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About 99% of U.S. households (the total of which are in the 115 million range) have a TV, and 56% have cable. Compare that to Netflix, which has more than 48 million members worldwide. That means its entire global viewership is still not even half the U.S. However, that's not bad for a company founded in 1997, tackling a nearly 64-year-old industry.

In the summer months, it's easy to assume Netflix usage would go through the roof, thanks in part to younger students who now have three free months of time.

While Netflix doesn't share specific data on its viewers, spokeswoman Jenny McCabe said the site doesn't acquire more subscribers during the summer months. Rather, it picks up more viewers in Q1 (January, February and March) and Q4 (October, November and December).

uy, based on their culture, mood, beliefs, occasion & geographic locations, it is also dependent on fashion cycle and plays a major role in introductory phase of recurring fashion cycles.

houses around the world totally rely on designers for understanding the same, but on the other side there are others who dont believe in it at all. In current times when we look at technology we know nothing is by chance and there are people who are working behind the scenes, day and night to make things appear easy and affordable to us

Moving forward to the early 20th century, a group of amateur writers called the 'Baker Street Irregulars', which included such luminaries as F.D. Roosevelt and Isaac Asimov, spent time writing and sharing further adventures for none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great fictional dweller of 221b; once the official literary canon had stopped, these fans took it into their own hands to continue the detective's narrative.

une 23, 2008 -- A symptoms checklist, combined with a blood test, can catch 80% of ovarian cancer in its earliest, most curable stages, a new study suggests.

"The symptom index and the CA125 test each finds 50% to 60% of women with early disease," Andersen tells WebMD. "But when they're combined, if either one is positive, we might be able to identify 80.6% of women with early stage ovarian cancer. Women with early stage disease have good chance of a cure -- it's just that right now, we don't find many of them in time.

The symptoms that warn of ovarian cancer aren't, in themselves, very specific. They may seem to be gastrointestinal or psychological rather than gynecological in nature.

These are the “ideal forms” of each of these characters. Yet only one of them is ever viewed sexually to outsiders, the women.

Both are genetic mutants, by any stretch of the imagination, but one is sexual, and the other isn’t.

Every year, millions of men, women and children in Asia venture to new places in search of a better life.

Human trafficking is on the rise in Asia as people flee poverty and conflict

Women and children are the most vulnerable. They are used for commercial sex, domestic labor and construction work.

But it took a long time for solar sails to go from concept to reality. The first successful demonstration of the propulsion system didn't come until 2010, when Japan's Ikaros probe deployed its 46-foot-wide (14 m) sail and became the first craft ever to cruise through space on the backs of photons.

The $27 million Sunjammer mission, which takes its name from the Arthur C. Clarke story, will use a sail built by California-based company L'Garde that measures 124 feet (38 m) on a side. The sail, made of an advanced material called Kapton, is just 5 microns (about 0.0002 inches) thick. It weighs less than 70 pounds (32 kilograms) and packs down to the size of a dishwasher, NASA officials have said.

Non-alignment, as practised by Ghana and many other countries, is based on co-operation with all States whether they be capitalist, socialist or have a mixed economy. Such a policy, therefore, involves foreign investment from capitalist countries, but it must be invested in accordance with a national plan drawn up by the government of the non-aligned State with its own interests in mind.

Computers are already powerful enough to sustain useful robots that interact and assist humans in every-day life. However progress requires a scientific shakedown in goals and methods not unlike the cognitive revolution that occurred 40 years ago.

The document presents the origin and early steps of the RUBI/QRIO project, in which two humanoid robots, RUBI and QRIO, are being brought to an early childhood education center on a daily bases for a period of time of at least one year. The goal of the RUBI/QRIO project is to accelerate progress on everyday life interactive robots by addressing the problem at multiple levels, including the development of new scientific methods, formal approaches, and scientific agenda.

MOST woman in Britain can probably name the signs of breast cancer. But how many of us could identify just one symptom of an even more deadly disease, ovarian cancer?

In fact, the shocking answer is only three per cent - which may explain why we have one of the worst survival rates in Europe.

Three quarters of women are only diagnosed once the cancer has spread, so it's not surprising that, out of the 7,000 new cases every year, only a third of women will live for five years.

Slowly, and only in a few, I watched them struggle to realize that having opposite seasons in the different hemispheres could not possibly be compatible with their "closer to the sun for summer" theory, and that the sun and the moon in the sky together could not possibly be compatible with their "Earth blocks the suns rays" theory of the phases.

Why more serious? Because the UCLA students and professors (and their Harvard counterparts) knew something that contradicted the very theories they were trying to articulate and not one of them could get to that contradictory knowledge to say, "Hey, wait a minute..."! In some form, they "knew" about the opposite seasons and that they had seen the sun and the moon in the sky at the same time, but they did not "know" in any operational sense of being able to pull it out of their memories when thinking about related topics. Their "knowings" were isolated instead of set up to be colliding steadily with new ideas as they were formed and considered.

