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Jumat, 30 April 2010
New, Voodoo-Free fMRI Technique
MIT brain scanners Fedorenko et al present A new method for fMRI investigations of language: Defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects. Also on the list of authors is Nancy Kanwisher, one of the feared fMRI voodoo correlations posse.
The paper describes a technique for mapping out the "language areas" of the brain in individual people, not for their own sake, but as a way of improving other fMRI studies of language. That's important because while everyone's brain is organized roughly the same way, there are always individual differences in the shape, size and location of the different regions.
This is a problem for fMRI researchers. Suppose you scan 10 people and show them pictures of apples and pictures of pears. And suppose that apples activate the brain's Fruit Cortex much more strongly than pears. But unfortunately, the Fruit Cortex is a small area, and its location varies between people. In fact, in your 10 subjects, no-one's Fruit Cortex overlaps with anyone else's, even though everyone has one and they all work exactly the same way.
If you did this experiment you'd fail to find the effect of apples vs. pears, even though it's a strong effect, because there will be no one place in the brain where apples reliably cause more activation. What you need is a way of finding the Fruit Cortex in each person beforehand. What you'd need to do is a functional localization scan - say, showing people a big bowl of fruit - as a preliminary step.
Fedorenko et al scanned a bunch of people while doing a simple reading task, and compared that to a control condition, reading a random list of nonsense which makes no linguistic sense. As you can see, there's a lot of variation between people, but there's also clearly a basic pattern of activation: it looks a bit like a tilted "V" on the left side of the brain:
These are the language areas of each person. (Incidentally, this is why fMRI, despite its limitations, is an amazing technology. There is no better way of measuring this activation. EEG is cheaper but nowhere near as good at localizing activity; PET is close, but it's slow, expensive and involves injecting people with radioactivity.)
Fedorenko et al then overlapped all the individual images to produce of map of the brain showing how many people got activation in each part:
The most robust activations were on the left side of the brain, and they formed a nice "V" shape again. These are the areas which have long been known to be involved in language, so this is not surprising in itself.
Here's the clever bit: they then took the areas activated in a large % of people, and automatically divided them up into sub-regions; each of the "peaks" where an especially large proportion of subjects showed activation became a separate region.
This is on the assumption that these peaks represent parts of the brain with distinct functions - separate "language modules" as it were. But each module will be in a slightly different place in each person (see the first picture). So they overlapped the subdivisions with the individual activation blobs to get a set of individual functional zones they call Group-constrained Subject-Specific functional Regions of Interest, or GcSSfROIs to their friends.
Fedorenko et al claim various advantages to this technique, and present data showing that it produces nice results in independent subjects (i.e. not the ones they used to make the group map in the first place.)
In particular, they argue that it should allow future fMRI studies to have a better chance of finding the specific functions of each region. So far, experiments using fMRI to investigate language have largely failed to find activations specific to particular aspects of language like grammar, word meaning, etc. which is unexpected because patients suffering lesions to specific areas often do show very selective language problems.
Does this relate to the voodoo correlations issue? Indirectly, yes. The voodoo (non-independence error) problem arises when you do a large number of comparisons, and then focus on the "best" results, because these are likely to be wholly, or partially, only that good by chance.
Fedorenko et al's method allows you to avoid doing lots of comparisons in the first place. Instead of looking all over the whole brain for something interesting, you can first do a preliminary scan to map out where in each person's brain interesting stuff is likely to happen, and then focus on those bits in the real experiment.
There's still a multiple-comparisons problem: Fedorenko et al identified 16 candidate language areas per brain, and future studies could well provide more. But that's nothing compared to the 40,000 voxels in a typical whole-brain analysis. We'll have to wait and see if this technique proves useful in the real world, but it's an interesting idea...
Fedorenko, E., Hsieh, P., Nieto Castanon, A., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., & Kanwisher, N. (2010). A new method for fMRI investigations of language: Defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects Journal of Neurophysiology DOI: 10.1152/jn.00032.2010
The paper describes a technique for mapping out the "language areas" of the brain in individual people, not for their own sake, but as a way of improving other fMRI studies of language. That's important because while everyone's brain is organized roughly the same way, there are always individual differences in the shape, size and location of the different regions.This is a problem for fMRI researchers. Suppose you scan 10 people and show them pictures of apples and pictures of pears. And suppose that apples activate the brain's Fruit Cortex much more strongly than pears. But unfortunately, the Fruit Cortex is a small area, and its location varies between people. In fact, in your 10 subjects, no-one's Fruit Cortex overlaps with anyone else's, even though everyone has one and they all work exactly the same way.
