Archive for January, 2011

Al Ain, the fourth largest city in the United Arab Emirates (and the second largest in the Abu Dhabi emirate) is, like most of non-costal UAE, located in the desert.AA Al Ain receives less than one cenimeter of rain per year — Death Valley, California receives about four times that — making agriculture all but impossible.A (Nevertheless, Al Ain is known as the Garden City in UAE, because of its relatively large amount of greenery.) The solution:A Man-made rain storms.

Who is Jill Price?

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Jill Price (nee Rosenberg, born December 30, 1965 in New York City) is one of eight confirmed subjects determined by scientists to have hyperthymesia and was the person who pioneered such research. She is able to recite details of every day of her life since she was fourteen years old. She can recall various obscure moments of her life in high detail Price’s condition was coined hyperthymesia, or hyperthymestic syndrome. It is characterized by a highly superior autobiographical memory and spending vast quantities of time thinking one’s past. She appears to have enlarged parts of her brain associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). The first report on the study of her brain was published in 2006. In 2008, she co-authored the book The Woman Who Can’t Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to ScienceaA Memoir, explaining her life with the condition.Avia further reading

While he routinely violates his own axiom about the integral relationship between culture and social structure, Wilson injects what might be called the "culturalist caveat." In a section on "the relative importance of structure and culture," he concedes, "Structural factors are likely to play a far greater role than cultural factors in bringing about rapid neighborhood change." But what structural changes does he have in mind? Despite the fact that Wilson's signature issue for many years was jobs, jobs, jobs, since his cultural turn there has been nigh any mention of jobs. Affirmative action is apparently off the table, and there is no policy redress for the nation's four million "disconnected youth" who are out of school and out of work.

Steve Wozniak : How Do You Change the World?

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Well, first you need to believe in yourself. Don't waver. There will be people, and I'm talking about the vast majority of people, practically everybody you'll ever meet, who just think in black-and-white terms. Most people see things the way the media sees them or the way their friends see them, and they think if they're right, everyone else is wrong. So a new idea, a revolutionary new product or product feature, won't be understandable to most people because they see things so black and white. Maybe they don't get it because they can't imagine it, or maybe they don't get it because someone else has already told them what's useful or good.

The only way to come up with something new or world-changing is to think outside of the constraints everyone else has. You have to think outside of the artificial limits everyone else has already set. You have to live in the gray-scale world, not the black-and-white one, if you're going to come up with something no one has thought of before.

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me, they're shy and they live in their heads. They're almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone, best outside the corporate environments, best where they can control an invention's design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee.

It's so easy to doubt yourself, and it's especially easy to doubt yourself when what you're working on is at odds with everyone else in the world who thinks they know the right way to do things. Sometimes you can't prove whether you're right or wrong. Only time can tell that.ABut if you believe in your own power to objectively reason, that's a key to happiness. And a key to confidence.

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The Kalamazoo Beer Exchange

The Kalamazoo Beer Exchange, located at 211 E. Water St., formerly home of Charlie Fosters, opened last week for lunch only from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Once the Michigan Liquor Control Commission releases the license from escrow, owner James Flora will offer a unique concept for beer lovers.

Flora has 28 taps ready to host some of the best Michigan craft beer, as well as some imported and domestic brews.

His bar/restaurant features several TVs that will show the price of all 28 beers.

Depending on what customers purchase, the prices will rise or fall.

"It's an ever-evolving happy hour," Flora said.

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Allen Vandever,s New Reflection on Opart

I have bean studding Opart for the last year to learn how to take it to the next level. I now have good grasp on how to use and incorporate it into my work. I will be Bloging my new Ideas and works in hopes to get some feedback on this endeavor. I hope you enjoy these images and if you don't for any reason let me know so I can take your ideas into consideration.

Allen Vandever

But whats more incredible about this is the change in attitude it has brought about. A I'm starting to see through the irrational fears that I have (and everyone else does too) and doors are starting to get opened left and right. AI'll take the high I get from succeeding while doing something that scares me, over sitting around, being "just comfortable", any day.

Eurisko : The Computer With A Mind Of Its Own

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On the July 4 weekend of 1981, while many Americans were preoccupied with barbecues or fireworks displays, players of an immensely complex, futuristic war game called Traveller gathered in San Mateo, California, to pick a national champion. Guided by hundreds of pages of design rules and equipment specifications, players calculate how to build a fleet of ships that will defeat all enemies without exceeding an imaginary defense budget of one trillion credits.

To design just one vessel, some fifty factors must be taken into account: how thick to make the armor, how much fuel to carry, what type of weapons, engines, and computer guidance system to use. Each decision is a tradeoff: a powerful engine will make a ship faster, but it might require carrying more fuel; increased armor provides protection but adds weight and reduces maneuverability.

Since a fleet may have as many as 100 ships-exactly how many is one more question to decide-the number of ways that variables can be juxtaposed is overwhelming, even for a digital computer. Mechanically generating and testing every possible fleet configuration might, of course, eventually produce a winner, but most of the computer's time would be spent blindly considering designs that are nonsense. Exploring Traveller's vast "search space," as mathematicians call it, require the ability to learn from experience, developing heuristics-rules of thumb-about which paths are most likely to yield reasonable solutions.

In 1981, Eurisko, a computer program that arguably displays the rudiments of such skills, easily won the Traveller tournament, becoming the top-ranked player in the United States and an honorary Admiral in the Traveller navy. Eurisko had designed its fleet according to principles it discovered itself-with some help from its inventor, Douglas B. Lenat, an assistant professor in Stanford University's artificial-intelligence program.

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My Ninja, Please! : Dr. Akira Iritani

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Get your Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King jokes ready. A professor at Japan’s Kyoto University is claiming that he’ll be able to resurrect a woolly mammoth within roughly four years’ time, bringing new life to a species that died out more than 5,000 years prior.

Even though Dr. Akira Iritani isn’t going to attempt to duplicate DNA strains from animals trapped in amber, the technique he’s propositioningawhich was already used by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology to clone a mouse previously frozen for sixteen yearsadoes sound fairly close to that on paper.

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