Autism Breakthrough: Girl's Writings Provide 'Remarkable Insight' on Disorder

"It feels like my legs are on first and a million ants are crawling up my arms," Carly said through the computer.Carly writes about her frustrations with her siblings, how she understands their jokes and asks when can she go on a date."We were stunned," Carly's father Arthur Fleischmann said. "We realized inside was an articulate, intelligent, emotive person that we had never met. This was unbelievable because it opened up a whole new way of looking at her." This is what Carly wants people to know about autism."It is hard to be autistic because no one understands me. People look at me and assume I am dumb because I can't talk or I act differently than them. I think people get scared with things that look or seem different than them." "Laypeople would have assumed she was mentally retarded or cognitively impaired. Even professionals labelled her as moderately to severely cognitively impaired. In the old days you would say mentally retarded, which means low IQ and low promise and low potential," Arthur Fleischman said.

Autism Breakthrough: Girl's Writings Provide 'Remarkable Insight' on Disorder

Seven Medical Myths

Ask your doctor how much water you should drink or why you couldn't keep your eyes open after Thanksgiving dinner, and you're likely to get the same misinformation your mother-in-law might dispense. A study published in the December 2007 British Medical Journal tweaked physicians on their acceptance of some widespread medical beliefs that might now be reclassified as old wives' tales. Here's a rundown:

1. Drink at least 8 glasses of water a day
2. We use only 10 percent of our brains
3. Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
4. Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
5. Shaving causes hair to grow back faster or coarser
6. Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals
7. Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy

Read the article to find why and how they are all false statements

Seven Medical Myths

Newfoundland ice waves

An interesting natural event

Don't underestimate the Shockwave

Do I need to tell more? ;-)

Antique engines inspire nano chip

Antique engines inspire nano chip

...snip...
"'What we are proposing is a new type of computing architecture that is only based on nano mechanical elements,' said Professor Robert Blick of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the paper.

'We are not going to compete with high-speed silicon, but where we are competitive is for all of those mundane applications where you need microprocessors which can be slow and cheap as well.'

In addition to high-temperature automotive applications, Professor Blick envisaged nano mechanical chips being used in everything from toys to domestic appliances.
...snip...
Unlike today's computers, which are based on the movement of electrons around circuits to do useful calculations, the nano mechanical computer would use the push and pull of each tiny part to carry out calculations."
...snip...

Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children

Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children
"People often act on behalf of others. They do so without immediate personal gain, at cost to themselves, and even toward unfamiliar individuals. Many researchers have claimed that such altruism emanates from a species-unique psychology not found in humans' closest living evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee. In favor of this view, the few experimental studies on altruism in chimpanzees have produced mostly negative results. In contrast, we report experimental evidence that chimpanzees perform basic forms of helping in the absence of rewards spontaneously and repeatedly toward humans and conspecifics. In two comparative studies, semi–free ranging chimpanzees helped an unfamiliar human to the same degree as did human infants, irrespective of being rewarded (experiment 1) or whether the helping was costly (experiment 2). In a third study, chimpanzees helped an unrelated conspecific gain access to food in a novel situation that required subjects to use a newly acquired skill on behalf of another individual. These results indicate that chimpanzees share crucial aspects of altruism with humans, suggesting that the roots of human altruism may go deeper than previous experimental evidence suggested."

Peer Review, Publication in Top Journals, Scientific Consensus, and So Forth: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

Peer Review, Publication in Top Journals, Scientific Consensus, and So Forth

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"It does not work as outsiders seem to think."

Peer review, on which lay people place great weight, varies from being an important control, where the editors and the referees are competent and responsible, to being a complete farce, where they are not. As a rule, not surprisingly, the process operates somewhere in the middle, being more than a joke but less than the nearly flawless system of Olympian scrutiny that outsiders imagine it to be. Any journal editor who desires, for whatever reason, to reject a submission can easily do so by choosing referees he knows full well will knock it down; likewise, he can easily obtain favorable referee reports. As I have always counseled young people whose work was rejected, seemingly on improper or insufficient grounds, the system is a crap shoot. Personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion, and a great deal of plain incompetence and irresponsibility are no strangers to the scientific world; indeed, that world is rife with these all-too-human attributes. In no event can peer review ensure that research is correct in its procedures or its conclusions. The history of every science is a chronicle of one mistake after another. In some sciences these mistakes are largely weeded out in the course of time; in others they persist for extended periods; and in some sciences, such as economics, actual scientific retrogression may continue for generations under the misguided (but self-serving) belief that it is really progress.
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Psychopaths Among Us, by Robert Hercz

Psychopaths Among Us, by Robert Hercz
"Dr. Robert Hare claims there are 300,000 psychopaths in Canada, but that only a tiny fraction are violent offenders like Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olsen. Who are the rest? Take a look around"

"Psychopath! psychopath!"