If you did this experiment you'd fail to find the effect of apples vs. pears, even though it's a strong effect, because there will be no one place in the brain where apples reliably cause more activation. What you need is a way of finding the Fruit Cortex in each person beforehand. What you'd need to do is a functional localization scan - say, showing people a big bowl of fruit - as a preliminary step.
Fedorenko et al scanned a bunch of people while doing a simple reading task, and compared that to a control condition, reading a random list of nonsense which makes no linguistic sense. As you can see, there's a lot of variation between people, but there's also clearly a basic pattern of activation: it looks a bit like a tilted "V" on the left side of the brain:
These are the language areas of each person. (Incidentally, this is why fMRI, despite its limitations, is an amazing technology. There is no better way of measuring this activation. EEG is cheaper but nowhere near as good at localizing activity; PET is close, but it's slow, expensive and involves injecting people with radioactivity.)Fedorenko et al then overlapped all the individual images to produce of map of the brain showing how many people got activation in each part:
The most robust activations were on the left side of the brain, and they formed a nice "V" shape again. These are the areas which have long been known to be involved in language, so this is not surprising in itself.Here's the clever bit: they then took the areas activated in a large % of people, and automatically divided them up into sub-regions; each of the "peaks" where an especially large proportion of subjects showed activation became a separate region.
This is on the assumption that these peaks represent parts of the brain with distinct functions - separate "language modules" as it were. But each module will be in a slightly different place in each person (see the first picture). So they overlapped the subdivisions with the individual activation blobs to get a set of individual functional zones they call Group-constrained Subject-Specific functional Regions of Interest, or GcSSfROIs to their friends.
Fedorenko et al claim various advantages to this technique, and present data showing that it produces nice results in independent subjects (i.e. not the ones they used to make the group map in the first place.)In particular, they argue that it should allow future fMRI studies to have a better chance of finding the specific functions of each region. So far, experiments using fMRI to investigate language have largely failed to find activations specific to particular aspects of language like grammar, word meaning, etc. which is unexpected because patients suffering lesions to specific areas often do show very selective language problems.
Does this relate to the voodoo correlations issue? Indirectly, yes. The voodoo (non-independence error) problem arises when you do a large number of comparisons, and then focus on the "best" results, because these are likely to be wholly, or partially, only that good by chance.
Fedorenko et al's method allows you to avoid doing lots of comparisons in the first place. Instead of looking all over the whole brain for something interesting, you can first do a preliminary scan to map out where in each person's brain interesting stuff is likely to happen, and then focus on those bits in the real experiment.
There's still a multiple-comparisons problem: Fedorenko et al identified 16 candidate language areas per brain, and future studies could well provide more. But that's nothing compared to the 40,000 voxels in a typical whole-brain analysis. We'll have to wait and see if this technique proves useful in the real world, but it's an interesting idea...
Fedorenko, E., Hsieh, P., Nieto Castanon, A., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., & Kanwisher, N. (2010). A new method for fMRI investigations of language: Defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects Journal of Neurophysiology DOI: 10.1152/jn.00032.2010
New, Voodoo-Free fMRI Technique
MIT brain scanners Fedorenko et al present A new method for fMRI investigations of language: Defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects. Also on the list of authors is Nancy Kanwisher, one of the feared fMRI voodoo correlations posse.
The paper describes a technique for mapping out the "language areas" of the brain in individual people, not for their own sake, but as a way of improving other fMRI studies of language. That's important because while everyone's brain is organized roughly the same way, there are always individual differences in the shape, size and location of the different regions.
This is a problem for fMRI researchers. Suppose you scan 10 people and show them pictures of apples and pictures of pears. And suppose that apples activate the brain's Fruit Cortex much more strongly than pears. But unfortunately, the Fruit Cortex is a small area, and its location varies between people. In fact, in your 10 subjects, no-one's Fruit Cortex overlaps with anyone else's, even though everyone has one and they all work exactly the same way.
If you did this experiment you'd fail to find the effect of apples vs. pears, even though it's a strong effect, because there will be no one place in the brain where apples reliably cause more activation. What you need is a way of finding the Fruit Cortex in each person beforehand. What you'd need to do is a functional localization scan - say, showing people a big bowl of fruit - as a preliminary step.
