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POPSWhales in Court "The Navy set out last year to conduct training exercises off the Southern California coast using mid-frequency sonar, a powerful tool for hunting submarines. Unfortunately, it's also a powerful tool for scrambling the brains of whales and other marine mammals, which can be deafened and even killed by such sonar. Though federal law requires the Navy to perform studies of the environmental impact of its exercises, it refused to do so -- and also refused to take common-sense precautions to protect marine life, as it had been doing in other waters."
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POPSCan human consciousness survive without a brain? "Why do you think there is such resistance to studies like yours? Because we're pushing through the boundaries of science, working against assumptions and perceptions that have been fixed. A lot of people hold this idea that, well, when you die, you die; that's it. Death is a moment — you know you're either dead or alive. All these things are not scientifically valid, but they're social perceptions.How is technology challenging the perception that death is a moment?"
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POPSNarcissistic People Most Likely To Emerge As Leaders It is important not to confuse narcissism with high self-esteem, she said. “A person with high self-esteem is confident and charming, but they also have a caring component and they want to develop intimacy with others,” Brunell explained. “Narcissists have an inflated view of their talents and abilities and are all about themselves. They don’t care as much about others.”
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POPSAre men smarter than women? So women have a self-esteem problem? I'm not advocating for self-esteem training and therapy. I think that many of the self-help gurus argue incorrectly that improved self-esteem increases performance. Helping people to perform better increases their self esteem. Giving a kind of carte blanche to self-esteem isn't a good idea in my mind. Rather, I think it should be that increased performance and feedback on the causes of that performance, ability or effort raises self-esteem. As I said, in primary and secondary schools, girls are outperforming boys. And where appropriate, their self-beliefs, hopefully, are increasing.
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POPSMichelle McMullen, Missing and Wanted There are so many questions and accusations surrounding the disappearance of Michelle McMullen, the young mother of a 6 year old, Jayden. Michelle was reported to be taking classes online and had transferred to a college in Louisiana to complete her on campus studies. Apparently she decided to bring her son back to Harrisburg, PA to stay with her parents while she finished her schooling. On the night of September 28, it is reported that Michelle dropped Jayden off at a friend's home in Harrisburg, who, by the way, was not expecting her nor had made prior arrangements to keep Jayden, turned around and headed back to Louisiana, a 17 hour drive.
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POPSCalming your thoughts through mindfulness "We want to move into a place where the outside world will do whatever it's going to do without us going through the roller coaster of emotions," Rogers says. "We want to maintain this more alive, vigilant, present way of being that is somewhat independent of how things are going."
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POPSPlanting Seeds of Disaster
In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” ACORN’s Inside Strategy Yet ACORN’s entirely deserved reputation for militance is balanced by its less-well-known “inside strategy.” The untold story of ACORN’s central role in the financial meltdown is about the one-two punch to the banking system administered by this outside/inside strategy. Critics of the notion that CRA had a major impact on the subprime crisis ask how a law passed in 1977 could have caused a crisis in 2008? The answer has a lot to do with ACORN — and the critical years of 1990-1995. Banks merger or expansion plans were rarely held up under CRA until the late 1980s, when ACORN perfected its technique of filing CRA complaints in tandem with the sort of intimidation tactics perfected by that original “community organizer” ,Saul Alinsky.
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POPSToo many calories send the brain off kilter The researchers report that that increased activity of the IKKß/NF-?B pathway can be divorced from obesity itself -- infusions of either glucose or fat into the brains of mice alone led to this inflammatory brain reaction. Further studies revealed that this activity in the brain leads to insulin and leptin resistance. Insulin lowers blood sugar by causing cells of the body to take it up from the bloodstream. Leptin is a fat hormone important for appetite control. Moreover, the researchers found that treatments preventing the activity of IKKß/NF-?B in the animals' brains protected them from obesity.
