Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

An elderly Chinese woman is only able to speak English after suffering a stroke, it's been reported. Liu Jaiyu, a 94-year-old former English teacher, has found herself no longer able to speak Chinese after parts of her brain relating to native language were damaged by a cerebral infarction, the local Hunan TV reports. Television pictures show her in bed, answering simple questions in English, which means the nursing staff are having to brush up on their language skills. "She greets me in the morning using English, after she's eaten her meals in the afternoon she uses English," one nurse tells the TV. "My memory of the language isn't too good, sometimes i don't understand what she's saying!" A doctor at the hospital says that Ms Liu is suffering from paralysis of all her limbs, as well as an "obstacle" to her language functions. "it seems the part of her brain responsible for her mother tongue has been damaged, however the part that uses English has been preserved," Li Yanfang says. There have been rare cases where patients develop a different accent after a stroke, migraine or head trauma. But Ms Liu's case appears different because she has apparently turned to an already-learned language. Experts say that the complex Chinese language requires the use of both parts of the brain, while English only uses one side.

The researchers - Peera Wongupparaj, Veena Kumari and Robin Morris at Kings College London - did not themselves ask anyone to sit an iQ test, but they analysed data from 405 previous studies. Altogether, they harvested iQ test data from more than 200,000 participants, captured over 64 years and from 48 countries. Focusing on one part of the iQ test, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, they found that on average intelligence has risen the equivalent of 20 iQ points since 1950. iQ tests are designed to ensure that the average result is always 100, so this is a significant jump.

Turn on the radio in France in 1951 and you might have heard contributors extol the benefits of parents smacking their children. "i don't like slapping the face," one commentator says. "Slapping can harm the ears and the eyes, especially if it's violent. But everybody knows that smacking the bottom is excellent for the circulation of the blood." At the time, few would have seen that advice as abusive. it was another three decades before Sweden became the first European country to make smacking children illegal. More than 20 others have followed suit, but France has held out against the changing tide of parenting, with staunch resolve. in the wake of the European ruling this week, articles have appeared in the French media with titles such as "Smacking: A French Passion", and contributors have lined up on online forums to advocate the benefits of "la fessee", as it's known here. "We were really surprised by the response," says Christine Hernandez, a writer for France's most popular parenting magazine, Parents. "Many of our readers said that smacking is part of educating children. it's astonishing that parents still think that it's a good way to teach children how to behave. They think they have to impose their authority on children from time to time - it's part of French traditional upbringing."

Clinical research can never prove that an intervention has an effect size of zero. Rather, clinical research assumes the null hypothesis, that the treatment does not work, and the burden of proof lies with demonstrating adequate evidence to reject the null hypothesis. So, when being technical, researchers will conclude that a negative study “fails to reject the null hypothesis.” Further, negative studies do not demonstrate an effect size of zero, but rather that any possible effect is likely to be smaller than the power of existing research to detect. The greater the number and power of such studies, however, the closer this remaining possible effect size gets to zero. At some point the remaining possible effect becomes clinically insignificant. in other words, clinical research may not be able to detect the difference between zero effect and a tiny effect, but at some point it becomes irrelevant. What David and i have convincingly argued, in my opinion, is that after decades of research and more than 3000 trials, acupuncture researchers have failed to reject the null hypothesis, and any remaining possible specific effect from acupuncture is so tiny as to be clinically insignificant.

It Is clear from meta-analyses that results of acupuncture trIals are varIable and InconsIstent, even for sIngle condItIons. After thousands of trIals of acupuncture and hundreds of systematIc revIews,18 arguments contInue unabated. In 2011,PaIn publIshed an edItorIal31 that summed up the present sItuatIon well. “Is there really any need for more studIes? Ernst et al.18 poInt out that the posItIve studIes conclude that acupuncture relIeves paIn In some condItIons but not In other very sImIlar condItIons. What would you thInk If a new paIn pIll was shown to relIeve musculoskeletal paIn In the arms but not In the legs? The most parsImonIous explanatIon Is that the posItIve studIes are false posItIves. In hIs semInal artIcle on why most publIshed research fIndIngs are false, IoannIdIs32 poInts out that when a popular but IneffectIve treatment Is studIed, false posItIve results are common for multIple reasons, IncludIng bIas and low prIor probabIlIty.” SInce It has proved ImpossIble to fInd consIstent evIdence after more than 3000 trIals, It Is tIme to gIve up. It seems very unlIkely that the money that It would cost to do another 3000 trIals would be well-spent.

But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.

We use "I" more when we talk to someone wIth power because we're more self-conscIous. We are focused on ourselves — how we're comIng across — and our language reflects that.

