Metagame

Metagaming refers to the relationship between the game and outside elements, including everything from player attitudes and play styles to social reputations and social contexts in which the game is played. Post-game locker room conversations about the match are metagame interactions. Memorizing words in the Scrabble dictionary is a metagame activity, the honing of in-game skills. The typical playing strategies of a particular Go master are metagame information, useful if you are playing agai...

 Exercise Releases Brain-Healthy Proteins

We all know that exercise is important for a strong and healthy body. Less appreciated is that exercise seems also to be important for a strong and healthy mind, boosting memory and learning, while possibly delaying age-related cognitive decline [1]. How is this so? Researchers have assembled a growing body of evidence that suggests skeletal muscle cells secrete proteins and other factors into the blood during exercise that have a regenerative effect on the brain. Now, an NIH-supported study...

 Understanding Factors Through Divisibility

This is appropriate for 4th or 5th graders and involves finding the smallest number divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 10. Directions: Teach the students how to tell if a number is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, & 10. Give groups ofu00a0two tou00a0four students the divisibility rules on a sheet of paper, and challenge them to find the smallest number divisible by all of the numbers listed above. Eventually the students, with or without help from the teacher, will come to reali...

 Computers Can't Do Everything

The … truck driver is processing a constant stream of [visual, aural, and tactile] information from his environment. … To program this behavior we could begin with a video camera and other sensors to capture the sensory input. But executing a left turn against oncoming traffic involves so many factors that it is hard to imagine discovering the set of rules that can replicate a driver’s behavior. … Articulating [human] knowledge and embedding it in software for all but highly structur...

 Ecological Approach to Nutrition

The interactions of man with his environment are so complex that only an ecological approach to nutrition permits an understanding of the whole spectrum of factors determining the nutritional problems that exist in human societies.

 How Science Changes Society

Change is one of mankind’s most mysterious creations. The factors that operate to cause it came into play when man produced his first tool. With it he changed the world forever, and bound himself to the artifacts he would create in order, always, to make tomorrow better than today. But how does change operate? What triggers a new invention, a different philosophy, an altered society? The interactive network of man’s activities links the strangest, most disparate elements, bringing togethe...

 How Greek Civilization Came Together

The development of objective thinking by the Greeks appears to have required a number of specific cultural factors. First was the assembly, where men first learned to persuade one another by means of rational debate. Second was a maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism. Third was the existence of a widespread Greekspeaking world around which travelers and scholars could wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent merchant class that could hire its own teachers. Fifth...