic.'

An 'epidemic of poverty' in Britain is having a dramatic impact on the survival rates and health chances of children from poor families, an influential coalition will warn this week in a major report that casts doubt on government efforts to close the inequality gap.

a 'huge injustice' in British society and has become one of the major factors affecting child mortality rates

Poorer children are two-and-a-half times more likely to suffer chronic illness when toddlers and twice as likely to have cerebral palsy

highlights how socio-economic factors affect the entire life of children born into poverty, from foetal development and early infancy through to teenage years and adulthood

children's health and very survival are threatened by family poverty

profound implications for public policy

requires bold action

Just Say No To Socialized Medicine

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:55:47 GMT

clipped by: bmeuppls
clipper's remarks: True, other developed nations may spend less on health care as a percentage of gross domestic product than the United States does — but so does Sudan. Without considering value, such statistical evaluations are worthless.

And one of the primary reasons health care costs more in America is that we are a wealthy country that demands the best. And, we’re investing a lot more in medical research.

The United States produces over half of the $175 billion in health care technology products purchased globally. In 2004, the federal government funded medical research to the tune of $18.4 billion. By contrast, the European Union — which has a significantly larger population than the United States — allocated funds equal to just $3.7 billion for medical research.

Clip Source: www.powerlineblog.com

According to an August 2008 study published in Lancet Oncology, the renowned British medical journal, Americans have a better than five-year survival rate for 13 of the 16 most prominent cancers when compared with their European and Canadian counterparts.

With breast cancer, for instance, the survival rate among American women is 83.9 percent. For women in Britain, it’s just 69.7 percent. For men with prostate cancer, the survival rate is 91.9 percent here but just 73.7 percent in France and 51.1 percent in Britain.

American men and women are more than 35 percent more likely to survive colon cancer than their British counterparts.

It’s no wonder then that foreign dignitaries living in countries with socialized health care systems routinely come to this country when they need top-flight medical treatment.

Tags: healthcare

Polygamy is the key to a long life

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:03:12 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: Men, by contrast, can reproduce well into their 60s and even 70s and 80s, and most researchers assumed this explained their longevity. But Lummaa and colleague Andy Russell wondered whether other factors explained the long lifespan of men, such as a grandfather effect.
If female survival is the main explanation for male longevity, then monogamous and polygamous men would live for about the same length of time. Instead, it seems that fathering more kids with more wives leads to increased male longevity. Men, then, live long because they're fertile well into their grey years.

The explanation could be both social and genetic. Men who continue fathering kids into their 60s and 70s could take better care for their bodies because they have mouths to feed. But evolutionary forces acting over thousands of years could also select for longer-lived men in polygamous cultures.

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Want to live a little longer? Get a second wife. New research suggests that men from polygamous cultures outlive those from monogamous ones.

After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Rather than a call to polygamy, the research might solve a long-standing puzzle in human biology: Why do men live so long?

This question only makes sense after asking the same for women, who - unlike nearly all other animals - live long past the menopause.

One answer seems to be a phenomenon called the grandmother effect. For every 10 years a woman survives past the menopause, she gains two additional grandchildren, Lummaa says. It seems that doting on and spoiling grandchildren aids their survival, as well as furthering some of their grandmother’s genes.

Tags: polygamy, life, longevity

Cradle of maternity in the brain discovered

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:53:47 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: The study also showed that a partial restoration of Pet-1 function in the developing brain of females partially restored their serotonin levels, and maternal behaviour in adulthood.
The finding indicated that subtle changes in the embryonic formation of the brain serotonin system in females could impact the quality of the maternal care they later provide for their offspring.
The researchers say that future studies with Pet-1 deficient mothers may help to further elucidate the link between serotonin and maternal behaviour, and lead to the development of new therapeutic approaches for treatment of post-partum depression and child neglect.

Clip Source: www.thaindian.com

A new study on mice conducted at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine has shown that the inactivation of brain serotonin in the mothers may affect the quality of the maternal care, and in turn offspring survival.

During the study, the researchers genetically engineered mice to carry a mutation in a gene called Pet-1, which directs the development of the brain serotonin neurotransmitter system.

Though Pet-1 deficient mice mothers showed normal rates of pregnancy and gave birth to normal numbers of offspring, it was observed that not of their offspring survived to five days of age.

Further studies indicated that a specific deficiency of maternal care was the cause of pup mortality.

The researchers found that Pet-1 deficient mothers, though nursed their offspring, often failed to build suitable nests and never organized offspring in a huddle.

Tags: behavior, brain, neuroscience, maternity

13 Dangerously Endangered Species

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:38:31 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Let's all try and do our bit...

Clip Source: www.socyberty.com

13 Dangerously Endangered Species

These endangered species are near extinction, but researchers and scientists have helped these rare animals reproduce in captivity.

a collection of 13 endanger species, all with babies born in captivity

Rare Red Pandas

On May 26th, 2008, the Edmonton Valley Zoo welcomed two rare red pandas, who were named Tai and Pip. The cubs have double their birth weight, and increase their survival rate.

