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Archive for the ‘education’ category: Page 185

Mar 25, 2016

Brain stimulation may help people with anorexia

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, education, food, neuroscience

FRIDAY, March 25, 2016 — Brain stimulation may ease major symptoms of the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, a typically hard-to-treat condition, a new study suggests.

British researchers evaluated anorexia patients before and after they underwent repetitive transcranial stimulation (rTMS), a treatment approved for depression.

“With rTMS we targeted … an area of the brain thought to be involved in some of the self-regulation difficulties associated with anorexia,” study first author Jessica McClelland, a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London, said in a school news release.

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Mar 24, 2016

First Retailer in Orbit: Lowe’s and Made In Space Send 3D Printer to Station

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, education, habitats, space

Outer space is about to get its first pop-up retail shop.

Lowe’s, the home-improvement store, has teamed up with Made In Space, the company behind the world’s first zero-G 3D printer, to launch the first commercial manufacturing facility on the International Space Station.

The Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF), as it is called, is an advanced, permanent 3D printer that will be available for use not only by NASA and its station partners, but also by researchers, educational organizations and commercial customers.

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Mar 23, 2016

My Beautiful Broken Brain — Official Trailer — Netflix [HD]

Posted by in categories: education, neuroscience

Stunning and beautifully heartfelt documentary of a young woman, stripped of her most cherished abilities, fighting hard to reclaim her life in the face of the indifferent cruelty that defines the natural world.

“A stroke stripped her of the skills she needs to function. This documentary captures the strange new world she inhabits, teeming with color and sound. Only on Netflix March 18th.”

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Mar 23, 2016

Detroit makes community college free

Posted by in category: education

Starting this year, any graduating high school senior who is accepted to one of Detroit’s five community colleges won’t have to pay a dime for tuition.

The Detroit Promise Zone program, officially launched on Tuesday, will make it possible. At first the funds will come from a private scholarship foundation. But starting in 2018, some of the money will come from property taxes already earmarked for the program.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a high school senior preparing for college now or a second-grader whose college career is years away. The Detroit Promise will be there to help make a college education a reality,” said Mayor Mike Duggan.

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Mar 22, 2016

Can Google Expand Cuba’s Censored Internet? — By David Talbot | MIT Technology Review

Posted by in categories: education, internet, media & arts

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“President Obama seems to think Google can help increase Internet access in a country that has not historically been interested in unfettered connectivity.”

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Mar 18, 2016

Interview with Pavel Exner ahead of his 70th birthday

Posted by in categories: education, physics

Going back to the start, how did you come to studying Theoretical Physics?

As with most people my path was determined by a series of choices involving random factors. I liked mathematics and physics at school, and did well in the olympiads, but I liked also literature, history, etc. At the age of fourteen I choose a technical-type high school oriented at nuclear disciplines, as popular then as they are despised by many these days, probably because it was one of the most difficult and challenging ones.

The way from there to the Technical University was straightforward. Since I have the need to understand things from the first principles, I drifted gradually towards theoretical physics and it was only natural that in the middle of my studies, corresponding roughly to the bachelor degree nowadays, I ended up at the Theoretical Physics Department of the Charles University, where I subsequently graduated.

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Mar 17, 2016

Don’t Turn Away From the Art of Life — By Arnold Weinstein | The New York Times

Posted by in categories: education, philosophy

23edweinsteinart-master675

“In a letter written in 1871, the Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud uttered a phrase that announces the modern age: “‘Je’ est un autre” (“‘I’ is someone else”). Some 69 years later I entered the world as an identical twin, and Rimbaud’s claim has an uncanny truth for me, since I grew up being one of a pair. Even though our friends and family could easily tell us apart, most people could not, and I began life with a blurrier, more fluid sense of my contours than most other folks.”

