I will de discontinuing the use of this web space for my research and reading storage. Some of the content here will shift over to my livejournal where I have been maintaining the lion's share of my on-line presence recently.

I have had this blog for almost two and a half years, but its usefulness for me has diminished of late.

Thank you to anyone who has been reading. And if you like what is here I do encourage you to keep an eye on this space.

Peace,

-L

Why Shakespeare works

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Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say.

Professor Philip Davis, from the University’s School of English, said: “The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as ‘he godded me’ from the tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited. By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.”

Experts believe that this heightened brain activity may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic impact on their readers.

Think Happy Thoughts

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A group of Canadian researchers looking into how moods affect our mental processes found that a good mood appears to enhance your ability to think laterally, or outside the box.

Conversely, they suspect that the tunnel vision associated with fear and anxiety can be an asset when it comes to tasks requiring close attention to detail.

The underlying mechanisms are still unclear, but in study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers suggest the phenomenon may have something to do with the way our mood affects the way we process information.

'We think the underlying mechanism is selection, the way in which we filter information,' said Adam Anderson, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada and author of the study.

'If attention is like a spotlight, then a good mood will widen that spotlight, while a negative mood will focus it very tightly.'

From museum to Condo

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It was as if someone had told devotees of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” or Matisse’s “Dance” that the Museum of Modern Art had changed hands and would soon be shut down for residential redevelopment, with all the art inside to vanish as part of the deal.

In this case the art is not hanging inside the building but is splashed all over the walls outside, in spray paint, wheat paste, rubber, plastic, metal, cardboard and various other unidentifiable substances, a story-high gallery of graffiti and street art that seems to have grown almost organically (and mostly unimpeded by the authorities) over the last two decades.

Depending on your point of view, the hulking 19th-century brick building at 11 Spring Street in NoLIta, a former stable and carriage house, was either a stunning eyesore or one of the most famous canvases and lodestars in the world for urban artists. When those of the latter view heard recently that the building had been sold and would soon be gutted and converted into condominiums, they considered it the end of an era. Bearing their cameras, they began showing up at the building over the last few weeks in a kind of mournful procession.

Political Clarity

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"Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," wrote George Orwell in his prescient essay "Politics and the English Language."

Beset as we Americans are by a misguided war, errant governance, unaddressed environmental threats and growing social injustice, it is perhaps easy to downplay the importance of language in solving our problems in a rationale manner.

While Orwell became familiar with the manipulation and corruption of language through the fascist and communist movements of the 1930s, he would most certainly be discouraged by the degree to which mutant parlance has advanced since he wrote his celebrated essay 50 years ago. Borrowing from the commercial advertisers and PR "consultants," politicians now spin, distort and lie to sell themselves with ever greater impunity, creating deceptive virtual worlds of pseudo reality in the process.

In the last few years, the wanton corruption of the meaning of words in political discourse has reached a perilous point where it is difficult to take the utterance of any public figure at face value. The Bush administration's tortured defense of the Iraq war effort leading up to the congressional elections could serve as Exhibit A.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," Orwell continued. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were to long words or exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

Precious Sleep

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Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have been investigating how memories might be consolidated. Their new study offers the hitherto strongest proof that new information is transferred between the hippocampus, the short term memory area, and the cerebral cortex during sleep. According to their findings and contrary to previous assumptions, the cerebral cortex actively controls this transfer. The researchers developed a new technique for their investigations which promises previously impossible insight into the largely under-researched field of information processing in the brain (Nature Neuroscience, November 2006).

The question of how the brain stores or discards memories still remains largely unexplained. Many brain researchers regard the consolidation theory as the best approach so far. This states that fresh impressions are first stored as short-term memories in the hippocampus. They are then said to move within hours or a few days - usually during deep sleep - into the cerebral cortex where they enter long-term memory. Investigations by Thomas Hahn, Mayank Mehta and the Nobel Prize winner Bert Sakmann from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have now shed new light on the mechanisms that create memory. According to their findings, the areas of the brain work together, but possibly in a different way from that previously assumed. 'This is a technically sophisticated study which could have considerable influence on our understanding of how nerve cells interact during sleep consolidation,' confirmed Edvard Moser, Director of the Centre for the Biology of Memory in Trondheim, Norway.

Book Covers

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'We're told not to judge a book by its cover, but we do this spontaneously,' explained Adams. 'In fact, it's quite an effort to undo the inferences that we make.'

