How the City Hurts Your Brain 439
Hugh Pickens writes "The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the 'concentration of social interactions' is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. 'The mind is a limited machine,' says psychologist Marc Berman. 'And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.' Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"
Nobel Prize Winning Physicist As Energy Secretary 498
bledri writes "Officials close to the Obama transition team say that
Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Chu is the likely candidate for Energy Secretary. Some are worried that Chu is not politically savvy enough,
but I'm hopeful that a scientist will base policy on evidence.
Discuss among yourselves."
Comment Re:The best way to not get caught (Score 1) 218
Actually its not the downloading* that is the problem, its the uploading that is the "file-sharing" part that gets you in trouble.
*See also NNTP.
Submission + - Bioinformatics with NVIDIA 8800GTX and PS3 (lifesciencessociety.org)
rbrinkman writes: "It seems you can put that 8800GTX for good use while waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to be released. Researchers have shown that game hardware such as GPUs and PS3s are a cost-effective platform for some computationally demanding bioinformatics problems including those involving clustering and Monte Carlo permutation procedures. No word on the PhysX though."
Submission + - Novell owns Unix/Unixware copyrights (groklaw.net)
karmester writes: From Groklaw:
http://www.groklaw.net/
Friday, August 10 2007 @ 04:52 PM EDT
Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling
[PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here
is what matters most:
[T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and
UnixWare Copyrights.
That's Aaaaall, Folks!
If anyone can please put this into text for us, that'd be simply great.
I hear there is a filing in IBM also, and we'll get it for your soon.
Here's the docket entry:
08/10/2007 1077 — NOTICE OF DECISION AND REQUEST FOR STATUS UPDATE.
Signed by Judge Dale A. Kimball on 8-10-07. (sih) (Entered: 08/10/2007)