Vancouver Island Marmot

only 25 marmots in the wild

Pygmy Rabbit

Scarlet Macaws

live to 80 years and begin to reproduce at 7 years old

White-Backed Vulture

Through the effort of breeding, one white-backed chick had hatched in captivity, in India.

Black-Footed Ferrets

Golden Langur

Black Jaguar

Siberian Tigers

Angel Shark

White Rhinos

The white rhinos are close to extinction, and the first white rhino born in captivity was at Pretoria on June 8, 1967.

Rare Chinese Snub-Nosed Monkey

Black and White Ruffed Lemurs

Tags: endangered, birds, animals, fish, captivity, zoo, sanctuary, national park

Cruelty meets beauty for Pakistan burn victims

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:05:37 GMT

clipped by: wiccantexan

Clip Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

Saira Liaqat squints through her one good eye as she brushes a woman's hair. Her face, most of which the acid melted years ago, occasionally lights up with a smile. Her hands, largely undamaged, deftly handle the dark brown locks.

A few steps away in this popular beauty salon, Urooj Akbar diligently trims, cleans and paints clients' fingernails. Her face, severely scarred from the blaze that burned some 70 percent of her body, is somber. It's hard to tell if she's sad or if it's just the way she now looks.

Liaqat and Akbar are among Pakistan's many female victims of arson and acid attacks. Such tales tend to involve a spurned or crazy lover and end in a life of despair and seclusion for the woman.

The two instead became beauticians.

The women can't escape the mirrors or pictures of glamorous models that surround them, but they consider the salon a second home and a good way to make a living.

Tags: woman, women, pakistan, beauty, survival

Why I Will Not Vote for John McCain

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:53:23 GMT

clipped by: monstersmom
clipper's remarks: "I can verify that John has an infamous reputation for being a hot head. He has a quick and explosive temper that many have experienced first hand. Folks, quite honestly that is not the finger I want next to that red button."

"It is also disappointing to see him take on and support Bush's war in Iraq, even stating we might be there for another 100 years. For me John represents the entrenched and bankrupt policies of Washington-as-usual. The past 7 years have proven to be disastrous for our country. And I believe John's views on war, foreign policy, economics, environment, health care, education, national infrastructure and other important areas are much the same as those of the Bush administration."

"I'm disappointed to see John represent himself politically in ways that are not accurate. He is not a moderate Republican. On some issues he is a maverick. But his voting record is far to the right. I fear for his nominations to our Supreme Court, and the consequent continuing loss o

Clip Source: www.military.com

John McCain is a long-time acquaintance of mine

But there are a number of reasons why I will not vote for him for President of the United States.

John allows the media to make him out to be THE hero POW, which he knows is absolutely not true, to further his political goals.

John was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart for heroism and wounds in combat.

there were approximately 600 military POW's in Vietnam

Silver Stars - 590

Purple Hearts - 1,249

he was one hero among many

Succeeding as a POW is a group sport, not an individual one.

I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.

I believe John's age (73) and survival expectation are not good for being elected to serve as our President for 4 or more years.

I can verify that John has an infamous reputation for being a hot head

Clipmarks | Survival Clips

HUNTRESS by AUDIOTHOR

HUNTRESS PART 2 - NOW AVAILABLE TO DOWNLOAD

EXCLUSIVE THIS AUDIOSTORY DOWNLOAD IS ONLY AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE

The World in Six Songs...

Friendship

Joy

Comfort

Ceremony

Love

Minding Mistakes: How the Brain Monitors Errors and Learns from Goofs

Russian judge: sexual harrassment is good because it produces children

Sexual harassment okay as it ensures humans breed, Russian judge rules

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

Corruption seen as grave threat to Iraqi democracy

AI Vs IA, a different level of survival?

Technology That Outthinks Us: A Partner or a Master?

Love is a memory tool :)

Behavior: Nothing Says ‘Focus’ Like Memory of Love

Study shows when to manage species

Epidemic of Poverty Killing UK Children

Just Say No To Socialized Medicine

Polygamy is the key to a long life

Cradle of maternity in the brain discovered

13 Dangerously Endangered Species

13 Dangerously Endangered Species

These endangered species are near extinction, but researchers and scientists have helped these rare animals reproduce in captivity.

Rare Red Pandas

Vancouver Island Marmot

Pygmy Rabbit

Scarlet Macaws

White-Backed Vulture

Black-Footed Ferrets

Golden Langur

Black Jaguar

Siberian Tigers

Angel Shark

White Rhinos

Rare Chinese Snub-Nosed Monkey

Black and White Ruffed Lemurs

Cruelty meets beauty for Pakistan burn victims

Why I Will Not Vote for John McCain

EXCLUSIVE
THIS AUDIOSTORY DOWNLOAD IS ONLY AVAILABLE FROM THIS SITE