"Do you think its just a coincidence that the same culture that uses this kind of indeterminate word is the culture that came up with the uncertainty principle
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You Say Potato, I Say Cassava: Language, Culture and Perception: Scientific American Po... - 0 views
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we are obsessed with time, we talk about time all the time and in fact time is the number one noun in terms of usage according to the Oxford [English] Dictionary.
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So we are talking about time all the time, but if you actually ask someone to define what time is, [they] really can't do it.
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So how do we talk about time? We talk about it metaphorically, and for the most part and this not just in English, but across the world in many different languages.
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So the metaphors we have like time being a landscape that we are moving across; so we talk about "coming up to Thanksgiving," as though Thanksgiving is a location that we are moving towards, but we also sometimes talk about time as something that's moving while we are static.
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Kuuk Thaayorre, the language of Pormpuraaw, is that time moves for them from east to west, so they don't talk about it as moving from east to west, but in terms of nonlinguistic cognition—we've tested this in various ways—they seem to depict it as moving from east to west
Culture - 0 views
About Singapore - Singapore culture & language, religion of Singapore, Singlish - 0 views
Singapore Culture - 0 views
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Were video games to blame for massacre? - Technology & science - Games - msnbc.com - 0 views
www.msnbc.msn.com/18220228
Entertainment Brain Games Society Psychology Violence Aggression Jack Thompson
shared by Ben Walters on 14 Nov 10
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The shooting on the Virginia Tech campus was only hours old, police hadn't even identified the gunman, and yet already the perpetrator had been fingered and was in the midst of being skewered in the media.
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Video games. They were to blame for the dozens dead and wounded. They were behind the bloodiest massacre in U.S. history. Or so Jack Thompson told Fox News and, in the days that followed, would continue to tell anyone who'd listen.
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But whether Seung-Hui Cho, the student who opened fire Monday, was an avid player of video games and whether he was a fan of "Counter-Strike" in particular remains, even now, uncertain at best.
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Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the school shootings and the finger-pointing that followed, game players and industry advocates say they're outraged that the brutal acts of a deeply disturbed and depressed loner with a history of mental illness would be blamed so quickly on video and computer games. They say this is perhaps the most flagrant case of anti-game crusaders using a tragedy to promote their own personal causes.
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"It's so sad. These massacre chasers — they're worse than ambulance chasers — they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox," said Jason Della Rocca,
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When Jack Thompson gets worked up, he refers to gamers as "knuckleheads." He calls video games "mental masturbation." When he's talking about himself and his crusade against violent games, he calls himself an "educator." He likes to use the word "pioneer."
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On those rare occasions when a student opens fire on a school campus, Thompson is frequently the first and the loudest to declare games responsible. In recent years he's blamed games such as "Counter-Strike," "Doom" and "Grand Theft Auto III" for school shootings in Littleton, Colo., Red Lake, Minn. and Paducah, Ky.
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He's blamed them for shootings beyond school grounds as well. In an attempt to hold game developers and publishers responsible for these spasms of violence, Thompson has launched several unsuccessful lawsuits.
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"It disgusts me," said Isaiah Triforce Johnson, a longtime gamer and founder of a New York-based gaming advocacy group that, in response to the accusations, is now planning what is the first ever gamer-driven peace rally.
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authorities released a search warrant listing the items found in Cho's dorm room. Not a single video game, console or gaming gadget was on the list, though a computer was confiscated. And in an interview with Chris Matthews of "Hardball," Cho's university suite-mate said he had never seen Cho play video games.
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"This is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer,"
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And in a letter sent to Bill Gates Wednesday, he wrote: "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill."
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Fed up with the scapegoating and lack of understanding, gamer groups have begun to get increasingly organized in their attempts to change public perception of their favorite hobby.
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"You cannot tell me — common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that."
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Dr. Karen Sternheimer, a sociologist at the University of Southern Calfornia and author of the book " Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions About Today's Youth," disagrees. She believes that it didn't require much skill for Cho to shoot as many people as he did. After all, eye witness accounts indicate many of the victims were shot at point-blank range.
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And for all of Thompson's claims that violent video games are the cause of school shootings, Sternheimer points out that before this week's Virginia Tech massacre, the most deadly school shooting in history took place at the University of Texas in Austin… in 1966. Not even "Pong" had been invented at that time.
