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"There is a biological story with information. I have been repeating that in a natural environment, a stressor is information. So too much information would be too much stress, exceeding the threshold of antifragility. In medicine, we are discovering the healing powers of fasting, as the avoidance of too much hormonal rushes that come with the ingestion of food. Hormones convey information to the different parts of our system and too much of it confuses our biology. Here again, as with the story of the news received at too high a frequency, too much information becomes harmful. And in Chapter x (on ethics) I will show how too much data (particularly when sterile) causes statistics to be completely meaningless. Now let's add the psychological to this: we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never small ones"

Those who are easily distracted from the task in hand may have "too much brain".

"t turns out that all over the world there were people trying to do similar things - opening biohacker spaces. Three years later, this is a thriving global community. Each lab has a flavor of where it was created - people work together or alone, in big cities or small villages, they build things and take them apart, and do much, much more. The spirit is open. But what about the dark side? What about biosafety, biosecurity? The minute Genspace opened their doors, journalists called. And the only question they wanted to ask was, "Would this lab create the next Frankenstein?" The press was overestimating their capabilities - and underestimating their ethic"

"The 18th-century philosopher David Hume (much quoted by Mr. Lehrer) didn't have an M.R.I. scanner at his disposal, but he framed the question in much the same way. His major work, "A Treatise of Human Nature," explored the ways in which habit, or "custom," rules our lives. Hume's experiments with perception - how we respond to colors, distance, numerical sets - prefigure the rigorous science of Professor Kahneman. His intent was to show us "the natural infirmity and unsteadiness both of our imagination and senses." Consciousness, like philosophy itself, stands on a "weak foundation.""

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2010/101207.html Peter Rothwell: In this new work, scientists from Oxford, Edinburgh, London and Japan used data on over 670 deaths from cancer in a range of randomised trials involving over 25,000 people. These trials compared daily use of aspirin against no aspirin and were done originally to look for any preventative effect against heart disease. The results, published in the Lancet, showed that aspirin reduced death due to any cancer by around 20% during the trials. But the benefits of aspirin only became apparent after taking the drug for 5 years or more, suggesting aspirin works by slowing or preventing the early stages of the disease so that the effect is only seen much later. After 5 years of taking aspirin, the data from patients in the trials showed that death rates were 34% less for all cancers and as much as 54% less for gastrointestinal cancers, such as oesophagus, stomach, bowel, pancreas and liver cancers.

I actually had never experienced much better tree transplanting service provider in IL like Arbor Care, Inc. They have finished this task together with terrific efforts. The group members were impressive. I am extremely pleased with their efforts. A pleasant work in very economical cost.

""You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits," he said. "I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make." He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one's ability to make further decisions. It's why shopping is so exhausting. "You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia." The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. "You can't wander around," he said. "It's much harder to be surprised. You don't have those moments of serendipity."

"I visit a lot of molecular biology labs, and most of them look pretty much identical: lab benches, microscopes, computers, messy break rooms, big filing cabinets crammed into every free corner. When you look closely, though, every lab has its own flavor, its own culture. This is the first post of what I hope will be a fun, photo-heavy series on the culture of different labs. Florian Engert's lab at Harvard is large, colorful, and messy."

"Currently making 1.67TB of research data available. Sharing data is hard. Emails have size limits, and setting up servers is too much work. We've designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets - for researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds."

"Rather, these successful men needed to also be blessed with "zeal and with capacity for hard labour." This study is a first glimpse into those essential qualities described by Galton, helping us map out the individual differences that make it slightly easier for some people to engage in hard labor. These diligent souls seem to get a bit more pleasure from the possibility of reward, but they also seem less sensitive to their inner complainer, that disruptive voice reminding them that minesweeper is more fun than editing, or that the ballgame on television is much more entertaining than their homework. At any given moment, there is a tug of war unfolding in our head, determining whether or not we're willing to put in the effort. This sentence only exists because, for a few minutes at least, I was able to win the war."

"I simply cannot believe that John Cook of Skeptical Science and psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky managed, in just 8 pages, to create something as magnificent as their new Debunking Handbook. It is packed not only with wonderful graphics, but also with a clear explanation of why many attempts to defeat misinformation fail, and what steps must be taken to do a better job. The core issue, of course, is one that I've written much about-too many scientists assume that that facts win out on their own, but that isn't actually true"

""It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others." - M.F.K. Fisher Human beings are notoriously terrible at knowing when we're no longer hungry. Instead of listening to our stomach - a very stretchy container - we rely on all sorts of external cues, from the circumference of the dinner plate to the dining habits of those around us. If the serving size is twice as large (and American serving sizes have grown 40 percent in the last 25 years), we'll still polish it off. And then we'll go have dessert."

"However, anthropological datasets show enormous complexity in how and why men and women behave the ways that they do [vi]. Studies in human biology and anthropology regularly demonstrate a dynamic flexibility and complex biocultural context for all human behavior, and this is especially true for gender.... No matter how much some want it to be true, it is just not that simple; there are no clear cut and easy answers to why we do what we do, and why men and women sometimes have problems getting along. To ignore the enormous wealth of data on how men and women are similar AND different and to try to tackle this enormously complex reality via one-dimensional approaches is just poor science."

"Every morning when the sun comes up, the ocean ground is radically cleaned. As soon as the first rays of sunlight find their way into the water, the microalgae "Nitzschia cf pellucida" start their deadly 'morning hygiene'. The algae, the size of only some few micrometers, wrap themselves and their surroundings in a highly toxic poison: cyanogen bromide, a chemical relative of hydrocyanic acid, although much more toxic."

Mathematica is renowned as the world's ultimate application for computations. But it's much more-it's the only development platform fully integrating computation into complete workflows, moving you seamlessly from initial ideas all the way to deployed individual or enterprise solutions.

The New Library of Alexandria, the New Bibliotheca Alexandrina is dedicated to recapture the spirit of openness and scholarship of the original Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It is much more than a library. It contains: A Library that can hold millions of books.An Internet ArchiveSix specialized libraries for Arts, multimedia and audio-visual materials, the visually impaired, children, the young, microforms, and rare books and special collections

"At least it doesn't when you practise over and over again without a break. Sydney scientists have found learning improves when students take a rest from continuous study or training. ''It seems intuitive that every minute of study should make you better, but, actually, if you do too much it might backfire and you end up wasting time,'' said the study's lead researcher, Joel Pearson."

"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."

"The problem, as I see it, is that we are not doing very much to remedy these issues, and that a lot of people have already accepted that "true science" is simply an ideal that will inevitably disappear with the current system proceeding along as it is. As such, why risk our careers and reputations to fight for some noble cause that most of academia won't really appreciate anyway?"