Fedorenko et al scanned a bunch of people while doing a simple reading task, and compared that to a control condition, reading a random list of nonsense which makes no linguistic sense. As you can see, there's a lot of variation between people, but there's also clearly a basic pattern of activation: it looks a bit like a tilted "V" on the left side of the brain:
These are the language areas of each person. (Incidentally, this is why fMRI, despite its limitations, is an amazing technology. There is no better way of measuring this activation. EEG is cheaper but nowhere near as good at localizing activity; PET is close, but it's slow, expensive and involves injecting people with radioactivity.)
Fedorenko et al then overlapped all the individual images to produce of map of the brain showing how many people got activation in each part:
The most robust activations were on the left side of the brain, and they formed a nice "V" shape again. These are the areas which have long been known to be involved in language, so this is not surprising in itself.
Here's the clever bit: they then took the areas activated in a large % of people, and automatically divided them up into sub-regions; each of the "peaks" where an especially large proportion of subjects showed activation became a separate region.
This is on the assumption that these peaks represent parts of the brain with distinct functions - separate "language modules" as it were. But each module will be in a slightly different place in each person (see the first picture). So they overlapped the subdivisions with the individual activation blobs to get a set of individual functional zones they call Group-constrained Subject-Specific functional Regions of Interest, or GcSSfROIs to their friends.
Fedorenko et al claim various advantages to this technique, and present data showing that it produces nice results in independent subjects (i.e. not the ones they used to make the group map in the first place.)
In particular, they argue that it should allow future fMRI studies to have a better chance of finding the specific functions of each region. So far, experiments using fMRI to investigate language have largely failed to find activations specific to particular aspects of language like grammar, word meaning, etc. which is unexpected because patients suffering lesions to specific areas often do show very selective language problems.
Does this relate to the voodoo correlations issue? Indirectly, yes. The voodoo (non-independence error) problem arises when you do a large number of comparisons, and then focus on the "best" results, because these are likely to be wholly, or partially, only that good by chance.
Fedorenko et al's method allows you to avoid doing lots of comparisons in the first place. Instead of looking all over the whole brain for something interesting, you can first do a preliminary scan to map out where in each person's brain interesting stuff is likely to happen, and then focus on those bits in the real experiment.
There's still a multiple-comparisons problem: Fedorenko et al identified 16 candidate language areas per brain, and future studies could well provide more. But that's nothing compared to the 40,000 voxels in a typical whole-brain analysis. We'll have to wait and see if this technique proves useful in the real world, but it's an interesting idea...
Fedorenko, E., Hsieh, P., Nieto Castanon, A., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., & Kanwisher, N. (2010). A new method for fMRI investigations of language: Defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects Journal of Neurophysiology DOI: 10.1152/jn.00032.2010
The paper describes a technique for mapping out the "language areas" of the brain in individual people, not for their own sake, but as a way of improving other fMRI studies of language. That's important because while everyone's brain is organized roughly the same way, there are always individual differences in the shape, size and location of the different regions.This is a problem for fMRI researchers. Suppose you scan 10 people and show them pictures of apples and pictures of pears. And suppose that apples activate the brain's Fruit Cortex much more strongly than pears. But unfortunately, the Fruit Cortex is a small area, and its location varies between people. In fact, in your 10 subjects, no-one's Fruit Cortex overlaps with anyone else's, even though everyone has one and they all work exactly the same way.
If you did this experiment you'd fail to find the effect of apples vs. pears, even though it's a strong effect, because there will be no one place in the brain where apples reliably cause more activation. What you need is a way of finding the Fruit Cortex in each person beforehand. What you'd need to do is a functional localization scan - say, showing people a big bowl of fruit - as a preliminary step.
Fedorenko et al scanned a bunch of people while doing a simple reading task, and compared that to a control condition, reading a random list of nonsense which makes no linguistic sense. As you can see, there's a lot of variation between people, but there's also clearly a basic pattern of activation: it looks a bit like a tilted "V" on the left side of the brain:
These are the language areas of each person. (Incidentally, this is why fMRI, despite its limitations, is an amazing technology. There is no better way of measuring this activation. EEG is cheaper but nowhere near as good at localizing activity; PET is close, but it's slow, expensive and involves injecting people with radioactivity.)Fedorenko et al then overlapped all the individual images to produce of map of the brain showing how many people got activation in each part:
The most robust activations were on the left side of the brain, and they formed a nice "V" shape again. These are the areas which have long been known to be involved in language, so this is not surprising in itself.Here's the clever bit: they then took the areas activated in a large % of people, and automatically divided them up into sub-regions; each of the "peaks" where an especially large proportion of subjects showed activation became a separate region.