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Sternheimer says the rush to blame video games in these situations is disingenuous for yet another reason. Although it remains unclear whether Cho played games, it seems nobody will be surprised if it turns out he did. After all, what 23-year-old man living in America hasn't played video games?
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"Especially if you're talking about young males, the odds are pretty good that any young male in any context will have played video games at some point,"
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"I think in our search to find some kind of answer as to why this happened, the video game explanation seems easy," she says. "It seems like there's an easy answer to preventing this from happening again and that feels good on some level."
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Jason Della Rocca agrees. "Everyone wants a simple solution for a massively complex problem. We want to get on with our lives."
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As the leader of an organization that represents video game creators from all over the world, Della Rocca knows the routine all too well.
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Someone opens fire on a school campus. Someone blames video games. His phone starts ringing. People start asking him questions like, "So how bad are these games anyway?"
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Of course, he also knows that this is far from the first time in history that a young form of pop culture has been blamed for any number of society's ills. Rock and roll was the bad guy in the 1950s. Jazz was the bad guy in the 1930s. Movies, paintings, comic books, works of literature…they've all been there.
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Still, Della Rocca believes that people like Thompson are "essentially feeding off the fears of those who don't understand games."
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For those who didn't grow up playing video games, the appeal of a game like "Counter-Strike" can be hard to comprehend. It can be difficult to understand that the game promotes communication and team work. It can be hard fathom how players who love to run around gunning down their virtual enemies do not have even the slightest desire to shoot a person in real life.
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While Thompson concedes that there are many elements that must have driven Cho to commit such a brutal act, he insists that without video games Cho wouldn't have had the skills to do what he did. "He might have killed somebody but he wouldn't have killed 32 if he hadn't rehearsed it and trained himself like a warrior on virtual reality. It can't be done. It just doesn't happen."
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the members of Empire Arcadia — a grassroots group dedicated to supporting the gaming community and culture — have been so incensed by the recent attempts to blame video games for the Virginia Tech shootings that they've begun planning a rally in New York City with the assistance of the ECA.
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"There we will protest, mourn and show how real gamers play video games peacefully and responsibly," organizer Johnson wrote on the group's Web site. "This demonstration is to show that gamers will not take the blame of this tragic matter but we will do what we can to help put an end to terrible events like this." Johnson says that, ultimately, he hopes the rally — scheduled for May 5 — will help people better understand video game enthusiasts like him. "We are normal people," he says. "We just play games."
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Abortion, Infanticide Foeticide India - 1 views
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According to a recent report
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up to 50 million girls and women are missing from India' s population as a result of systematic gender discrimination in India.
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United States of America: Foreign Aid - 0 views
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Most donations come from individuals (76 percent of the total), and some nonprofit sectors were hit harder last year than others
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absolute figures are less significant than the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP, or national wealth) that a country devotes to foreign aid
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50% of its aid budget is spent on middle-income countries in the Middle East, with Israel being the recipient of the largest single share.
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Eating Disorders and the Media | Media Influence on Eating Disorders | Anorexia | Bulim... - 0 views
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Okay, so we all want to hear how Calvin Klein is the culprit and that the emaciated waif look has caused women to tale-spin into the world of Eating Disorders. While the images of child-like women has obviously contributed to an increased obsession to be thin, and we can't deny the media influence on eating disorders, there's a lot more to it than that.
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Images on T.V. spend countless hours telling us to lose weight, be thin and beautiful, buy more stuff because people will like us and we'll be better people for it. Programming on the tube rarely depicts men and women with "average" body-types or crappy clothes, ingraining in the back of all our minds that this is the type of life we want. O
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while thin women and pumped-up men are the successful, popular, sexy and powerful ones. How can we tell our children that it's what's inside that counts, when the media continuously contradicts this message?
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han the typical woman and maintains a weight at about 15 to 20 percent below what is considered healthy for her age and height.
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the ideal body" combined with the diet industry's drive to make more money, creates a never-ending cycle of ad upon ad that try to convince us
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Barbie-type dolls have often been blamed on playing a role in the development of body-image problems and Eating Disorders.
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Not only do these dolls have fictionally proportioned, small body sizes, but they lean towards escalating the belief that materialistic possessions, beauty and thinness equate happiness.
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Barbie has more accessories available to purchase than can be believed, including Ken, her attractive boyfriend.
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With an increased population of children who spend a lot of time in front of television, there are more of them coming up with a superficial sense of who they are.
