Quals UK Lectures! - The UK Lectures at St. Andrews, Warwick, Cambridge and Queen Mary were a success! Thanks to everyone who came out, it was great to meet you! More info here! Top 10 Myths About The Common Cold Health Winter is on its way (to the Northern Hemisphere) and with it comes myths of the common cold. We all grow up with a variety of beliefs about the common cold that often differ from home to home, but the fact is, most of them are wrong. With this list we will help to educate everyone about the myths relating to the cold and flu and hopefully help us to be better prepared to cope with it in future. We have all done it – or at least seen others do it: covering up with extra blankets, sticking your head over a bowl of hot water – all in the hopes that we will sweat the cold out. Unfortunately, this does not work – it is completely ineffective.
industrial design magazine + resource / blog Posted by Kat Bauman | 11 Apr 2014 | Comments (0) Yep, it's Friday, get ready to waste some time and feel fine doing it. Skip your next Facebook break and try out the addictive game Super Planet Crash—build planetary systems, watch as they destroy themselves, collect points and think about gravitational relationships for fun! Super Planet Crash was made by Stefano Meschiari, whose real job involves real planets. As a postdoc astronomer at UT Austin and a big contributor to Seismic 2—software to aid "exploring and analyzing exoplanetary data"—Meschiari knows what's up with interplanetary intrigue. The goal: Build the most complex star system that can last for 500 years.
10 myths about vaccination {*style:<b> </b>*}While better hygiene, hand washing and clean water can protect people against diseases such as influenza and cholera, most viruses spread regardless of how clean we are. If people are not vaccinated, so-called old diseases will quickly reappear, such as measles. Owing to the complexity of the human immune system, no vaccine provides 100% protection, but this persistent myth also draws on the fact that true immunization status is not always recorded correctly and that numbers can be manipulated. Over 90% of the people with measles cases reported in 2009 had received less than the recommended two doses of measles vaccine. All medical treatments, including vaccination, can have side-effects. The fin de siècle newspaper proprietor / F. Opper. Rights assessment is your responsibility. More about Copyright and other Restrictions For guidance about compiling full citations consult Citing Primary Sources. Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.
Special Features: Myths of the Common Cold 1. Approximately 25% of people who get a cold virus infection do not develop symptoms and yet they get over the infection as well as people who do have symptoms (5, 72, also see How Virus Infection Occurs). 2. The True History of Fake News In the long history of misinformation, the current outbreak of fake news has already secured a special place, with the president’s personal adviser, Kellyanne Conway, going so far as to invent a Kentucky massacre in order to defend a ban on travelers from seven Muslim countries. But the concoction of alternative facts is hardly rare, and the equivalent of today’s poisonous, bite-size texts and tweets can be found in most periods of history, going back to the ancients. Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century AD churned out dubious information, known as Anecdota, which he kept secret until his death, in order to smear the reputation of the Emperor Justinian after lionizing the emperor in his official histories. Although pasquinades never disappeared, they were succeeded in the seventeenth century by a more popular genre, the “canard,” a version of fake news that was hawked in the streets of Paris for the next two hundred years. The Gallic Queen is partial to the English.
Why You're Probably Less Popular Than Your Friends Are your friends more popular than you are? There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason to suppose this is true, but it probably is. We are all more likely to become friends with someone who has a lot of friends than we are to befriend someone with few friends. It’s not that we avoid those with few friends; rather it’s more probable that we will be among a popular person’s friends simply because he or she has a larger number of them. This simple realization is relevant not only to real-life friends but also to social media. In Twitter, for example, it gives rise to what might be called the follower paradox: most people have fewer followers than their followers do.
The internet is full of fake news, and there may not be a way to fix it Fake news. The internet is full of it, and Facebook, for one, is making a big push to find it, flag it and make sure that people know what they’re reading. But not everyone is convinced that Facebook — or anyone else — can actually improve the internet’s fake news problem. A new study from Pew Research Center, which surveyed more than 1,000 “internet and technology experts” like professors, authors, and technologists, found that people are split on whether or not the internet’s fake news issue will be resolved. Of those polled, 51 percent believe the “information environment will not improve” in the next 10 years, while 49 percent believe it will. The fake news pessimists believe that technology just moves too fast for humans to catch up with bad actors, according to the findings.
Blogging, Now and Then Nouvellistes gossiping and reading in a café of the Palais-Royal (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper) Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker Crown, 404 pp., $26.00