This is on the assumption that these peaks represent parts of the brain with distinct functions - separate "language modules" as it were. But each module will be in a slightly different place in each person (see the first picture). So they overlapped the subdivisions with the individual activation blobs to get a set of individual functional zones they call Group-constrained Subject-Specific functional Regions of Interest, or GcSSfROIs to their friends.
Fedorenko et al claim various advantages to this technique, and present data showing that it produces nice results in independent subjects (i.e. not the ones they used to make the group map in the first place.)In particular, they argue that it should allow future fMRI studies to have a better chance of finding the specific functions of each region. So far, experiments using fMRI to investigate language have largely failed to find activations specific to particular aspects of language like grammar, word meaning, etc. which is unexpected because patients suffering lesions to specific areas often do show very selective language problems.
Does this relate to the voodoo correlations issue? Indirectly, yes. The voodoo (non-independence error) problem arises when you do a large number of comparisons, and then focus on the "best" results, because these are likely to be wholly, or partially, only that good by chance.
Fedorenko et al's method allows you to avoid doing lots of comparisons in the first place. Instead of looking all over the whole brain for something interesting, you can first do a preliminary scan to map out where in each person's brain interesting stuff is likely to happen, and then focus on those bits in the real experiment.
There's still a multiple-comparisons problem: Fedorenko et al identified 16 candidate language areas per brain, and future studies could well provide more. But that's nothing compared to the 40,000 voxels in a typical whole-brain analysis. We'll have to wait and see if this technique proves useful in the real world, but it's an interesting idea...
Fedorenko, E., Hsieh, P., Nieto Castanon, A., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., & Kanwisher, N. (2010). A new method for fMRI investigations of language: Defining ROIs functionally in individual subjects Journal of Neurophysiology DOI: 10.1152/jn.00032.2010
Aye Aye Captain!
I was reading this week that P&O Cruises have appointed their first female captain, Captain Sarah Breton. This got me thinking of my childhood, I’ll go on to explain. Sarah took command of P&O Artemis on 19th April this month. She has served on many of the Carnival ships, working her way up from 3rd officer when she joined P&O in 1989 to master at the very respectable age of 45. My Dad made captain at 33 (I’m not bragging) but he was at sea at 16. So both have made Master at quite a young age. My first experience at sea was when I was about 5.....
there was no kids clubs, no swimming pools, and the only entertainment I had were the rowdy crew. Being a captain has its certain perks, so my dad was allowed to bring his family onboard the Ultra luxurious "cargo ship". Me and my brother had all kinds of fun playing football in the empty cargo holds, manning the bridge, prating about with the engineers in the engine room and with the strong Atlantic winds blowing, trying to stand up straight. My next experience at Sea, the dock workers went on strike in a French port, I can’t remember the name, but it was close to Sete in the south of France. We were stuck there for a month, imagine that sound familiar? Well unlike the people stranded by the volcano, the ship was pretty much our home, I had my family with me, the sun was shining, there were lots of beaches around and it meant a month off school! Unfortunately my dad has left the sea, but still works in the industry as a consultant. Otherwise I would have asked him the go for a job on a cruise ship, as I imagine the perks that come with being a master on a cruise ship greatly outweigh the perks on a Cargo ship! Not that I am complaining, being at sea was a brilliant, memorable experience one that I will always remember. I just wonder if I should have followed in his footsteps, with my dad being Captain, and me er…… selling cruises. It hasn’t quite got the same ring to it has it, but at least they both have something to do with the sea! That’s what I like to think anyway.
Jack Beats, Bed Supper Club - May 6th
The pairing of Beni G (Mixologists) and Plus One (Scratch Perverts) has proved to be an inspirational match-up that has reinvigorated the British house scene and got the reserved British public off the wall and reaching for the lasers.
Accompanied by Boy 8, the act will appear at Bed Supperclub on Thursday May 6 between 10pm and 2am. Entry plus two drinks will set you back 900 baht.