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we are continually exposed to the notion that losing weight will make us happier and it will be through "THIS diet plan".
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These images may not help, and for those already open to the possibility of negative coping mechanisms and/or mental illness, the media may play a small contributing role -- but ultimately, if a young man or woman's life situation, environment, and/or genetics leave them open to an Eating Disorder (or alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, OCD, etc.), they will still end up in the same place regardless of television or magazines.
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it helps to perpetuate an ideal of materialism, beauty, and being thin as important elements to happiness in one's life.
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Most New Yorkers Oppose Ground Zero Mosque: Poll | NBC New York - 0 views
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A majority of New Yorkers oppose plans to build a mosque and Muslim cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll released Thursday.
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Fifty-two percent of the respondents said they did not want the mosque to be built at all, 31 percent are in favor of it, and 17 percent are undecided.
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"New York enjoys a reputation as one of the most tolerant places in America, but New Yorkers are opposed to a proposal to build a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero," said Quinnipiac University Polling Institute Director Maurice Carroll in a press release.
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"The Mozart Effect": A Small Part of the Big Picture - 0 views
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the Mozart Effect actually does not increase general intelligence and lasts only a few minutes, it does not provide a substitute for music study and practice.
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Studies have shown that music education and music-making have positive effects on many mental and behavioral factors that are themselves not part of music.
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mass media have played a major role in starting and maintaining public excitement about the Mozart Effect.
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This story began in 1993 when Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Katherine Ky published a brief paper in the prestigious journal Nature
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. The report by Rauscher, Shaw and Ky suggested that listening to music actually caused the brain to perform better in spatial reasoning, at least for a few minutes.
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the question is whether or not brief exposure to certain music can produce long term improvements in intelligence, either limited to spatial/temporal abilities or to more general intelligence, then the answer is no.
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Understanding and appreciating musical forms, genres, meanings and performances in historical, social and cultural context
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Reading musical notation, integrating sight, sound, touch and movements to perform and express self musically, solo, in cooperative group or both
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Mozart Effect requires only 10 minutes of exposure (not necessarily even attentive listening) to music.
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Shark fin soup alters an ecosystem - CNN - 0 views
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Yet, in a relatively short period of time, humans and their technological arsenal have driven most shark populations to the verge of extinction.
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These are ecosystems that have evolved over millions and millions of years," said Knights. "As soon as you start to take out an important part of it, it's like a brick wall, you take out bricks [and] eventually it's going to collapse."
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What is rarely reported is that worldwide, sharks kill an average of 10 people every year. It's usually when people venture into a shark's habitat and not the other way around. By contrast, humans kill around 100 million sharks every year - a number that has ballooned in recent years because of the enormous demand for shark fins to make shark fin soup.
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Shark fin soup is a delicacy reserved for the wealthy on special occasions and it has been part of Chinese culture for centuries. For years, only rich Chinese mostly in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore consumed it, so the impact on the overall shark population was negligible
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Video-game sales overtaking music - MSN Money - 0 views
articles.moneycentral.msn.com/...oGameSalesOvertakingMusic.aspx
Economy Games Money Sales Music Growth
shared by Ben Walters on 15 Nov 10
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video-game sector will remain one of the above-average growth segments of the global entertainment industries through 2011, with global games spending set to exceed music spending this year
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Key growth engines will include online and wireless games, new-generation consoles and the burgeoning in-game advertising business.
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2011, the worldwide gaming market will be worth $48.9 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 9.1%
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For the U.S. gaming business, PwC projects 6.7% compound annual gains for the five-year period, to $12.5 billion. Asia-Pacific should remain the region with the highest overall spending on gaming during the period and reach $18.8 billion in 2011, PwC forecasts.
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Despite its leading size, its 10% average annual gains will only be exceeded by the combined region of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), which is pegged for a 10.2% compound annual gain and is set to remain at No. 2 in terms of worldwide gaming.
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Consumer spending on console and hand-held games will go from $6.5 billion in 2006 to $7.9 billion in 2011
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However, the U.S. PC games market will continue its decline, with PwC eyeing a contraction from an estimated $969 million in 2006 to $840 million in 2011.
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this estimate could prove conservative as "advertisers like to reach the younger males" that many games tend to attract.
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He also said that the overall gaming audience continues to expand and become somewhat more female and older than in the past thanks to casual games and the arrival as games as an "important part of culture."