Doctor X is a trained physician that works on harm reduction projects in real life but helps Silk Road users in his free time by providing answers to any of their questions—all for free. He started in June 2013, and received 600 questions and 5,000 visits after just three months. In an interview with Joseph Cox of Vice, Doctor X said: "Drug users need more...They need answers, and that's what I try to provide. People ask me about the real risks and adverse effects, drug combinations [illegal and prescriptive] and the use of drugs in persons suffering from different conditions, such as diabetes or neurological problems."

Home/Magazine Archive/July 2009 (Vol. 52, No. 7)/Are We Losing Our Ability to Think Critically?/Full Text News Are We Losing Our Ability to Think Critically? By Samuel Greengard Communications of the ACM, Vol. 52 No. 7, Pages 18-19 10.1145/1538788.1538796 Comments (3) View as: Print ACM Digital Library Full Text (PDF) In the Digital Edition Share: Send by email Share on reddit Share on StumbleUpon Share on Tweeter Share on Facebook More Sharing ServicesShare Society has long cherished the ability to think beyond the ordinary. In a world where knowledge is revered and innovation equals progress, those able to bring forth greater insight and understanding are destined to make their mark and blaze a trail to greater enlightenment. "Critical thinking as an attitude is embedded in Western culture. There is a belief that argument is the way to finding truth," observes Adrian West, research director at the Edward de Bono Foundation U.K., and a former computer science lecturer at the University of Manchester. "Developing our abilities to think more clearly, richly, fully—individually and collectively—is absolutely crucial [to solving world problems]." To be sure, history is filled with tales of remarkable thinkers who have defined and redefined our world views: Sir Isaac Newton discovering gravity; Voltaire altering perceptions about society and religious dogma; and Albert Einstein redefining the view of the universe. But in an age of computers, video games, and the Internet, there's a growing question about how technology is changing critical thinking and whether society benefits from it. Although there's little debate that computer technology complements—and often enhances—the human mind in the quest to store information and process an ever-growing tangle of bits and bytes, there's increasing concern that the same technology is changing the way we approach complex problems and conundrums, and making it more difficult to really think. "We're exposed to [greater amounts of] poor yet charismatic thinking, the fads of intellectual fashion, opinion, and mere assertion," says West. "The wealth of communications and information can easily overwhelm our reasoning abilities." What's more, it's ironic that ever-growing piles of data and information do not equate to greater knowledge and better decision-making. What's remarkable, West says, is just "how little this has affected the quality of our thinking." According to the National Endowment for the Arts, literary reading declined 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002 and the rate of decline is accelerating. Many, including Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, believe that a greater focus on visual media exacts a toll. "A drop-off in reading has possibly contributed to a decline in critical thinking," she says. "There is a greater emphasis on real-time media and multitasking rather than focusing on a single thing." Nevertheless, the verdict isn't in and a definitive answer about how technology affects critical thinking is not yet available. Instead, critical thinking lands in a mushy swamp somewhere between perception and reality; measurable and incomprehensible. It's largely a product of our own invention—and a subjective one at that. And although technology alters the way we see, hear, and assimilate our world—the act of thinking remains decidedly human. Back to Top Rethinking Thinking Arriving at a clear definition for critical thinking is a bit tricky. Wikipedia describes it as "purposeful and reflective judgment about what to believe or what to do in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments." Overlay technology and that's where things get complex. "We can do the same critical-reasoning operations without technology as we can with it—just at different speeds and with different ease," West says. What's more, while it's tempting to view computers, video games, and the Internet in a monolithic good or bad way, the reality is that they may be both good and bad, and different technologies, systems, and uses yield entirely different results. For example, a computer game may promote critical thinking or diminish it. Reading on the Internet may ratchet up one's ability to analyze while chasing an endless array of hyperlinks may undercut deeper thought.

Reading on the Internet may ratchet up one's ability to analyze while chasing an endless array of hyperlinks may undercut deeper thought.

Dolphin meat is often mislabeled as whale meat in violation of Japanese food safety laws. The change of the meat sold in stores from baleen whales, which are low trophic feeders, to dolphins which are high trophic feeders, subjects those eating this meat to high levels of heavy metals, such as mercury, and organochlorines like PCBs, dioxins and benzenes.

Mercury is not the only toxin found in dolphin and whale meat. Whale and dolphin meat can be highly contaminated by both heavy metals and PBOPs (persistent bioaccumulative organic pollutants) such as PCBs, and pesticides such as DDT and chlordanes.

In a study presented to International Whaling Commission (IWC) conference in Australia, Japanese researchers reported finding dioxin levels up to 172 times the tolerable daily intake in marketed whale meat.

Pandora (which is also the name of the company) grew out of the Music Genome Project, which company founder Tim Westergren began six years ago.

He became fascinated with the way directors described the music they were looking for, which led to his wondering what made people enjoy certain types of music. He asked himself, "If people haven't found any music that they love since college, and artists are struggling to find an audience, is there a role for technology to help bridge the gap?"

Westergren started the Genome Project from the idea of creating a platform for connecting people with music that they'll love based on music they already enjoy. The project uses experts called "music analysts" to deconstruct music into its fundamental parts and capture the results into a database. Pandora has 40 professional musicians who come to the office every day and listen to one song at a time, analyzing each in anywhere from 200 to 400 dimensions. (The dimensions are somewhat different for each genre of music.)