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POPSIs Forbes acquiring Clipmarks? VentureBeat just ran a story stating that Forbes has acquired Clipmarks. I wanted to quickly fill everyone in on what's going on. First, this article is a bit premature. We have not been acquired by Forbes. However, for the past few months we have been meeting with people at all levels of Forbes and the excitement and support they have shown for what we're creating has been very meaningful to us. As many of you have probably seen already, a number of their writers are already clipping and our technology has been integrated on forbes.com. For quite a while, we have been in talks with various parties about helping to financially support clipmarks. However, we hadn't yet found the right "partner" to help us complete this journey. A partner who fully understands our vision for making news and information more portable and interactive than ever before. Therefore, we just kept looking. Continued...
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POPSSchizophrenia: The Curse That's Almost a Blessing
A recent study may have found what kind of process goes awry in schizophrenic brains. Researchers found that DISC1 regulates the migration of new neurons in the adult brain. When the levels of DISC1 were reduced in mice during adult neurogenesis, the newborn neurons sped up and overshot their intended targets within the hippocampus, When the neurons finally reached their destinations, they forged an unusual number of connections with neighboring cells, a series of events that might give rise to the abnormal—and quite crippling—brain functions associated with schizophrenia, according to Hongjun Song, a Johns Hopkins neurologist who also worked on the study. It is possible, Song says, that further research will lead to a drug that treats schizophrenia by restoring normal neurogenesis. So what evolutionary advantage could schizophrenia-related genes bring to people who have some of the genes but not the disease? For now, this remains one of the many open questions.
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POPSDouglas Adams: The Atheist interview People will then often say “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would chose not to worship him anyway.)
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POPSIntimacy In A Fluid World FM-2030 was a name adopted by the transhumanist philosopher and futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary (October 15, 1930–July 8, 2000), who professed "a deep nostalgia for the future."
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POPSStunning Science! Science is SO beautiful! Go to the site and enjoy more of these fantastic visualisations of wave functions, quantum resonances, classical collisions etc. It's absolutely breathtaking.
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POPSSocial Networking for Zebras Ecologists have turned to computer scientists to develop dynamic graphs of social behavior among Zebra populations, revealing why some are thriving while others are endangered: The difference showed that the Grevy's zebras tended to hang out in cliques, whereas the onagers spent time with different buddies on different days. The methods developed turn out to applicable to human networks, too: In the meantime, Berger-Wolf is testing her methods on other datasets, including the records of e-mails exchanged at Enron that became available after they were subpoenaed. She has found some surprising connections between the two kinds of networks. "We can see that our method to detect when a lion was in the area of zebras detects very well when the subpoena was issued at Enron," she says. When faced with a lion, the zebras flee and follow one lead zebra. Similarly, after the subpoena was issued, e-mail traffic to the lawyers increased dramatically.
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POPSCultivating gratitude- interview Prof. Robert Emmons studies gratitude for a living as Professor of Psychology at UC Davis and is Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Positive Psychology. He has just published Thanks: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, an interdisciplinary book that provides a research-based synthesis of the topic as well as practical suggestions.
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POPS Self models There is no such thing as a substantial self (as a distinct ontological entity, which could in principle exist by itself), but only a dynamic, ongoing process creating very specific representational and functional properties. Self-consciousness is a form of physically realized representational content
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