http://www.ted.com/talks/thandie_newton_embracing_otherness_embracing_myself.html
To Dance Is a Radical Act To dance is a radical act. To think about dance, to study dance, or to practice dance in this 21st century is a radical act. Why? Because if dancing matters—if dancing makes a difference to how we humans think and feel and act-then dancing challenges the values that fund modern western cultures. How so? Reinventing Health Care Services (August 16, 2011) A doctor describes his groundbreaking, transdisciplinary effort to design more cost-effective care models for conditions that drive a large proportion of US health spending. (Illustration by Keith Negley) My professional life has revolved around a single question: How can doctors and other health professionals catalyze big leaps in the quality and affordability of health care? In keeping with the Physician Charter, a modern version of the Hippocratic oath, many physicians are beginning to realize that they have an ethical imperative to promote “the wise and cost-effective management of limited clinical resources”—in addition to the health of patients. This ethical imperative has now become a fiscal imperative if the United States is to avoid what has been described in The New England Journal of Medicine as the “specter of financial Armageddon” for federal and state governments.
6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers In the beginning, there was just you and your partners. You did every job. You coded, you met with investors, you emptied the trash and phoned in the midnight pizza. Now you have others to do all that and it's time for you to "be strategic." Whatever that means. Minds are as clever as they will ever be, say scientists It’s all downhill from here â we are as clever as we are ever going to be, scientists have concluded. If our brains were to evolve any further, it would increase the risk of disorders such as autism. Our grey matter has hit an evolutionary âsweet spotâ â with the perfect balance between high intelligence and a balanced personality. But scientists claim that, if our brains did become more advanced, we would be more likely to develop disorders such as autism or synaesthesia, where several senses âjoin togetherâ and are indistinguishable.
Government 2.0 (August 16, 2011) Thanks to Todd Park, a federal agency has discovered that health care organizations can think more like nimble startups than like lumbering giants. (Illustration by Keith Negley) The great irony of the transformative health care reform legislation passed in 2010 is that although the law promises access to care for 30 million Americans, it relies on an outdated structure woefully ill prepared to serve them. Constrained resources, flawed economics, rising costs—how can a health care system under so much strain survive such an expansion? The answer will be found in creativity. Over time, the most dynamic health care institutions have boosted their creative metabolisms, so to speak, with promising methods for vetting new ideas and technologies.
Why our minds have probably evolved as far as they can go SExpand OK..this is going to sound like I am tooting my own horn...but this is my experience, and all experiences are equally valid right? I have an almost photographic memory. I remember almost everything I pay attention to. Plasmonics intensifies a novel nanoscale light source, Stanford engineers find Mark Brongersma The EFISH device greatly increases the power of light passing through it. Not long after the development of the first laser in 1960, scientists discovered that shining a beam through certain crystals produced light of a different color; more specifically, it produced light of exactly twice the frequency of the original. The phenomenon was dubbed second harmonic generation.
» Creating Silence from Chaos Post written by Leo Babauta. We are often afraid of silence, because its emptiness feels idle, boring, unproductive, and scary. And so we fill our lives with chaos, noise, clutter. But silence can be lovely, and therapeutic, and powerful. It can be the remedy for our stress and the habits that crush us.
1. Dangers of Crying It Out Letting babies "cry it out" is an idea that has been around since at least the 1880s when the field of medicine was in a hullaballoo about germs and transmitting infection and so took to the notion that babies should rarely be touched (see Blum, 2002 , for a great review of this time period and attitudes towards childrearing). In the 20 th century, behaviorist John Watson (1928), interested in making psychology a hard science, took up the crusade against affection as president of the American Psychological Association. He applied the mechanistic paradigm of behaviorism to child rearing, warning about the dangers of too much mother love. The 20 th century was the time when "men of science" were assumed to know better than mothers, grandmothers and families about how to raise a child. Too much kindness to a baby would result in a whiney, dependent, failed human being.
+330,000 Jobs in 2 Decades from Energy Efficiency Clean Power Published on September 21st, 2011 | by Zachary Shahan Export dollars per job in the clean economy are almost double those in the broader economy. Median wages are nearly 20% higher. Energy efficiency saves us bucket-loads of cash, but it also creates jobs for our fellow Americans (and the money they make goes back into our economy). James Dixon, chairman of the National Association of Energy Service Companies, recently pointed out on Politico that, since 1990, the energy efficiency industry has added 330,000 jobs (I imagine some of you have such jobs).
Group settings can diminish expressions of intelligence, especially among women In the classic film 12 Angry Men, Henry Fonda's character sways a jury with his quiet, persistent intelligence. But would he have succeeded if he had allowed himself to fall sway to the social dynamics of that jury? Research led by scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute found that small-group dynamics -- such as jury deliberations, collective bargaining sessions, and cocktail parties -- can alter the expression of IQ in some susceptible people. "You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well," said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. "We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ," said Montague.
3 Questions: Faster than light? The news media were abuzz this week with reports of experiments conducted at the Gran Sasso particle detector complex in Italy, apparently showing subatomic particles called neutrinos had traveled from the giant particle accelerator at CERN, outside Geneva, to the Italian detector at a speed just slightly faster than the speed of light — a result that, if correct, would overturn more than a century of accepted physics theory. Professor of Physics Peter Fisher, head of MIT’s Particle and Nuclear Experimental Physics division, answered some questions about these new findings. Q. If this result is confirmed, does it really undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity, as some news reports claim? And if so, is there a theory that’s been proposed that might account for it?
Science overturns view of humans as naturally 'nasty' Biological research increasingly debunks the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish, a leading specialist in primate behavior told a major science conference Monday. "Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies," Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. New research on higher animals from primates and elephants to mice shows there is a biological basis for behavior such as cooperation, said de Waal, author of "The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society."