I'm alone in my living room and I'm yelling at my TV. "Forget rehabilitation -- that guy is a psychopath."

Ever since I visited Dr. Robert Hare in Vancouver, I can see them, the psychopaths. It's pretty easy, once you know how to look. I'm watching a documentary about an American prison trying to rehabilitate teen murderers. They're using an emotionally intense kind of group therapy, and I can see, as plain as day, that one of the inmates is a psychopath. He tries, but he can't muster a convincing breakdown, can't fake any feeling for his dead victims. He's learned the words, as Bob Hare would put it, but not the music.

The incredible thing, the reason I'm yelling, is that no one in this documentary -- the therapists, the warden, the omniscient narrator -- seems to know the word "psychopath." It is never uttered, yet it changes everything. A psychopath can never be made to feel the horror of murder. Weeks of intense therapy, which are producing real breakthroughs in the other youths, will probably make a psychopath more likely to reoffend. Psychopaths are not like the rest of us, and everyone who studies them agrees they should not be treated as if they were.

I think of Bob Hare, who's in New Orleans receiving yet another award, and wonder if he's watching the same show in his hotel room and feeling the same frustration. A lifetime spent looking into the heads of psychopaths has made the slight, slightly anxious emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia the world's best-known expert on the species. Hare hasn't merely changed our understanding of psychopaths. It would be more accurate to say he has created it.
..continues..

People Often Think An Opinion Heard Repeatedly From The Same Person Is Actually A Popular Opinion

People Often Think An Opinion Heard Repeatedly From The Same Person Is Actually A Popular Opinion
"Whether people are making financial decisions in the stock market or worrying about terrorism, they are likely to be influenced by what others think. And, according to a new study in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA), repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient's sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is."

NASA - Preventing Sick Spaceships

NASA - Preventing Sick Spaceships
..snip..
"Moreover, the mass of water was only one of several hiding behind different panels. Scientists later concluded that the water had condensed from humidity that accumulated over time as water droplets coalesced in microgravity. The pattern of air currents in Mir carried air moisture preferentially behind the panel, where it could not readily escape or evaporate.

Nor was the water clean: two samples were brownish and a third was cloudy white. Behind the panels the temperature was toasty warm—82F (28C)—just right for growing all kinds of microbeasties. Indeed, samples extracted from the globules by syringes and returned to Earth for analysis contained several dozen species of bacteria and fungi, plus some protozoa, dust mites, and possibly spirochetes.

But wait, there's more. Aboard Mir, colonies of organisms were also found growing on 'the rubber gaskets around windows, on the components of space suits, cable insulations and tubing, on the insulation of copper wires, and on communications devices,' said Andrew Steele, senior staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington working with other investigators at Marshall Space Flight Center."
..snip..

Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?

As anyone who follows the business of culture is aware, the profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success — a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist — to offset the many investments that fail dismally. What may be less clear to casual observers is why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. How could it be that industry executives rejected, passed over or even disparaged smash hits like “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and the Beatles, even as many of their most confident bets turned out to be flops? It may be true, in other words, that “nobody knows anything,” as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood. But why? Of course, the experts may simply not be as smart as they would like us to believe. Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know — a result that has implications not only for our understanding of best-seller lists but for business and politics as well.

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes

"When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raisingthe greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes."

.Science
The enemy within - homophobia among gay men - Brief Article: "IT HAS LONG BEEN A STAPLE OF PSYCH 101 THAT THE THING YOU hate most in other people is the thing you hate in yourself. It doesn't take Freud to figure out that those who hate gay people with the most passion may be suppressing a considerable amount of gay passion of their own.

The idea was never scientifically tested, however, until last year, when Henry Adams, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Georgia, conducted the first Study to measure--quite literally--the homosexuality of homophobes. Adams recruited 64 straight white male college students, rated their level of homophobia according to a standard psychological test, and divided the men into two groups: those who were homophobic and those who were not. Then came the good part. He hooked up the men to devices called penile plethysmographs, which measure arousal, and showed them three different kinds of porn videos: heterosexual, lesbian, and gay male. And you'll never guess what. The men who tested nonhomophobic were, for the most part, left cold by the gay porn. But the men in the homophobic group were turned-on."
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