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Mar 16, 2016

SFCI Archive: Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium (1993)

Posted by in categories: education, physics, virtual reality

studioforcreativeinquiry.org/projects/the-networked-virtual-art-museum
studioforcreativeinquiry.org/projects/iten-interdisciplinary-teaching-network

Directed by Carl Loeffler, The Networked Virtual Art Museum was a pioneering project that investigated telecommunications and virtual reality, and provided a basis for multiple users located in distant geographical locations to be conjoined in the same virtual, immersion environment. The project employed telecommunication hardware, as well as the hardware associated with virtual reality: data eyephones and multi-directional navigation devices. The immersion environment was an art museum with galleries offering various exhibitions.

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Mar 7, 2016

The Importance of Hope

Posted by in categories: biological, education, health, homo sapiens, life extension

hope

I learn useful life lessons from each patient I meet. Some are positive messages, reminding me of the importance of maintaining balance between family, work, and leisure activities, but more frequently I witness examples of the remarkable resilience of the human spirit when facing the reality and risks of a major surgical procedure and a diagnosis of cancer. Rarely, patients and their family members utter remorseful or simply sad remarks when they are faced with a grim prognosis and the emotions associated with an onrushing date with mortality. These comments invariably involve an inventory of regrets in life, including, “I should have spent more time with my kids,” “I wish I had told my father (or mother, brother, sister, child, or some other person) that I loved them before they died,” and “I have spent my entire life working, I never took time for anything else.” I wince when I hear these openly expressed remonstrations, I recognize that I am hearing painful and heartfelt truths. Not a week goes by that I am not reminded that I do not one day want to look back at my life with a long list of regrets, should have dones, and what ifs.

I was blessed to meet a great teacher in the guise of a patient early in my academic career. He came to my clinic in my first year after completing a Fellowship in Surgical Oncology, my first year as an Assistant Professor of Surgery. My patient was a 69 year-old Baptist Minister from a small town in Mississippi. He was referred to me by his medical oncologist who called me and said, “I don’t think there is anything you can do for him, but he needs to hear that from you because he doesn’t believe me.” This tall, imposing man had colon cancer that had metastasized (spread) to his liver. The malignant tumor in his colon was removed the year before I met him, and he had received chemotherapy to treat several large tumors found in his liver. The chemotherapy had not worked and the tumors grew. At the point I met him, the medical oncologist told him he would live no more than 6 months, and because he was an avid fisherman when not preaching or helping others in his community , the doctor suggested that he go out and enjoy his remaining time by getting in as much fishing as possible. I learned two invaluable lessons from this patient and his family. First, never deny or dismiss hope from a patient or their family, even when from a medical perspective the situation seems hopeless and the patient is incurable. Second, quoting the minister directly, “Some doctors think of themselves as gods with a small ‘g’, but not one of you is God”.

When I first walked into the examining room, this man was slouched on the examining table in the perfunctory blue and white, open-backed, always unflattering hospital gown. He made eye contact with me briefly, then looked down to the floor. In that momentary meeting of our eyes, I saw no sparkle, no life, no hope in his eyes. He responded to my initial questions with a monotonic and quiet voice. Several times I had to ask him to repeat an answer because his response was so muted. Mid-way through our first visit, the patient’s wife told me he had been very depressed by his diagnosis of untreatable metastatic colon cancer. She reported, despite his occasional side-long warning glances requesting her silence, that while he was eating well, he was spending most of his time sitting in a chair or laying in bed, and that the active, gregarious man with the quick wit and booming voice she had married was gone.

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Mar 4, 2016

The beginning of the end for encryption schemes? New quantum computer, based on five atoms, factors numbers in a scalable way

Posted by in categories: computing, education, encryption, nanotechnology, quantum physics

Replacing traditional encryption schemes.


What are the prime factors, or multipliers, for the number 15? Most grade school students know the answer — 3 and 5 — by memory. A larger number, such as 91, may take some pen and paper. An even larger number, say with 232 digits, can (and has) taken scientists two years to factor, using hundreds of classical computers operating in parallel.

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