The Stations of the Resurrection--Eighth Station--Jesus Strengthens the Faith of Thomas
("The Incredulity of Thomas," by Michelangelo Merisi da Carvaggio)
The Eighth Station--Jesus Strengthens the Faith of Thomas
Leader: O Risen Christ, Light of the world, we adore you;
People: You allowed Thomas to believe in the way he understood best.
Thomas had been absent from the other disciples when Jesus had breathed the Holy Spirit upon them. When they told him of their encounter with Jesus, Thomas just glared at them and did not say anything for a long time. He had no doubt his companions had experienced something--but wondered if their desire and wishes to see Jesus again had not clouded reality for them. Perhaps they had met someone who reminded them of Jesus and they wished it so. Perhaps someone had played a cruel trick on them. Perhaps they were so grief-stricken they were having delusions.
Thomas was still grieving terribly himself. He simply did not want to hurt any more than he was hurting already. He didn't want to hear these stories--it did not make his own pain any better. So finally, he growled back, "You know what? I don't want to disagree with you, but I just can't buy it, as much as I love and believe in you. I won't believe it until I see it--and I'd have to feel the nail marks and the hole in his side myself before I could even begin to believe it."
A week later, the disciples were again behind closed doors and Thomas was among them. Suddenly, Jesus was again in their midst! "Peace be with you," repeated Jesus. He looked squarely at Thomas, holding out his hands. "Thomas, put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt, but believe."
The Gospel of John doesn't say whether Thomas actually did touch Jesus--that is left up to our imaginations--but whatever did happen caused Thomas to exclaim, "My Lord and my God!" What is clear, though, is that Jesus understood exactly what it took to come to Thomas on his own terms--and he was perfectly willing to do that.
Leader: Jesus came to Thomas to the way of his own understanding,
People: Just as Christ can come to us in the way of our own understanding.
Leader: Let us pray.
(a brief period of silence is observed.)
Lord God, perceiver of all things,
Sometimes it hurts too much to simply accept and believe your truth.
Sometimes when our worries and fears overtake us,
the gentle touch of your loving hand sears our flesh like acid.
It becomes easier to doubt than to believe.
Remind us in those moments
that we are loved by a Son with nail holes in his own hands
and a gash in his side, a Son who cries and bleeds,
and will not ask anything of us in our pain
but to simply touch his own wounds and feel one with them.
People: Amen.
Leader: Alleluia! Christ is risen!
People: The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Kamis, 29 April 2010
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carlos tevezWhat's the difference between Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Starship?
Search: jefferson airplane
Why: Every time my brother hears "We Built This City," he calls to tell me that it was my favorite song when I was little. "No, no," he says, "You didn't just like it. You loved it." I have seen a Betamax tape of little me dancing around to it...
But I digress. What's the diff?
Answer: A short list of line-ups and singles:
Jefferson Airplane (1965-72, 1985-) - Grace Slick, Marty Balin, Jorma Kaukonen, Paul Kantner, Jack Casady, Spencer Dryden, Signe Toly Anderson, Bob Harvey, Jerry Peloquin, Skip Spence, Joey Covington, Papa John Creach, John Barbata, David Freiberg
- "Somebody to Love"(1967)
- "White Rabbit" (1967)
- "Volunteers" (1969)
- "Mexico" (1969)
- "Miracles" (1975)
- "With Your Love" (1976)
- "Jane" (1979)
Starship (1984-1990) - Grace Slick, Mickey Thomas, Craig Chaquico, Brett Bloomfield, Mark Morgan, Kenny Stayripolous, Christina Marie Saxton, Melisa Kary
- "We Built This City" (1985)
- "Sara" (1985)
- "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" (1987)
- "It's Not Over ('Til It's Over)" (1987)
- "It's Not Enough" (1989)
This is what Grace Slick looks like, btw.
Source: Wikipedia
The More You Know: My god, the 80s were righteous.
Where do soft shell turtles live?
Search: soft shell turtle
Why: Jason posted this video of a soft shell turtle on a Roomba. It looks like it has webbed feet, aka needs to be in water.
Answer: In water!
In nature, most soft-shelled turtles reside in bodies of water with soft mud or sandy bottoms where they bury themselves and away passing prey.Source: Chelonia.org
The More You Know: Soft-shell turtles are so-called because their carapace doesn't have horny scutes (scales), but instead is leathery and pliable. Varieties live in Africa, Asia, and Southeast Asia, and some were recently discovered in North America!! They can be kept as pets, but they require a ton of equipment. And they are weird looking.