Sometimes, in fact, those inferences are dead-on. In the 1990s, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Nalini Ambady -- who Adams later worked with at Harvard University --conducted a study in which college students were asked to evaluate a professor's teaching ability. The students' ratings were based solely on watching a muted 10-second clip of that professor in front of a class. Remarkably, these instant ratings substantially matched those given after an entire semester.

[SNIP]

"Sometimes not thinking is important," he explained. "When your body seems to know before your mind, your mind seems to get in the way."

Sounds good, tastes better

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For most of us, the boundaries between our bodily senses are clear-cut and rigid. But for a few rare individuals, the demarcation between vision and hearing, or between taste and touch, are less solid, with one bleeding into the other.

These people have a condition called 'synesthesia,' in which two or more of the senses are crossed. Some see colors when listening to music, while others associate tastes with shapes or words with colors.

A very small number of synesthetes can 'taste' words.

A new study finds that individuals with this last form of synesthesia—called 'lexical-gustatory' synesthesia—can taste a word before they ever speak it, and that the word's meaning, not its sound or spelling, is what triggers this taste sensation.

Positive Peace Protests

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Living on their houseboat off the Marin County coast, anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel, concocted a way for the world to communally create a lot of peaceful vibes.

They want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day.

On Dec. 22, they're asking the world to contribute in their own way to the Global Orgasm for Peace. Sheehan said not to worry if you don't have a partner.

Busy multi-taskers shouldn't despair about trying to cram this global activism into their busy schedules, either, she said. Take any time during the 24-hour period at the beginning of the winter solstice to join the demonstration. Just make sure to think of peace before or after participating.

Once you've committed, there's even a secret sign to show others that you plan to take part: Flash the universal 'OK' sign and wink. Or, as it has been redubbed, 'The O' sign.

Welcome to the Future Mr. Tesla

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Typically, systems that use electromagnetic radiation, such as radio antennas, are not suitable for the efficient transfer of energy because they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it into free space.

To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of 'non-radiative' objects with so-called 'long-lived resonances'.

When energy is applied to these objects it remains bound to them, rather than escaping to space. 'Tails' of energy, which can be many metres long, flicker over the surface.

'If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another,' said Professor Soljacic.

Plugs and cables
Wireless energy transfer has been thought about for centuries

Hence, a simple copper antenna designed to have long-lived resonance could transfer energy to a laptop with its own antenna resonating at the same frequency. The computer would be truly wireless.

Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed.

The systems that the team have described would be able to transfer energy over three to five metres.

Rumsfeld and War Crimes

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Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

[Snip]

Germany was chosen for the court filing because German law provides "universal jurisdiction" allowing for the prosecution of war crimes and related offenses that take place anywhere in the world. Indeed, a similar, but narrower, legal action was brought in Germany in 2004, which also sought the prosecution of Rumsfeld. The case provoked an angry response from Pentagon, and Rumsfeld himself was reportedly upset. Rumsfeld's spokesman at the time, Lawrence DiRita, called the case a "a big, big problem." U.S. officials made clear the case could adversely impact U.S.-Germany relations, and Rumsfeld indicated he would not attend a major security conference in Munich, where he was scheduled to be the keynote speaker, unless Germany disposed of the case. The day before the conference, a German prosecutor announced he would not pursue the matter, saying there was no indication that U.S. authorities and courts would not deal with allegations in the complaint.

Personal Foreign Policy

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The sentence is one almost every German -- and certainly every German from Berlin -- still cherishes to this day: "Ich bin ein Berliner." And it was uttered by a man West Germany instantly took into its heart when he visited the divided city in 1963 at the height of the Cold War.

Now, President John F. Kennedy has a museum dedicated to his memory in the heart of Berlin, right next to the Brandenburg Gate. Set to open to the public on Saturday, the new exhibit provides a glittery overview of the Camelot era, when America had a lean young president with a glamorous wife and a pair of beaming young children. Museum curator Dr. Andreas Etges also says the collection shows the start of a "new era in politics and media."

[SNIP]

The outpouring of support for Kennedy in Berlin contrasts mightily, of course, with the sour German attitude toward current US President George W. Bush. Anthony Kennedy-Shriver, a nephew of the former president who came to Berlin on Friday to help open the museum, said there was a fundamental difference between his uncle's foreign-policy style and the style of almost every administration since.

'The best way to describe the different approach,' he said, 'is that when Kennedy came here, he said, 'I am one of you,' and when President Reagan came here (in 1987), he said, 'Tear down this wall.'' Reagan came to project aggressive power, said Kennedy-Shriver, while Kennedy came to show sympathy. 'The other approach,' the way of aggression, he said, 'is the one that always fails.'

Remember,


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