You can't, he believes, change who you are by changing your language; you can only change your language by changing who you are

According to a new report by Calvin College assistant professor Jonathan Hill, many Americans do not think it's that important to have the "correct beliefs" on the origins of human life.

"No creationist wakes up in the morning and says, 'i have really strong opinions about whether Archaeopteryx is the ancestor of modern birds,'" he said.* "Who are we as people? That’s the question that they think evolution is answering. What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be an animal?"

What that means is that "debates" about evolution and creationism actually might not be that effective

Lately, Johnson draws for pleasure, but for three decades she had a happily hectic career as an illustrator, sometimes presenting clients with dozens of sketches a day. Her playful watercolors once adorned packages of Lotus software; for a program called Magellan, she created a ship whose masts were tethered to billowing diskettes. She made a popular postcard of two red parachutes tied together, forming a heart; several other cards were sold for years at MOMA’s gift shop. Johnson produced half a dozen covers for this magazine, including one, from 1985, that presented a sunny vision of an artist’s life: a loft cluttered with pastel canvases, each of them depicting a fragment of the skyline that is framed by a picture window. it’s as if the paintings were jigsaw pieces, and the city a puzzle being solved. Now Johnson is obsessed with making puzzles. Many times a day, she uses her grids as foundations for elaborate arrangements of letters on a page—word searches by way of Mondrian. For all the dedication that goes into her puzzles, however, they are confounding creations: very few are complete. She is assembling one of the world’s largest bodies of unfinished art.

From primary school to university, i witnessed countless such public humiliations: for fighting, cheating or petty misdemeanors. Caught committing any of these offenses and you may have to stand before the student body, criticizing your own “moral flaws,” condemning your character defects, showing yourself no mercy, even exaggerating your faults. Only those who have endured it can know the depth of shame one feels.

From Amie i first heard about Yitang Zhang, a solitary, part-time calculus teacher at the University of New Hampshire who received several prizes, including a MacArthur award in September, for solving a problem that had been open for more than a hundred and fifty years. The problem that Zhang chose, in 2010, is from number theory, a branch of pure mathematics. Pure mathematics, as opposed to applied mathematics, is done with no practical purposes in mind. it is as close to art and philosophy as it is to engineering. “My result is useless for industry,” Zhang said. The British mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940 that mathematics is, of “all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote.” Bertrand Russell called it a refuge from “the dreary exile of the actual world.” Hardy believed emphatically in the precise aesthetics of math. A mathematical proof, such as Zhang produced, “should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation,” he wrote, “not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.” Edward Frenkel, a math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says Zhang’s proof has “a renaissance beauty,” meaning that though it is deeply complex, its outlines are easily apprehended. The pursuit of beauty in pure mathematics is a tenet. Last year, neuroscientists in Great Britain discovered that the same part of the brain that is activated by art and music was activated in the brains of mathematicians when they looked at math they regarded as beautiful.

Salzman first became interested in wine when he was a graduate student at Stanford University studying neuroscience (Ph.D.) and psychiatry (M.D.). “i was corrupted by some people who were very serious about wine,” he told me. Together, they would host wine tastings and travel to vineyards. Over time, as his interest in wine grew, he began to think about the connections between his tastings and the work he was doing on the ways in which emotion colors the way our brains process information. “We study how cognitive and emotional processes can affect perception,” he said. “And in the case of something like wine, you have the perfect example: even before you open a bottle to experience the wine itself, you already have an arbitrary visual stimulus—the bottle and the label—that comes with non-arbitrary emotional associations, good and bad.” And those emotional associations will, in turn, affect what we taste.

In one recent study, the Caltech neuroscIentIst HIlke Plassman found that people’s expectatIons of a wIne’s prIce affected theIr enjoyment on a neural level: not only dId they report greater subjectIve enjoyment but they showed Increased actIvIty In an area of the braIn that has frequently been assocIated wIth the experIence of pleasantness. The same goes for the color and shape of a wIne’s label: some labels make us thInk that a wIne Is more valuable (and, hence, more tasty), whIle others don’t. Even your abIlIty to pronounce a wInery’s name can Influence your apprecIatIon of Its product—the more dIffIcult the name Is to pronounce, the more you’ll lIke the wIne.

For experts, though, the story is different. in 1990, Gregg Solomon, a Harvard psychologist who wrote “Great Expectorations: The Psychology of Expert Wine Talk,” found that amateurs can’t really distinguish different wines at all, but he also found that experts can indeed rank wines for sweetness, balance, and tannin at rates that far exceeded chance. Part of the reason isn’t just in the added experience. it’s in the ability to phrase and label that experience more precisely, a more developed sensory vocabulary that helps you to identify and remember what you experience. indeed, when novices are trained, their discrimination ability improves.