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Comment Re:Nothing good (Score 1) 220

It is not true that there is no check on a majority government. The Supreme Court of Canada is a check on the power of majority government and has in recent years very much functioned in that role. That being said, parliament can use the "not withstanding" clause to curb the check, but to say there are no checks on a majority government is not strictly true. In practice, it is true, but majority governments have, in Canadian history, acted relatively reasonably given the amount of power they do have...

Submission + - The Most Disruptive Technology Of The Last 100 Years Isn't What You Think

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ana Swanson writes in the Washington Post that when people talk about "disruptive technologies," they're usually thinking of the latest thing out of Silicon Valley but some of the most historically disruptive technologies aren't exactly what you would expect and arguably, the most disruptive technologiy of the last century is the refrigerator. In the 1920s, only about a third of households reported having a washer or a vacuum, and refrigerators were even rarer. But just 20 years later, refrigerator ownership was common, with more than two-thirds of Americans owning an icebox. According to Helen Veit, the surge in refrigerator ownership totally changed the way that Americans cooked. "Before reliable refrigeration, cooking and food preservation were barely distinguishable tasks" and techniques like pickling, smoking and canning were common in nearly every American kitchen. With the arrival of the icebox and then the electric refrigerator, foods could now be kept and consumed in the same form for days. Americans no longer had to make and consume great quantities of cheese, whiskey and hard cider — some of the only ways to keep foods edible through the winter. "A whole arsenal of home preservation techniques, from cheese-making to meat-smoking to egg-pickling to ketchup-making, receded from daily use within a single generation," writes Veit.

Technologies like the smartphone, the computer and the Internet have, of course, dramatically changed the ways we live and work but consider the spread of electricity, running water, the flush toilet developed and popularized by Thomas Crapper and central heating and the changes these have wrought. "These technologies were so disruptive because they massively reduced the time spent on housework," concludes Swanson. "The number of hours that people spent per week preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning fell from 58 in 1900 to only 18 hours in 1970, and it has declined further since then."

Comment Re:Wait for the results. (Score 1) 155

Full disclosure: I am familiar with the researchers and had an opportunity to participate in this project. The work is ongoing. This research is woefully underfunded at present and based on solid research done in animal models. One could also ask, "Why write stories about humans going to Mars? They've not designed/built any of the hypothesized vechiles." The answer is, in the current scientific climate, this kind of story is not a non-story, but the difficulty in attracting funding in this area even for very promising project.

Comment Re: This is called Kaya Kalpa in yoga (Score 1) 155

It took about 5 minutes for me, but had to be *total* dakness. So dark I couldn't tell if my eyes were open or shut. This was in a lab where we were doin nuclear emission spectroscopy (just gas discharge tubes). Any outside light would pollute the results, so the lab was really dark until we turned on the juice. During that period I could see as clearly as i'm seeing this screen flowing sheets of glowing pastel paint sliding down a wall that wasn't there. Not true hallucinations of course--by definition if you know it's not real it's not a hallucination. Phosphenes I think they were called.

Anyhow, very beautiful and unusual. I don't think my lab partners saw anything--at least they didn't say they did. Or they were afraid people would think they were nuts.

Later i blacked out my dorm room & reproduced the effect. And learned it's really hard to produce absolute darkness. Tinfoil is *full* of tiny holes! And black paint is not as opaque as it seems.

5 minutes is not long enough to fully adapt the human visual system see: http://www.visualexpert.com/im... 5-8 minutes your cones (the photoreceptors concentrated in the central visual field that are used to encode color) and 20+ minutes for the rod (what we use to see in low light situation) to full adapt. Phosphenes are normal and can be produced by placing slight pressure on the eye. Also interesting dark adaptation can be done independently in each eye. Black out one eye for 8 minutes or so (easier to do than a whole room) then open both your eyes. It is a fun and a little disorienting experience if done correctly.
Science

Submission + - Soccer Superstar Plays With Very Low Brain Activity

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Brazilian superstar Neymar's (Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior) brain activity while dancing past opponents is less than 10 per cent the level of amateur players, suggesting he plays as if on "auto-pilot", according to Japanese neurologists Eiichi Naito and Satoshi Hirose. The findings were published in the Swiss journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience following a series of motor skills tests carried out on the 22-year-old Neymar and several other athletes in Barcelona in February this year. Three Spanish second-division footballers and two top-level swimmers were also subjected to the same tests. Researcher Naito told Japan's Mainichi Shimbun newspaper: "Reduced brain activity means less burden which allows [the player] to perform many complex movements at once. We believe this gives him the ability to execute his various shimmies." In the research paper Naito concluded that the test results "provide valuable evidence that the football brain of Neymar recruits very limited neural resources in the motor-cortical foot regions during foot movements".
Science

Submission + - Does Thinking Science Make People More Ethical?

Submitted by
alysion
alysion writes: "Per research published in the online journal PLOS One, psychologists Christine Ma-Kellams of Harvard University and Jim Blascovich of the University of California, Santa Barbara report, "Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms." Salon.com covered the story. In one of the four supporting experiments, undergraduates considered an account of a date rape and were asked to judge behavior on a scale of 1 to 100. Science types, perhaps not surprisingly, proved to have a better grasp of reality, including the moral kind."
Open Source

Submission + - What does it actually cost to publish a scientific paper? (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders.
Quoting from the piece: "The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think,” agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality." There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that "Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible."

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