Below are my top 10 posts from Sept, 2007, selected by the number of comments I got per post. Thank Bilbo, Mike, John, Sicilian, who shared their opinions on almost every posts here.
long TV viewing cause shorter attention.
viagra promote feelings of love.
translates numbers into images.
steroids is the explanation for home runs surge
commuter-marriages increases in us.
Among the findings: Barely half trust the government to handle international problems, the lowest number ever. And less than half express faith in the government handling domestic issues, the lowest findings since 1976. Faith in the executive branch has fallen to 43% - only 3% higher than it was just before President Nixon's resignation in 1974. At the same time, trust in Congress, at 50%, is its lowest ever.Gallup has asked about trust in government since 1972. It conducted this year's poll Sept. 14-16 and found the following:
-- Barely half of Americans, 51%, say they have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in the federal government to handle international problems.
-- Less than half of Americans, 47%, now have at least a fair amount of trust in the federal government to handle domestic problems.
We all know yawning is contagious, but can we measure how contagious is it? or can we somehow engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious? According to this interesting NPR story, Robert Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, try to design a 100% contagious yawn.
"A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55% of the audience. So that was his starting point: could he design a yawn powerful enough to move from a 55% response right up to Total Yawn-ness?".
The results? no matter what the Prof. Provine tried, he could not make a yawn with more 55% response rate.
According to census data released last week, only about 50% married Americans ever get to celebrate their 25th year together, down from nearly 70% married in the late 1950s who made it to the quarter-century mark. The rest were widowed, divorced, or separated beforehand.
According to a new study by Tufts University physicist Roger Tobin, steroids is the most plausible explanation for the home runs surge in recent years. Below are his calculations:I enjoyed this Flash animation (Male vs.Female) very mush. Funny and true.
Many cases of colds, flu, and foodborne illness are spread by unclean hands, and these diseases are responsible for billions of dollars each year in health care expenditures and productivity losses. Hand hygiene is simple routine of modern day life.
However, accoding to a recent survey, 1/3 of U.S. men doesn't wash his hands after using public bathrooms. 92% of Americans who claimed in a phone survey that they always do it, but only 77% people actually did it an observational stud. In terms of gender gap, 88% of women did it, but only 66% of men - a drop from the 75% of men who did it in a similar study two years ago.
That's gross!
Studies show men don't suffer any loss in status when they express emotion on the job, but for women, the rules are different. In a recent research, Victoria Brescoll of Yale University asked a group of men and women to watch videotaped interviews of male and female job applicants, some of whom expressed anger while describing their past work experiences. Afterward, the viewers rated the subjects' competence and suggested target salaries. When male candidates expressed emotion, viewers contributed it to a tough situation. Women's anger, though, was attributed to personality, and women were offered salaries 40% lower than those awarded to men. But when women mentioned a reason for their anger, the gender bias disappeared. Bottom line, people strongly disapprove of women expressing anger in a professional context. 
When thinking about the dinosaurs, I tend to image a rain of asteroids falling down to the Earth, which bring down the dinosaurs. Last week, I learned from a science seminar that after three decades of research, the consensus of the scientific community is now believe that it just took 1 single, asteroid to cause that destruction which ended the 161-million year reign of the dinosaurs. According to computer models, it goes something like this ....People used to believe Viagra promotes sex mechanically, by boosting blood flow to the penis. Now through a new study on rat, researchers found that Viagra can increase the level of oxytocin (also known as Love Hormone) by 300%. Researchers suspect it does the same to people. Earlier studies showed that "oxytocin-sensitive cells in the brain play a role in the neural control of erectile responses." It appears that Viagra can promote love, not just sex.
In the past, one could get by on intuition and experience. Times have changed. Today, the name of the game is data and analysis. Here is an example of how to evaluate wines by the number - according to Princeton University economics professor Orley Ashenfelter,
Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 x winter rainfall + 0.0614 x average growing season temperature - 0.00386 x harvest rainfall
We as parents know sitting too close to the TV is bad for childrens eyes, a new study show too much television may be linked to a bad attention span. According to this large long-term study, watching television more than 2 hours a day early in life can lead to attention problems later in adolescence, an 40% increase in attention problems among heavy TV viewers (>3 hours a day). Symptoms of attention problems included short attention span, poor concentration, and being easily distracted.
The reason? Children who watch a lot of television may become less tolerant of slower-paced and more mundane tasks, such as school or House work. To make things worse, young children who watched a lot of television were more likely to continue the habit as they got older, but even if they did not, the damage was done, the study said.
Another side effect of TV watching - unlike other activities that promote participation, such as reading, games, sports and play, TV watching is inherently lack of participation which might also condition children when it comes to other activities.
Below are my top 10 posts from August, 2007, selected by the number of comments I got per post. Thank you for everyone who shared your opinions here.
feminity of poverty
why kids love McDonald's
worlds' most expensive coffee
gene and gender differences
top 10 reasons why humans have sex
some Iraq war statistics
why fingernails grow faster than toenails
solve all rubiks cubes in 26 moves
higher risk suicide linked breast implants
link between cell phone usage and car accidents
