carapace – Not your father's america

Wal-Mart is apologizing for approving a full-page ad equating a proposed Arizona zoning
ordinance with a Nazi book burning. The ad in the May 8 “Arizona Daily Sun” included a 1933 photo of people throwing books onto a pyre in Berlin. The ad compared a Flagstaff, Ariz., proposal to
restrict Wal-Mart from expanding a local store to the government limiting what books people could read. Complaints by the Arizona Anti-Defamation League, members of Congress and the United Food
and Commercial Workers about the ad triggered Wal-Mart’s apology.

From: Work in Progress

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,357110,00.html

With a yearly budget of over $40 million, Al Hurra, a U.S. supported TV channel for the “Arab World,” is “one of the US government’s most expensive public diplomacy efforts yet,” reports MediaCorp News, a Singapore-based media group. Since its launch in February 2004, most
news stories about the 24-hour Arabic-language satellite station report that the channel is viewed as little more than U.S. propaganda in the form of news and entertainment. Al Hurra’s
credibility as an independent news outlet is challenged by the German magazine Der Spiegel’s report that the station’s “50 staff members in Iraq have been instructed to be on the lookout
for signs of improvement. ‘If the power comes back on in a part of the city, we see this as
being more newsworthy than reporting that the power is out someplace else,’ says one employee.”

SOURCE: Der Spiegel, May 21, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3715

11 steps to a better brain

28 May 2005
NewScientist.com news service

11 steps to a better brain
You must remember this. It doesn’t matter how brainy you are or how much education you’ve had – you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn’t have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells.

5.Gainful employment

Put your mind to work in the right way and it could repay you with an impressive bonus

UNTIL recently, a person’s IQ – a measure of all kinds of mental problem-solving abilities, including spatial skills, memory and verbal reasoning – was thought to be a fixed commodity largely determined by genetics. But recent hints suggest that a very basic brain function called working memory might underlie our general intelligence, opening up the intriguing possibility that if you improve your working memory, you could boost your IQ too.

Working memory is the brain’s short-term information storage system. It’s a workbench for solving mental problems. For example if you calculate 73 – 6 + 7, your working memory will store the intermediate steps necessary to work out the answer. And the amount of information that the working memory can hold is strongly related to general intelligence.

A team led by Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has found signs that the neural systems that underlie working memory may grow in response to training. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, they measured the brain activity of adults before and after a working-memory training programme, which involved tasks such as memorising the positions of a series of dots on a grid. After five weeks of training, their brain activity had increased in the regions associated with this type of memory (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75).

“Working memory training could be the key to unlocking brain power”Perhaps more significantly, when the group studied children who had completed these types of mental workouts, they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 44, p 177). It’s early days yet, but Klingberg thinks working-memory training could be a key to unlocking brain power. “Genetics determines a lot and so does the early gestation period,” he says. “On top of that, there is a few per cent – we don’t know how much – that can be improved by training.”

From issue 2501 of New Scientist magazine, 28 May 2005, page 28

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18625011.900

June 18, 2002

15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don’t hold up

By John Rennie

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving “desirable” (adaptive) features and eliminating “undesirable” (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.

As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence “TOBEORNOTTOBE.” Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet’s). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare’s entire play in just four and a half days.

Complete article at:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF