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POPSMore and more e-books being stored on the 'cloud' It will be very interesting to see which of these approaches becomes the preferred option, and especially how popular "demand" affects "price". Given the increasing availability of "annotation" services that overlay web content and the increasing demands on personal time, it is easy to anticipate that "user generated" annotation content may well become the modern equivalent of the Reader's Digest "condensed" book.
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POPSManaging Wildlife Populations I recommend reading the full article. My own feeling is whilst this is a success story generally, bringing the numbers of elephants in Sth Africa from virtual extinction into now finding a solution to manage their population growth. There is a huge irony that is much more subtle.
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POPSAugmented Reality "as a way to expand the real-world." Jean Baudrillard didn't have a point to make did he ...
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POPSHow criticism of the global warming orthodoxy dissapeared from Wikipedia
the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago. Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.
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POPSThe Health Bill Is Scary My 25 years as a practicing physician have shown me what happens when government attempts to practice medicine: Doctors respond to government coercion instead of patient cues, and patients die prematurely. Even if the public option is eliminated from the bill, these onerous rationing provisions will remain intact. For instance, the Reid bill (in sections 3403 and 2021) explicitly empowers Medicare to deny treatment based on cost. An Independent Medicare Advisory Board created by the bill"composed of permanent, unelected and, therefore, unaccountable members"will greatly expand the rationing practices that already occur in the program. Medicare, for example, has limited cancer patients' access to Epogen, a costly but vital drug that stimulates red blood cell production. It has limited the use of virtual, and safer, colonoscopies due to cost concerns. And Medicare refuses medical claims at twice the rate of the largest private insurers.
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POPSThe Psychology of Cyberspace John Suler, Ph.D. Department of Psychology, Science and Technology Center Rider University. There is a rapidly growing field of 'cyberpsychology': the contents here suggest some of the areas of focus. Clearly, business and marketing research are well represented in studies; another interesting area of study is the social site as a virtual laboratory for studying human personality, motivation,etc; related to the latter the pressing question of how internet relationships (e.g. friendship, group, lover) interact with individuals' lives beyond the internet.
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POPS The Boston Tea Party December 16, 1773 The British tea dumped in Boston Harbor on the night of December 16 was valued at some $18,000. Parliament, outraged by the blatant destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British. This Day In History "The Boston Tea Party December 16, 1773 http://bit.ly/8eDIl3 youtube video http://bit.ly/4o3vSK
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POPS A Festive Virtual Christmas Fireplace w/ Sam Harris music (20min)
This is a perfect 20 minute break in your work day at the office! A virtual yuletide video fireplace right on your computer screen, any time you want! With highest quality video, stereo audio and high definition TV picture resolution. First make sure you select the "HQ" icon at the bottom of the widescreen video for HDTV quality, and the button that opens the video to FULL SCREEN so it fills your entire computer monitor. Dim the lights if you can, and sit back to relax and listen. We have selected six of the softest songs from Sam's album "On This Night", mixed together to blend smoothly, and with a bit of invigoration at the end with Sam's self penned song "All I Need This Christmas", to get you back on track to your daily routine. The order played in the video is: 1) THE FIRST NOEL 2) LITTLE DRUMMER BOY 3) THE CHRISTMAS SONG 4) HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS 5) ANGELS WE HAVE HEARD ON HIGH 6) ALL I NEED THIS CHRISTMAS
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POPSImplicit: Discovering Your Unconscious Bias This site presents some amazing tests that help you explore your hidden beliefs. More from the site below: "Project Implicit blends basic research and educational outreach in a virtual laboratory at which visitors can examine their own hidden biases. Project Implicit is the product of research by three scientists whose work produced a new approach to understanding of attitudes, biases, and stereotypes. The Project Implicit site (implicit.harvard.edu) has been functioning as a hands-on science museum exhibit, allowing web visitors to experience the manner in which human minds display the effects of stereotypic and prejudicial associations acquired from their socio-cultural environment."
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POPSHistory as the Monster and the balm of Gilead
History is the monster. And there is no escape. You can't talk your way out of it--at every step we're confronted by our own laziness. It warps our stories, reduces beautiful and complicated narratives about race, sports, agency into cartoonish fairy tales. It's sad. I always thought that what we needed in this country wasn't so much cash payments, but some respect for history. Not history as an excuse for hamburgers, hot dogs and chips, but history as a way of understanding who we--despite ourselves-- really are. And for African-Americans, history really is the balm in Gilead. I think a lot of us can come to some peace, can come to understand that whatever happened to us, there are limits on what anyone can do to make it right, and while those limits have to be pushed, some of this we're going to have to carry ourselves. And then with a even broader sense we can understand that our suffering is not singular, that it isn't the only suffering.
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POPSGoogle to Put Iraqi Artifacts Online “I can think of no better use of our time and our resources than to make the images and the ideas of your civilization available to all the people of the world,” Mr. Schmidt said.