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POPSDecoding the sense of smell In future work, the team plans to work with researchers worldwide, including MIT's Media Lab and Department of Biology, to develop a portable microfluidic device that can identify an array of different odors. Such a device could be used in medicine for the early diagnosis of certain diseases that produce distinctive odors, such as diabetes and lung, bladder and skin cancers, Zhang said. There are also a wide range of industrial applications for such a smell-based biosensing device, he said. One application i can think of is developing an antidote for smelly things, people etc.. :)
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POPS Why We Can't Imagine Death? "This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start."
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POPSOutstanding article on parent-child relationship This article in the Statesman Journal is one of the most thorough journalistic presentations of the importance of the first five years of child development AND the critical role that parents play. Most journalists focus on programs, but Mackenzie Ryan gets it right: Parents are the key.
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POPSSocial Welfare Spending with regulation and tax bills close behind. According to Burnside and Whitehurst, other than social welfare and a bit of government regulation, "Obama devoted very little time to most policy areas." Conventional wisdom has it that John McCain holds a political advantage over Obama on war and foreign policy issues, while Obama is favored to handle the economy. Yet Obama's economic experience is largely limited to social welfare spending. Indeed, precisely because of his penchant for spending, Obama's fingerprints are all over Illinois's burgeoning fiscal crisis. . . . Illinois's fate may foreshadow the nation's. Obama's small and carefully targeted spending bills were expressly designed to win passage by a Republican-controlled state senate. But if Obama takes the presidency with a Democratic Congress at his back, we'll likely see a grand-scale version of the fiscal mayhem Obama and his colleagues brought to Illinois.
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POPSThe Physiology And Psychology Of Voting The researchers used a multiple regression analysis to compare the effects of change in skin conductance levels in response to threatening images, gender, age, education, and income on support for socially “protective” policies such as the ones listed above. The only two statistically significant effects were those of education (less education translated into more support for conservative policies) and skin conductance. That in itself means that -- within the confines of this study -- physiology trumps gender, age and income, traditionally considered highly relevant causal factors in politics by social scientists. Moreover, the regression coefficient associated with skin conductance was more than 56 times that of education! !!!
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POPSMusical training enhances integration of the senses This study shows that sensorimotor and auditory training induces cortical reorganization to a greater extent than does auditory training alone. It also shows that sensorimotor and auditory training cause more changes in the auditory cortex than auditory training alone. This phenomemon, called cross-modal plasticity, has been investigated only rarely. In 2003, the same group showed that professional trumput players have enhanced interactions between the auditory cortex and the regions of the somatosensory cortex devoted to the lip. The new study therefore provides another demonstration that the sensorimotor and auditory cortices are connected to each other.
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POPSOur Feet and Our Organs "The Organs of your body have their sensory touches at the bottom of your foot, if you massage these points you will find relief from aches and pains as you can see the heart is on the left foot. Typically they are shown as points and arrows to show which organ it connects to. It is indeed correct since the nerves connected to these organs terminate here. This is covered in great details in Acupressure studies or textbooks.
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POPSApply a skeptic’s careful eye "1. Unnatural environment for cognition 2. Scans are indirect measurements of brain activity. 3. Colors exaggerate the effects in the brain. 4. Brain images are statistical compilations. 5. Brain areas activate for various reasons."
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POPSResearchers decode thought “In one of our early studies, we showed people words representing tools and words representing buildings,” Mitchell said. “We found that we could train our model so that it could successfully distinguish new tool words from new building words.” Having developed a model able to categorize objects correctly approximately 90 percent of the time, the team sought to determine the effect that viewing an object as a picture, as opposed to viewing an object as a word, has on a person’s brain activation patterns. The team therefore trained their model on fMRI data collected from subjects looking at pictures, and then tested the model on fMRI data collected as subjects read corresponding words. “The accuracy was almost the same,” Mitchell said. “The fact that it doesn’t matter whether we use a word or a picture means that we are really capturing the neural activity associated with the meaning of an item, and not just the .”
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