This clickable infograph lists over 50 different stretching exercises. Click on any illustration for a quick video demonstration of that exercise.
Source: Periodic Table of Stretching Exercises | Strength Stack 52
The common thought that learning by experience is most effective when it comes to teaching entrepreneurship at university has been challenged in a new study.
An analysis of more than 500 graduates found no significant difference between business schools that offered traditional courses and those that emphasise a ‘learning-by-doing’ approach to entrepreneurship education.
The research challenges the ongoing trend across higher education institutes (HEIs) of focussing on experiential learning, and suggests that universities need to reconsider their approach if they are to increase entrepreneurship among their students.
Ms Inna Kozlinska, research associate at Aston Business School and author of the study, said: “Entrepreneurship education is seen as a major force capable of generating long-term socio-economic changes through developing entrepreneurial, creative, flexible and wise individuals. There is an ongoing shift towards experiential learning in business schools, yet there is little empirical evidence to suggest this approach has better impact than traditional learning.
“This study has shown, contrary to our expectations that ‘learning-by-doing’ approaches do not necessarily lead to better outcomes for students, and were even found to have adverse effects in some instances.
[…]
The study highlights another crucial issue that has not been widely researched up until now: how new entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and attitude relate to further achievements in the professional life of graduates. Contrary to expectations, the attitude of graduates was found to have the most positive effect on employability and entrepreneurial activity. The influence of newly acquired knowledge and skills on graduates was not significant.Ms Kozlinska added: “The findings surrounding the attitudes of successful graduates tend to characterise entrepreneurs: a high level of creativity and self-confidence, strong passion towards entrepreneurship, and tolerance to failure.”
Source: Entrepreneurial experiences ‘no better than textbooks,’ says study
A Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary CRISPR–Cas9 technique.
On 28 October, a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu.
Earlier clinical trials using cells edited with a different technique have excited clinicians. The introduction of CRISPR, which is simpler and more efficient than other techniques, will probably accelerate the race to get gene-edited cells into the clinic across the world, says Carl June, who specializes in immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and led one of the earlier studies.
“I think this is going to trigger ‘Sputnik 2.0’, a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States, which is important since competition usually improves the end product,” he says.
Source: CRISPR gene-editing tested in a person for the first time
For the study, Greenberg and colleagues first recruited basketball players to play two back-to-back, one-on-one games with lead researcher Colin Zestcott, another psychologist at the University of Arizona. (The players didn’t know that Zestcott was a researcher; they thought he was another study participant.) After the first game, half of the participants were randomly assigned to take a questionnaire on how they felt about basketball. The other half took one about their thoughts on their own death.
Those that took the spooky survey saw a 40-percent boost in their individual performance during the second game as compared with their first. Those that took the non-macabre survey saw no change
In a second experiment, participants were given a basket-shooting challenge, which a researcher described to them in a 30-second tutorial. Based on a coin-toss, half the participants got the tutorial while the researcher was wearing a plain jacket. The other half saw the researcher in a T-shirt with a skull-shaped word-cloud made entirely of the word ‘death.’ The participants’ performance on the shooting challenge was then scored by another researcher who didn’t know which players saw the death shirt.
In the end, players who did see the shirt took more shots, and outperformed by 30 percent, those that just saw the jacket.
Source: “You’re all going to die”: A scientifically proven pep-talk for winning
Sexual activity before competition has been considered as a possible cause for reduced performance since ancient Greece and Rome. Recently, the hypothesis that optimal sport performance could be influenced by a variety of factors including sexual activity before competition has been investigated. However, few scientific data are available, with the exception of anecdotal reports of individual experiences.
[…]
The present evidence suggests that sexual activity the day before competition does not exert any negative impact on performance, even though high-quality, randomized controlled studies are urgently needed.
Source: Sexual Activity before Sports Competition: A Systematic Review
This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression. We underpin this social norm view by analyzing a major social media platform concerned with public affairs over a period of three years entailing 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.
Source: Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media
Yuri van Gelder, Dutch gymnast, went out for a few to celebrate making the final. Apparently he got carried away and had some alcohol (shock! horror!) and came home at some time in the morning. So the Dutch team have sent him home, without allowing him to participate in the final. His behaviour sounds slightly irresponsible for an athlete in the Olympic final, but then again, if he got there and he’s good enough to perform drinking alcohol that’s his business. It’s not like he was doing anything illegal. And I can understand the urge to celebrate as well. this performance by the Dutch Olympic Sports Bond sounds like a reformed church Christian religious fanatic throwback.
Source: Van Gelder misdraagt zich in Rio en moet naar huis – Olympische Spelen 2016 | NOS
When the world’s population passed seven billion people in 2011 we humans weighed, in total, 350 million tonnes. That weight is rising rapidly as our numbers are still growing and we are getting heavier. Back in 2011 each of us weighed, on average, just under eight stone. Around two billion of us were children then, and there were more people underweight than overweight worldwide. Since then, the number that are overweight has risen dramatically. The proportion of the population who are children has been falling, as fertility itself has fallen. Peak baby was in 1990, but the human population continues to rise because of ageing. Most of the growth in human population predicted in the next few decades will be as a result of that ageing.
