16 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Covering Your Tracks Online is Suspicious
The drawback to covering your tracks like this on
a daily basis is that it sometimes makes you look
like, well, like you’re covering your tracks. People
who engage all of their privacy functions sometimes
stand out in a transparent society. It may make
people suspicious, thinking that you’re up to something.
If you’re only encrypting your communications
with certain people, it sometimes makes it look
even worse, like you’re collaborating—and it also
pinpoints who you’re in cahoots...If you do not show up in searches, then it appears as though you have something to hide.
21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
The Laetoli Footprints
team of paleoanthropologists led by Mary Leakey confirmed the
bipedality of A. afarensis with another remarkable find in Tanzania: the
famous “Laetoli footprints.” In 1976, Andrew Hill and another member
of the team were taking a break by indulging in a favorite field pastime:
pelting each other with chunks of dried elephant dung. Looking for
ammunition in a dry stream bed, Hill stumbled upon a line of fossilized
footprints. After careful excavation, the footprints turned out to be an
...Not only do these prints demonstrate A. afarensis could walk upright, but the nature of their preservation, having been made in volcanic ash and their proximity to one another, paints a image of two ancestors huddling together in an ashen landscape.
07 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies Look to Mothers for Cues on How to React to the World
Other experiments also show that one-year-olds have a radically new understanding of people. What happens when you show a baby something new, something a little strange, maybe wonderful, maybe dangerous—say, a walking toy robot? The baby looks over at Mom quizzically and checks her out. What does she think? Is there a reassuring smile or an expression of shocked horror? One-year-olds will modify their own reactions accordingly. If there's a smile, they'll crawl forward to investigate; if th...When presented with an unknown, the infant will look to the mother's expression to understand how it should react and if it should engage.