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Intriguing article but frustratingly vague on the measurements used for intelligence testing. Apparently HARDI (High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging) can measure the diffusion of water through the brain, especially myelin. In yet another twin study (n=46 pairs) there appears to be a correlation between diffusion speed and intelligence.

In what may feel like a flashback to the porn wars of the '60s, a new study investigates the link between a country's relative gender equality and the degree of female "empowerment" in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1st, 15th and (yikes) 54th on the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women "from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation." Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is "bound and dominated" by "leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs" or "whether she has a natural looking body." Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of "empowered women" and less of "disempowered women." It turned out the former was true, but, contradictory as it may sound, the latter was not. "While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types -- conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman -- there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women," the researchers explain. In other words, Norwegian porn showed more signs of female empowerment, but X-rated images in all three countries equally depicted women in demeaning positions and scenarios. This, the researchers surmise, "suggests that empowerment and disempowerment within pornography are potentially different constructs." So, gender equality is accompanied by sexual interest in a broader range of beauty types but not a decrease in porn's infantilization of females, use of dominating fetish gear on women or any of the other characteristics th

Pre Historic Puzzles: Rocking the Cradle of Civilization For more than a century, archeologists were convincing that the cradle of civilization lay in Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The learning of the advanced peoples of this region, it was thought, gradually moved west into Europe. But in the last few decades these theories have been overturned, thanks to Nobel Prize-winning physicist Willard F. Libby and a substance knows as carbon 14. Carbon 14 is a radioactive substance that exists in minute quantities. In the late 1940's Libby discovered that all plants and animals absorb it. When they die, the carbon-like all radioactive substances-begins to decay at a regular rate. Libby was able to measure this rate and could thus use carbon 14 as an archeological calendar. Today it is known that half of the carbon 14 in living organism disappears in 5,730 years, half of what remains in an additional 5,730 years, and so on. How old is old? Many of the items found at prehistoric sites are made of organic material. By measuring the amount of carbon 14 remaining in the shaft of an old ax or a piece of pottery, for example, scientists can accurately determine its age. Radiocarbon dating has proved to be phenomenally accurate: it can date to within 100 years going back to 50,000 B.C. It is particularly useful on wood because it can be checked against Dendron-chronology, dating by tree rings. A new ring forms every year in the trunk of a tree as it grows: counting the number of rings enables one to determine the age of any tree. Where did civilization begin?

Buy Wechat Account Introduction Wechat accounts are used for a variety of purposes, from transferring and entering dispatches and making calls to using the mobile payment service, Wechat Pay. Purchasing a Wechat account is a simple process, and one that can be done online. When buying a Wechat account, you'll need to give the account's unique ID number, as well as your own particular information, similar as your name and dispatch address. Once the account is registered, you'll be suitable to use it to communicate with your connections and access the features of Wechat. When buying a Wechat account, make sure you read the terms and conditions and read up on the security measures the account provider has in place to insure your data is kept secure. Companies can use. client service WeChat can be used to give client service to guests, responding to inquiries and furnishing support. Marketing Companies can use WeChat to produce juggernauts, post updates, and announce products and services. Payment WeChat allows companies to accept payments directly from guests through its mobile portmanteau. Content creation Companies can produce and partake blogs, papers, and other content on WeChat. Brand structure Companies can use WeChat to make their brand by connecting with guests and creating a sense of community. Recruiting Companies can use WeChat to retain new workers and share job rosters. Deals Companies can use WeChat to promote their products, services, and specials. Events Companies can use WeChat to host virtual events and promote them to their followers. Buy Wechat Account Are you looking for a way to market your business? Then wechat account is an excellent choice WeChat is a popular social media platform in China that allows druggies to shoot dispatches, make payments, share prints, and more. It's a great way to reach out to implicit guests and make your brand in the Chinese request. With WeChat, you can produce juggernauts, run contests, and offer

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Buy Wechat Account Introduction Wechat accounts are used for a variety of purposes, from transferring and entering dispatches and making calls to using the mobile payment service, Wechat Pay. Purchasing a Wechat account is a simple process, and one that can be done online. When buying a Wechat account, you'll need to give the account's unique ID number, as well as your own particular information, similar as your name and dispatch address. Once the account is registered, you'll be suitable to use it to communicate with your connections and access the features of Wechat. When buying a Wechat account, make sure you read the terms and conditions and read up on the security measures the account provider has in place to insure your data is kept secure. Companies can use. client service WeChat can be used to give client service to guests, responding to inquiries and furnishing support. Marketing Companies can use WeChat to produce juggernauts, post updates, and announce products and services. Payment WeChat allows companies to accept payments directly from guests through its mobile portmanteau. Content creation Companies can produce and partake blogs, papers, and other content on WeChat. Brand structure Companies can use WeChat to make their brand by connecting with guests and creating a sense of community. Recruiting Companies can use WeChat to retain new workers and share job rosters. Deals Companies can use WeChat to promote their products, services, and specials. Events Companies can use WeChat to host virtual events and promote them to their followers. Buy Wechat Account Are you looking for a way to market your business? Then wechat account is an excellent choice WeChat is a popular social media platform in China that allows druggies to shoot dispatches, make payments, share prints, and more. It's a great way to reach out to implicit guests and make your brand in the Chinese request. With WeChat, you can produce juggernauts, run contests, and offer

"To create organizations that are fit for the future, we need to dramatically retool the management systems and processes that govern . . . * How strategies get created * How opportunities get identified * How decisions get made * How resources get allocated * How activities get coordinated * How power gets exercised * How teams get built * How tasks and talent get matched up * How performance gets measured * How rewards get shared"

In a new study, researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" -- a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements. Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their attention in the direction suggested to them by a face on a computer screen. Conservatives, on the other hand, did not

Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. Using the neurochemical specificity of [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography scanning, combined with psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system activity, we found endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening. To examine the time course of dopamine release, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging with the same stimuli and listeners, and found a functional dissociation: the caudate was more involved during the anticipation and the nucleus accumbens was more involved during the experience of peak emotional responses to music. These results indicate that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system. Notably, the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release in an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself. Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.