Rabu, 28 April 2010
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Head Trip
A quick post to recommend the 2007 book Head Trip, by Jeff Warren.Head Trip is about "24 hours in the life of your brain": sleeping, waking, and everything in-between, from lucid dreaming to daydreams and hypnosis.
Warren gives a nice overview of current research and theory along with the story of his personal quest to experience the full spectrum of conciousness.
The book's most interesting chapter is called "The Watch". It's about that hour or two of wakefulness which occurs in the middle of the night, between the first sleep and the second sleep. You know the one...right? Neither did I, but apparently, this makes us a bit weird, historically speaking.
Warren says that until the era of artificial lighting and alarm clocks, sleep was segmented. It was common for people to sleep twice each night, with a bout of awakeness in the middle. This nocturnal alertness wasn't quite like daytime waking, though: it was more relaxed, less focussed, carefree. Our modern sleep pattern, then, is kind of compressed, with the two sleeps pushed together until they merge into one.
There are two lines of evidence for this. Writings from the pre-modern era routinely make reference to "first sleep" and "second sleep", and in many languages, although not modern English, there were special words for these periods and the wakefulness between. This is according to historian A. Roger Ekirch in his history of night-time, At Day's Close (review, Wiki), a book I really want to read now.
On the other hand, there's the findings of sleep psychiatrist Thomas Wehr, in particular his classic 1992 study called In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic. Wehr took healthy American volunteers and put them in an artificial environment with a controlled light cycle, such that there were only 10 hours of brightness per day. (That's 6 hours less than we get on average, even in winter, due to artificial light.) Within a few weeks "their sleep episodes expanded and usually divided into two symmetrical bouts, several hours in duration, with a 1-3 h waking interval between them."
This is pretty freaky. Sleeping all night seems natural, normal and healthy: if we wake up before we need to get up, we're dismayed and we call it insomnia. Maybe this is a modern invention like electric lighting. There's something amazing and also a bit disturbing about this idea. As Warren says, it's like finding out that your house "is really the exposed bell-tower of a vast underground cathedral".
Head Trip
A quick post to recommend the 2007 book Head Trip, by Jeff Warren.Head Trip is about "24 hours in the life of your brain": sleeping, waking, and everything in-between, from lucid dreaming to daydreams and hypnosis.
Warren gives a nice overview of current research and theory along with the story of his personal quest to experience the full spectrum of conciousness.
The book's most interesting chapter is called "The Watch". It's about that hour or two of wakefulness which occurs in the middle of the night, between the first sleep and the second sleep. You know the one...right? Neither did I, but apparently, this makes us a bit weird, historically speaking.
Warren says that until the era of artificial lighting and alarm clocks, sleep was segmented. It was common for people to sleep twice each night, with a bout of awakeness in the middle. This nocturnal alertness wasn't quite like daytime waking, though: it was more relaxed, less focussed, carefree. Our modern sleep pattern, then, is kind of compressed, with the two sleeps pushed together until they merge into one.
There are two lines of evidence for this. Writings from the pre-modern era routinely make reference to "first sleep" and "second sleep", and in many languages, although not modern English, there were special words for these periods and the wakefulness between. This is according to historian A. Roger Ekirch in his history of night-time, At Day's Close (review, Wiki), a book I really want to read now.
On the other hand, there's the findings of sleep psychiatrist Thomas Wehr, in particular his classic 1992 study called In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic. Wehr took healthy American volunteers and put them in an artificial environment with a controlled light cycle, such that there were only 10 hours of brightness per day. (That's 6 hours less than we get on average, even in winter, due to artificial light.) Within a few weeks "their sleep episodes expanded and usually divided into two symmetrical bouts, several hours in duration, with a 1-3 h waking interval between them."
This is pretty freaky. Sleeping all night seems natural, normal and healthy: if we wake up before we need to get up, we're dismayed and we call it insomnia. Maybe this is a modern invention like electric lighting. There's something amazing and also a bit disturbing about this idea. As Warren says, it's like finding out that your house "is really the exposed bell-tower of a vast underground cathedral".
Who was the wedding band in "The Time Traveler's Wife"?
Search: time traveler's wife
Why: I watched that movie last night. The band was covering "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division which, jicydak, is probably the worst wedding song ever.
Answer: Broken Social Scene! which is weird because I really like them, but as I was watching that scene, I was thinking, "This band is awful."