The heaviest animals on the planet are the ones we farm for their meat. This includes some 1.4 billion cattle that weigh 520 million tonnes at any one time. After that there are the 1.1 billion sheep making up 65 million tonnes in total planetary sheep weight.
Then there are the 18.6 billion chickens weighing 40 million tonnes worldwide, being by far the most populous birds on the planet today. If we ignore fish in the oceans and insects, then the vast majority of animal life on Earth by weight is either us, or what we farm to eat. We have taken over the planet.→
Source: Meat Eaters – Views of the World
Edit 14/1/25: It has been pointed out to me that there were in fact 26.56 billion chickens on this earth in 2022. Source: How Many Chickens Are In The World – For All Those Who Are Lovin’ It! – WorldAnimalFoundation.org
In comparing how well people read a square pie chart, a circular pie chart, a donut shaped pie chart or a bar chart, it turns out that people do worst on the bar and best on the square pie charts.
Source: A Reanalysis of A Study About (Square) Pie Charts from 2009 – eagereyes
D-PLACE – the Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment – is an expandable, open access database that brings together a dispersed body of information on the language, geography, culture and environment of more than 1,400 human societies. It comprises information mainly on pre-industrial societies that were described by ethnographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The team’s paper on D-PLACE is published today in the journal PLOS ONE.
“Human cultural diversity is expressed in numerous ways: from the foods we eat and the houses we build, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we marry and the types of games we teach our children,” said Kathryn Kirby, a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Geography at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. “Cultural practices vary across space and time, but the factors and processes that drive cultural change and shape patterns of diversity remain largely unknown.
Source: Massive open-access database on human cultures created
In the first of the two studies, the researchers sought to determine which genes out of about a thousand might still be functioning in zebrafish and mice in the immediate days following death. To their surprise, the researchers found that hundreds of genes sprung back to life. Not only that, the activity of some of these genes actually increased. Most of these genes eventually gave up after about 24 hours, but some remained active for as much as four days after death. That’s surprising, to say the least.
The majority of these zombie genes were not random in terms of function. Each of them play an important role when an animal experiences some kind of trauma or illness. For example, some genes that were ramped up are responsible for stimulating inflammation and the immune system as well as for countering stress. Some genetic activity, like a gene that’s responsible for embryonic development, baffled the scientists. Noble suspects that this gene becomes active because the cellular environment in dead bodies must somehow resemble those found in embryos.
A new equation, showing how our happiness depends not only on what happens to us but also how this compares to other people, has been developed by UCL researchers funded by Wellcome.
The team developed an equation to predict happiness in 2014, highlighting the importance of expectations, and the new updated equation also takes into account other people’s fortunes.
The study, published in Nature Communications, found that inequality reduced happiness on average. This was true whether people were doing better or worse than another person they had just met. The subjects played gambles to try to win money and saw whether another person won or lost the same gambles. On average, when someone won a gamble they were happier when their partner also won the same gamble compared to when their partner lost. This difference could be attributed to guilt. Similarly, when people lost a gamble they were happier when their partner also lost compared to when their partner won, a difference that could be attributed to envy.
“Our equation can predict exactly how happy people will be based not only on what happens to them but also what happens to the people around them,” explains one of the study’s co-lead authors, Dr Robb Rutledge (UCL Institute of Neurology and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research). “On average we are less happy if others get more or less than us, but this varies a lot from person to person. Interestingly, the equation allows us to predict how generous an individual will be in a separate scenario when they are asked how they would like to split a small amount of money with another person. Based on exactly how inequality affects their happiness, we can predict which individuals will be altruistic.”
Source: Happiness equation: New equation reveals how other people’s fortunes affect our happiness
The selfies are accepted as collateral for loans up to 15,000 yuan – about US$2,200 – on a whopping 30 per cent rate of interest per week. That may, however, have to do with translation: China Daily says the interest rate is 30 per cent per year.
As well as the selfies, borrowers had to provide other forms of identity such as their student cards, and contact details for family members.
With the issue going public, PDO reports that lenders have been sending messages via Tencent’s QQ telling readers they’re no longer accepting nude photos.
Source: Chinese loan sharks seek salacious selfies as collateral
Tinder is discontinuing use of the app for everyone under the age of 18 starting next week, according to a statement from Tinder VP of Communications Rosette..
Source: Tinder discontinues service for users under 18
If you are held responsible for what happens during human interaction because you facilitate the meeting of the humans, there is something very wrong with the law.
Alexa will put up with just about anything. She has a remarkable tolerance for annoying behavior, and she certainly doesn’t care if you forget your please and thank yous.