For example, the researchers tracked which students responded to questions posed to the class as a whole, not one particular student. At the beginning of the semester, female students were much less likely than male students (9 percent vs. 23 percent) to respond to such questions, regardless of the gender of the instructor. But as the course progressed, female students became much more likely to respond to such questions posed by female instructors (46 percent of female students were responding) than to male instructors (only 7 percent of female students were responding). Likewise, a larger percentage of male students answered questions posed by female instructors (42 percent of men) than by male instructors (only 26 percent of men). Notably, however, the impact of having a female instructor vs. a male instructor was much greater for women. The researchers tracked other measures as well. At the beginning of the courses, there were not notable differences in whether female students approached female instructors (12 percent did) or male instructors (13 percent did) with questions after class. But as the course progressed, the percentage of female students approaching female instructors stayed constant, while the number approaching male instructors dropped -- all the way to zero.

IF YOU want to lose weight, convince yourself that everything you eat is highly calorific. It could lower your levels of a hunger hormone, potentially suppressing your appetite. Alia Crum at Yale University and her colleagues gave 46 healthy volunteers the same 380-calorie milkshake but were told it was either a sensible, low-calorie choice or an indulgent, high-calorie one. The team also measured levels of ghrelin - a hormone released by the stomach when we are hungry - before and after participants drank the shake. Ghrelin levels have been shown to spike half an hour before mealtimes and return to normal after eating. Volunteers who thought they had indulged showed significantly greater drops in ghrelin levels than those who thought they had consumed less. The authors suggest that merely thinking that one has eaten something unhealthy can quell hunger pangs and perhaps help curb overeating (Health Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/a0023467). The study shows that food labels can affect consumption in unexpected ways, says David Cummings, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time. Some measures of intelligence - such as performance on Raven's Progressive Matrices in Des Moines and Scotland - have been increasing for at least 100 years. What's most peculiar is how scores have increased:

Why are we all so different? Here is a toolkit for finding out what people are really like IN THE 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, Aristotle's student and successor, wrote a book about personality. The project was motivated by his interest in what he considered a very puzzling question: "Why it has come about that, albeit the whole of Greece lies in the same clime, and all Greeks have a like upbringing, we have not the same constitution of character?" Not knowing how to get at the answer, Theophrastus decided to instead focus on categorising those seemingly mysterious differences in personality. The result was a book of descriptions of personality types to which he assigned names such as The Suspicious, The Fearful and The Proud. The book made such an impression that it was passed down through the ages, and is still available online today as The Characters of Theophrastus. The two big questions about personality that so interested Theophrastus are the same ones we ask ourselves about the people we know: why do we have different personalities? And what is the best way to describe them? In the past few decades, researchers have been gradually answering these questions, and in my new book, Making Sense of People: Decoding the mysteries of personality, I take a look at some of these answers. When it comes to the origins of personality, we have learned a lot. We now know that personality traits are greatly influenced by the interactions between the set of gene variants that we happen to have been born with and the social environment we happen to grow up in. The gene variants that a person inherits favour certain behavioural tendencies, such as assertiveness or cautiousness, while their environmental circumstances influence the forms these innate behavioural tendencies take. The ongoing dialogue between the person's genome and environment gradually establishes the enduring ways of thinking and feeling that are the building blocks of personality. This de

If you tend to be hard on yourself, being less critical can make you more creative: Self-compassion is a multifaceted state of potential utility in alleviating the self-critical tendencies that may undermine creative expressions among certain individuals. To investigate this idea, 86 undergraduates were randomly assigned to control or self-compassion conditions, following which creative originality was assessed by a version of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The manipulation was hypothesized to facilitate creative originality particularly among individuals who are prone to critical self-judgment, as assessed by a trait measure. This interactive hypothesis was supported: Self-judgmental individuals displayed lower levels of creative originality in the control condition, but equal levels of creative originality in the self-compassion condition. Results are discussed in the context of theories of creative potential, self-compassion, and chronic tendencies toward self-criticism. Source: "Don't Be So Hard on Yourself: Self-Compassion Facilitates Creative Originality Among Self-Judgmental Individuals" from Creativity Research Journal, Volume 22, Issue 3, 2010

With its expansive range and unprecedented potential for anonymity, (the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and AOL) to create the world's largest experiment in sexuality in 2009. Quietly tapping into a billion Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than 100 million men and women around the world. The result is the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than 18,000 middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953. Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case that male and female sexuality exist on different planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as well as by small sample sizes. That is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from Web searches and employing the help of Alexa-a company that measures Web traffic and publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world-Ogas and Gaddam shine a light on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has barely been glimpsed. Here is a sampling of their fascinating results, selected from their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts.

Young adults today are marrying at lower rates than previous generations, and self-reports suggest that a lack of economic security plays a role in the decline. However, it is unclear which aspects of economic security truly matter with regard to young adult marriage rates: is it a matter of employment, wages, poverty, or housing? Or, do all these factors matter? Moreover, how does the measurement of each concept matter to understanding how an economic prerequisite to marriage may operate among young adults? Finally, are the economic characteristics of men more relevant to marriage rates than those of women, as research about previous generations suggests?

This is a good article that looks at how anxiety happens- it is more or less something you are born with, but you learn to live with, if you are intelligent about it. Liked it. Good writing.

A study on "framing" and how / if it influences user experience using HD Televisions. "