But try this song! Clap along at 1:42.
Source: Wikipedia
The More You Know: I saw Broken Social Scene in 2006-ish in Boston, and Feist opened for them. I don't know if you know this, but she was one of the girl voices on their 2003 album You Forgot It In People, which Jake sent me when I was in Europe. She is also a butterface.
Urine Test - Seems like common sense
I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit. In order to earn that pay cheque, I work on a rig for a drilling contractor. I am required to pass a random urine test for drugs and alcohol, with which I have no problem.
What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test. Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a benefits cheque because I have to pass one to earn it for them? Please understand that I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do on the other hand have a problem with helping someone to sit on their arse drinking booze, smoking dope and generally taking all kinds of drugs. Could you imagine how much money the government would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a benefit cheque?
Ed. This proposal might be a bit 'tongue in cheek' but it strikes me as an idea worth considering.
I would also take it a step further and make ID Cards compulsory for benefit claimants and dependants. Claimants and dependents would have to have their finger prints taken to get an ID Card. Law abiding claimants will have no problem with this process. However, claimants with multiple identies or with with fake dependants will have to find other ways to cheat the system.
Now if we could only come up with a way to stop politicians fiddling their expenses we'd be quids in!!!!!
If you like your footie Part 2
Heading over to Yahoo.co.uk at the beginning of next season will allow you to view weekend match highlights from midnight on a Sunday, or from midnight on the same day for mid-week games.
If you like your footie
The Times is running a couple of good articles on Premier League players today. They are:
As you'd guess, the choices are subjective, contentious, etc., etc. The readers comments at the end make good reading.
Which category does the photoed player belong in do you think?
Thailand's red shirt protests - update
One soldier is feared dead and at least 10 people were injured in violent clashes between Thai troops and red-shirted protesters in a suburb of Bangkok.
Along Vibhavadi-Rangsit road, riot squads fired into the air to push protesters back but several tried to remove the razor wire, prompting troops to level their rifles and shoot directly at protesters who fled into oncoming traffic. Police huddled behind riot shields, while soldiers wielding rifles took up positions behind concrete pylons. A heavy afternoon downpour halted the fighting, at least temporarily.
The confrontation was chaotic and at one point security forces fired on a group of troops riding toward them on motorbikes in what appeared to be an accident, although some members of the security forces have been accused of siding with the protesters. At least four motorbikes crashed and one soldier was carried away on a stretcher, bleeding profusely from the head. Several others from the group threw their hands in the air.
"We brought force out to stop them. At this point, society finds it unacceptable to have protesters traveling in a motorcade like this," Sansern said. "We try our best to prevent losses."
Selasa, 27 April 2010
Was Louis Braille always blind?
Search: louis braille
Why: On Learn Something Every Day:
Answer: Kinda! He was born near Paris in 1809 and was blind by the age of 3. But it wasn't genetic!
Louis became blind by accident, when he was 3 years old. Deep in his Dad's harness workshop, Louis tried to be like his Dad, but it went very wrong; he grabbed an awl, a sharp tool for making holes, and the tool slid and hurt his eye. The wound got infected, and the infection spread, and soon, Louis was blind in both eyes.That is the answer to the question, but now you are probably wondering when he invented Braille. Get ready for some interesting information!
He stayed at his old school for 2 more years, but he couldn't learn everything just by listening. Louis got a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris when he was 10. But even there, most of the teachers just talked at the students. The library had 14 huge books with raised letters that were very hard to read. Louis was impatient.Source: American Foundation for the Blind
Then in 1821, a former soldier named Charles Barbier visited the school. Barbier shared his invention called "night writing," a code of 12 raised dots that let soldiers share top-secret information on the battlefield without even having to speak. Unfortunately, the code was too hard for the soldiers, but not for 12-year-old Louis!
Louis trimmed Barbier's 12 dots into 6, ironed out the system by the time he was 15, then published the first-ever braille book in 1829. But did he stop there? No way! In 1837, he added symbols for math and music. But since the public was skeptical, blind students had to study braille on their own. Even at the Royal Institution, where Louis taught after he graduated, braille wasn't taught until after his death. Braille began to spread worldwide in 1868, when a group of British men, now known as the Royal National Institute for the Blind, took up the cause.
The More You Know: I have a braille book called Jungle Animals in my closet. I will learn how to read it one day. Also Band-Aid boxes.
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