Group items tagged

December 9th, 02005 - Sam Harris"The View From The End Of The World"This is an audio only presentation. This talk took place in the Conference Center Golden Gate Room, San Francisco. Quote: With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response? Harris began with Christianity. In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. "This is genocidal stupidity," Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics. In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it's likely. The good news of Christ's return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. "End time thinking," Harris said, "is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future." Harris was particularly critical of religious moderates who give cover to the fundamentalists by not challenging them. The moderates say that all is justified because religion gives people meaning in their life. "But what would they say to a guy who believes there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his backyard? The guy digs out there every Sunday with his family, cherishing the meaningthe quest gives them." "I've read the books," Harris said. "God is not a moderate." The Bible gives strict instructions to kill various kinds of sinners, and their relatives, and on occasion their entire towns. Yet slavery is challenged nowhere in the New or

The holiday season is a time for giving. We exchange gifts with our friends. We contribute to our favorite charities. We give money directly to poor people on the street. How can you make the most impact per dollar with your giving for this holiday season?

Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life

Listen up, Facebook and Twitter groupies: how easily can social pressure affect your memory? Very easily, researchers at the Weizmann Institute and University College London have proved, and they think they even know what part of the brain is responsible. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers. They were later invited back to the lab to retake the test. This time, the subjects were also given supposed answers of the others in their film-viewing group (along with social-media-style photos) while being scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) that revealed their brain activity. Is most of what you know false? Planted among these were false answers to questions the volunteers had previously answered correctly and confidently. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time. To determine if their memory of the film had actually undergone a change, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab later to take the memory test once again, telling them that the answers they had previously been fed were not those of their fellow film watchers, but random computer generations. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, correct ones, but get this: despite finding out the scientists messed with their minds, close to half of their responses remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted in the earlier session. An analysis of the fMRI data showed a strong co-activation and connectivity between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. Social reinforcement could act on the amygdala to persuade our brains to replace a strong memory wi

The poultry industry today is dealing with the pestering need to have improved research in order to give sustainable poultry production. So, if you have a poultry farming business plan, you should do market research and gain every information regarding poultry farming because in future it gives you more profit due to rapid consumption of beef.

Soil erosion is a natural occurrence in which soil, debris and sediments are broken down through the flow of wind or action of rain. Coastline Sediment Control gives erosion control systems to control sedimentation and soil erosion.

FUSE Labs works in partnership with product and research teams to ideate, develop, and deliver new social, real-time, and media-rich experiences for home and work. FUSE Labs experiences give users new ways to create, connect and collaborate with the people, information and ideas that matter to them.

SpringerOpen gives you the opportunity to publish open access in all areas of science. It makes it easier than ever for you to widen your readership, comply with open access mandates, retain copyright, and benefit from Springer's trusted brand.

"How many mammal species live in the forest? It sounds like a simple question, but the actual distributions of shy, small or rare mammals are often murky, confounding conservationists seeking to protect them. Yet a paper published online on Tuesday in the journal Molecular Ecology explores a new way to track biodiversity: by capturing flies that feed on carcasses. The flies' stomachs offer DNA diaries of their recent meals, giving scientists clues to which animals live and die in the forest. "The animals are there, but you just don't see them," said Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and an author of the paper. "Those flies will find them and will tell us what is there"

This web page is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. There are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars and then the other maps slowly expand out until we have reached the scale of the entire visible universe.

PlagiarismDetection.org offers an innovative, user-friendly online tool that helps students and instructors with detection and prevention of academic plagiarism. Our sophisticated, yet easy-to-use detector conducts thorough and in-detail detection for plagiarism of a submitted document within a few minutes only. The plagiarism detection software is designed to leave no chances for plagiarized works and runs against all the available Internet resources, including websites, digital databases and online libraries (such as Questia, ProQuest, etc.). As a result, the program underlines the plagiarized parts of the text and indicates the original source the passage was initially taken from. Finally, PlagiarismDetection.org generates a full report, indicating the overall originality rating and the percentage of plagiarized materials in the submitted text. Customer has an opportunity to share plagiarism reports with other people by simply giving them the link, generated by our program.

ai-one™ - biologically inspired intelligence. We sell software development kits (SDKs) for machine learning applications. We give programmers a virtual brain so they can build artificial intelligence into any software application. Unlike other machine learning tools, our technology works in any language, works with any data and learns quickly without human intervention.

"Science is a scheme for thinking and solving issues using evidence. It requires hypotheses, i.e. potential truths that require examination. A hypothesis or scientific idea is only as strong as the evidence to support it. Strong evidence is predictive and reproducible, weak evidence is less so. Scientific thinking gives greater weight to the stronger evidence base."

"During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness."

Wolfram|Alpha Pro gives you a whole new way to interact with Wolfram|Alpha-and immediate access to new, more personal, computational knowledge.

"Slow science was pretty much the only science conceivable for hundreds of years; today, we argue, it deserves revival and needs protection. Society should give scientists the time they need, but more importantly, scientists must take their time."

"An IEEE Spectrum contributing editor, Charette is a self-described "risk ecologist" who investigates the impact of risk on technology and society. His interest is both professional and personal: He's a 33-year member of the IEEE Computer Society and has two daughters who are contemplating STEM careers. "Now I can give better career advice to my daughters," he says"

"Thomson Reuters Cortellis™, your advanced source for timely and accurate Life Sciences information. From drug discovery data to patent reports, the latest global regulatory documentation changes to submission guides, Cortellis can give you the confidence to make the best business decisions, faster."

Free Download - StanfordUniversity - January 22, 2009 - Karl Deisseroth is pioneering bold new treatments for depression and other psychiatric diseases. By sending pulses of light into the brain, Deisseroth can control neural activity with remarkable precision. In this short talk, Deisseroth gives an thoughtful and awe-inspiring overview of his Stanford University lab's groundbreaking research in "optogenetics".

A central point to understanding string theory is that it cannot be formulated the way all other fundamental theories are, by giving the dynamical variables and the equations they obey. We do not know what the fundamental dynamical variables of string theory are, nor the equations they obey.