08 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Law School is a Cash Cow
In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.
[...]
IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey informat...
1 30 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Fortune of Conception
Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of
conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into
existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most
decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your
consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than
it was a split second before. To be sure, the embryonic you that came
into existen... 1 
notes
notes16 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
"Real Life" General Game Play
The first thing you'll notice about Real-life is that it about 9 months to start a new character, mainly because two other players have to "register" for a new player to enter the game, fortunately now-a-days "registering" is happening more and more frequently, unfortunately this means that the "sever" getting overcrowd. But back to starting a new character, after waiting 9 months, you enter the game (in a pretty graphic way) but after the tutorial begins, with learning about the breathing an...It takes nine months to spawn and everything is a mini-game.
25 DEC 2012 by ideonexus
Should Smallpox be Made Extinct?
A few decades from now, we may make a brutal,calculated decision to totally eradicate a particular form of life. We already are 99 percent of the way along that path.
Even conservationists, who publicly deplore the extinction of innumerable species of animals and plants through neglect, ignorance, or financial greed, have applauded this conscious, murderous act to be carried out by a UN agency.
I speak of smallpox virus. Since 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been systematica... 1 notes
notes1978 article on the state of the smallpox virus, driven to extinction by the United Nations, asks whether it should be preserved in deep freeze for science?
28 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Sign Language May Boost Cognition in Children by 50 Percent
Gestures and speech used similar neural circuits as they developed in our evolutionary history. University of Chicago psycholinguist David McNeill was the first to suggest this. He thought nonverbal and verbal skills might retain their strong ties even though they’ve diverged into separate behavioral spheres. He was right. Studies confirmed it with a puzzling finding: People who could no longer move their limbs after a brain injury also increasingly lost their ability to communicate verbally....Folksonomies: parenting child development
Folksonomies: parenting child development
1 notes
notesChildren who learned the form of communication in the first grade performed 50 percent better on a series of cognitive tests.
24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The A not B Task
Emilie sits on her father's lap and excitedly stares at the shiny brass bell that the research assistant across the table is holding. Making sure Emilie is watching, the assistant places the bell into one of two matching wells in the table and then quickly covers both wells with identical cloths. Emilie is eager to grab the bell, as any eight-month-old would, but her father gently holds back her arms while the researcher distracts her with a funny face. After five seconds, Dad is signaled to ...Folksonomies: cognition child development
Folksonomies: cognition child development
1 notes
notesA number of complex cognitive tasks must come into play and coordinate properly for a child to recognize that an object has been moved from one hiding place to another.
21 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Development of Memory in Infants
Memory is not a single entity but a patchwork of several different forms of information storage that emerge progressively with the maturation of different brain circuits. Babies begin life with a primitive yet very useful set of memory skills; lower parts of the brain can store information, but it is at an automatic level, beneath consciousness, and lasts for relatively short periods of time. Then, starting at eight or nine months of age, they show signs of a more flexible, deliberate type of...Folksonomies: memory infant development
Folksonomies: memory infant development
1 notes
notesThe first paragraph in this passage outlines the development milestones, while the second is included for its eloquence. Then select passages on habituation, classical and operant conditioning are included as types of memory.
21 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Theory of Neuromuscular Maturation
Believe it or not, it is only relatively recently that scientists have begun to appreciate the importance of babies' earliest motor activity. In the first part of this century, most researchers championed the view that motor development is largely innate, or "hard-wired." Struck by the remarkable consistency of skill acquisition, they argued that motor development depends solely on a fixed process o{ neuromuscular maturation (as their theory came to be called). with little role for practice o... 1 notes
notesExercising babies in neuromotor skills appears to have no effect on the development of those skills. The infants body will acquire those skills when they are sufficiently developed for them.
01 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Emergence Through Emergencies
Very frequently I hear or read of my artifacts adjudged by critics as
being "failures," because I did not get them into mass-production and
"make money with them." Such money-making-as-criteria-of-success critics
do not realize that money-making was never my goal. I learned very early
and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are
trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive. I
saw that nature has various categories of unique gestation lags betwee...Folksonomies: environmentalism innovation
Folksonomies: environmentalism innovation
1 notes
notesBuckminster Fuller explains that many of his ideas haven't caught on, not because they aren't profitable, but because our lack of foresight hasn't yet created a sufficient emergency situation to prompt their adoption.
21 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Animal Instinct and Child Birth
What, then, is the difference between human and other animals?
Are their bodies made differently? As a matter of fact they are remarkably similar. Cat and dog bodies are used in premedical anatomy studies due to the similarity of structures with identical name and function. Is it that they just can't experience pain? Following a natural-childbirth newspaper article, an indignant letter to the editor asserted cats can have kittens without pain because they cannot feel pain as human beings do...Humans don't have instincts when it comes to childbirth, but they can train for it.
