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To communicate effectively, it is not enough to have well organized ideas expressed in complete and coherent sentences and paragraphs. One must also think about the style, tone and clarity of his/her writing, and adapt these elements to the reading audience. Again, analyzing one's audience and purpose is the key to writing effectiveness. In order to choose the most effective language, the writer must consider the objective of the document, the context in which it is being written, and who will be reading it.

Effective language is: (1) concrete and specific, not vague and abstract; (2) concise, not verbose; (3) familiar, not obscure; (4) precise and clear, not inaccurate or ambiguous; (5) constructive, not destructive; and (6) appropriately formal.

the social psychologist Sheena Iyengar asked 100 American and Japanese college students to take a piece of paper. On one side, she had them write down the decisions in life they would like to make for themselves. On the other, they wrote the decisions they would like to pass on to others.

The Americans desired choice in four times more domains than the Japanese.

Americans now have more choices over more things than any other culture in human history. We can choose between a broader array of foods, media sources, lifestyles and identities. We have more freedom to live out our own sexual identities and more religious and nonreligious options to express our spiritual natures.

The oft-repeated claim that we must all learn Mandarin Chinese, the better to trade with our future masters, is one that readers of David Moser’s “A Billion Voices” will rapidly end up re-evaluating.

In fact, many Chinese don’t speak it: Even Chinese authorities quietly admit that only about 70% of the population speaks Mandarin, and merely one in 10 of those speak it fluently.

Mr. Moser presents a history of what is more properly called Putonghua, or “common speech,” along with a clear, concise and often amusing introduction to the limits of its spoken and written forms.

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics

At Göttingen, she pursued her passion for mathematical invariance, the study of numbers that can be manipulated in various ways and still remain constant. In the relationship between a star and its planet, for example, the shape and radius of the planetary orbit may change, but the gravitational attraction conjoining one to the other remains the same — and there’s your invariance.

Noether’s theorem, an expression of the deep tie between the underlying geometry of the universe and the behavior of the mass and energy that call the universe home. What the revolutionary theorem says, in cartoon essence, is the following: Wherever you find some sort of symmetry in nature, some predictability or homogeneity of parts, you’ll find lurking in the background a corresponding conservation — of momentum, electric charge, energy or the like. If a bicycle wheel is radially symmetric, if you can spin it on its axis and it still looks the same in all directions, well, then, that symmetric translation must yield a corresponding conservation.

television forces those who appear on it to argue "directly, and pointedly, in a short amount of time." This shapes how debates unfold because "concision actually favors the spouting of conventional thinking."

What if a television network tried to run a debate show like the back-and-forths that sometimes occur in print?

if executed correctly, the quality of argument and entertainment would be far better than any of the talking head exchanges currently broadcast on cable.

The same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art were being activated by "beautiful" maths.

The researchers suggest there may be a neurobiological basis to beauty.

neurobiological basis to b

Life at Versailles was apparently a protracted battle of wits. You gained status if you showed “esprit” — clever, erudite and often caustic wit, aimed at making rivals look ridiculous. The king himself kept abreast of the sharpest remarks, and granted audiences to those who made them. “Wit opens every door,” one courtier explained.If you lacked “esprit” — or suffered from “l’esprit de l’escalier” (thinking of a comeback only once you had reached the bottom of the staircase) — you’d look ridiculous yourself.

But many modern-day conversations — including the schoolyard cries of “Bim!” — make more sense once you realize that everyone around you is in a competition not to look ridiculous

Many children train for this at home. Where Americans might coo over a child’s most inane remark, to boost his confidence, middle-class French parents teach their kids to be concise and amusing, to keep everyone listening. “I force him or her to discover the best ways of retaining my attention,” the anthropologist Raymonde Carroll wrote in her 1987 book “Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience.”

Our standard framework for thinking about engineering failures—reflected, for instance, in regulations for medical devices—was developed shortly after World War II, before the advent of software, for electromechanical systems. The idea was that you make something reliable by making its parts reliable (say, you build your engine to withstand 40,000 takeoff-and-landing cycles) and by planning for the breakdown of those parts (you have two engines). But software doesn’t break. Intrado’s faulty threshold is not like the faulty rivet that leads to the crash of an airliner. The software did exactly what it was told to do. In fact it did it perfectly. The reason it failed is that it was told to do the wrong thing.

Software failures are failures of understanding, and of imagination. Intrado actually had a backup router, which, had it been switched to automatically, would have restored 911 service almost immediately. But, as described in a report to the FCC, “the situation occurred at a point in the application logic that was not designed to perform any automated corrective actions.”

“The problem is that software engineers don’t understand the problem they’re trying to solve, and don’t care to,” says Leveson, the MIT software-safety expert. The reason is that they’re too wrapped up in getting their code to work.

. The purpose of this review article is to summarize recent researches focusing on phantom limb in order to discuss its definition, mechanisms, and treatments.

The incidence of phantom limb pain has varied from 2% in earlier records to higher rates today. Initially, patients were less likely to mention pain symptoms than today which is a potential explanation for the discrepancy in incidence rates. However, Sherman et al.4 discuss that only 17% phantom limb complaints were initiated treated by physicians. Consequently, it is important to determine what constitutes phantom pain in order to provide efficacious care. Phantom pain is pain sensation to a limb, organ or other tissue after amputation and/or nerve injury.5 In podiatry, the predominant cause of phantom limb pain is after limb amputation due to diseased state presenting with an unsalvageable limb. Postoperative pain sensations from stump neuroma pain, prosthesis, fibrosis, and residual local tissue inflammation can be similar to phantom limb pain (PLP). Patients with PLP complain of various sensations including burning, stinging, aching, and piercing pain with changing warmth and cold sensation to the amputated area which waxes and wanes.6 Onset of symptoms may be elicited by environmental, emotional, or physical changes.

The human body encompasses various neurologic mechanisms allowing reception, transport, recognition, and response to numerous stimuli. Pain, temperature, crude touch, and pressure sensory information are carried to the central nervous system via the anterolateral system, with pain & temperature information transfer via lateral spinothalamic tracts to the parietal lobe. In detail, pain sensation from the lower extremity is transported from a peripheral receptor to a first degree pseudounipolar neurons in the dorsal root ganglion and decussate and ascend to the third-degree neurons within the thalamus.7 This sensory information will finally arrive at the primary sensory cortex in the postcentral gyrus of the parietal lobe which houses the sensory homunculus.8 It is unsurprising that with an amputation that such an intricate highway of information transport to and from the periphery may have the potential for problematic neurologic developments.