But while artificial intelligence technology can blow past such indignities, parents are still irked by their kids’ poor manners when interacting with Alexa, the assistant that lives inside the Amazon Echo.
“I’ve found my kids pushing the virtual assistant further than they would push a human,” says Avi Greengart, a tech analyst and father of five who lives in Teaneck, New Jersey. “[Alexa] never says ‘That was rude’ or ‘I’m tired of you asking me the same question over and over again.’”
[…]
The syntax is generally simple and straightforward, but it doesn’t exactly reward niceties like “please.” Adding to this, extraneous words can often trip up the speaker’s artificial intelligence. When it comes to chatting with Alexa, it pays to be direct—curt even. “If it’s not natural language, one of the first things you cut away is the little courtesies,” says Dennis Mortensen, who founded a calendar-scheduling startup called x.ai.
[…]
this is a box you speak to as if it were a person who does not require social graces.”
It’s this combination that worries Hunter Walk, a tech investor in San Francisco. In a blog post, he described the Amazon Echo as “magical” while expressing fears it’s “turning our daughter into a raging asshole.”
Source: Parents are worried the Amazon Echo is conditioning their kids to be rude
Unintended consequences of AI!
A study into abusive tweets sent from UK Twitter accounts suggests large-scale misogyny, with women responsible for half of such tweets.
Source: Twitter abuse – ‘50% of misogynistic tweets from women’ – BBC News
And men for the other half.
Until recently, the human species has been unable to take advantage of this fundamental biological technique, for we didn’t evolve the ability to swarm. Enter Unanimous A.I., a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur and researcher Dr. Louis Rosenberg. The core question Rosenberg set out to answer was: Can humans swarm, and if so can we amplify our intelligence beyond the ability of individuals? The answer appears to be a resounding yes.
Unanimous spent the last two years building a swarm intelligence platform called UNU that enables groups to get together as online swarms — combining their thoughts, opinions, and intuitions in real-time to answer questions, make predictions, reach decisions, and even play games as a unified collective intelligence. To quantify how smart these UNU swarms really are, researchers at Unanimous regularly convene swarms and ask them to make predictions on high profile events, testing whether or not many minds are truly better than one.
UNU has made headlines in recent months by predicting the Oscars better than the experts, even besting the renowned forecasters at FiveThirtyEight. UNU also surprised the sports world by predicting the NCAA college bowl games with 70% accuracy against the spread, earning +34% return on Vegas odds. But still, the fact that average people could use UNU to amplify their collective intelligence so dramatically was met with cautious resistance.
Enter Hope Reese, a reporter from TechRepublic. Two weeks ago, she challenged Unanimous A.I. to use UNU to predict the winners of the Kentucky Derby.
The bill would make businesses come up with hours during which employees cannot check or send emails.
And it comes as workers are finding it increasingly difficult to detach themselves from work, Socialist MP Benoit Hamon told BBC News.
“Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work,” he said.
“They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog. The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”
[…]
A 2015 study from the Center for Creative Leadership, an executive education firm, Center for Creative Leadershipfound that employees who use smartphones end up working as much as 13.5 hours every day — and as many as 72 hours every week when you include weekends.
The research also found that people are only spending about three hours every day on activities such as working out and family time.
But subjects in that study didn’t blame technology for their extra work hours — they blamed their employers’ lousy time and people management.
“While technology may be a logical scapegoat, it is actually just a new-age mask for an age-old problem: poor management and poor leadership,” the report said.
Source: France Is Getting Closer To Banning After-Work Emails
Heatmap News gives you a quick overview of what is happening in the world right now. It provides a unique perspective by presenting the most important news stories from around the world on a map.
Source: Heatmap News
Here we show that intracortically recorded signals can be linked in real-time to muscle activation to restore movement in a paralysed human. We used a chronically implanted intracortical microelectrode array to record multiunit activity from the motor cortex in a study participant with quadriplegia from cervical spinal cord injury. We applied machine-learning algorithms to decode the neuronal activity and control activation of the participant’s forearm muscles through a custom-built high-resolution neuromuscular electrical stimulation system. The system provided isolated finger movements and the participant achieved continuous cortical control of six different wrist and hand motions. Furthermore, he was able to use the system to complete functional tasks relevant to daily living.
The man managed to pour drinks, play guitar hero, swipe credit cards. Good stuff.
The answer to our world’s plastic pollution problem is here.[…]To show Ari doesn’t just talk a big game, he started studying the strengths and weaknesses of certain substances, eventually landing on a solution to our plastic problem made from algae.[…]If the bottle remains full of water it will keep its shape, as soon as it’s empty it starts to decompose – you couldn’t ask for a better alternative.
Source: A Student In Iceland May Have Just Saved The Planet
Charts of the 10 leading causes of death and injury by age group for the US
An interesting one is when you look at the unintentional injury chart you can see firearm related deaths high on the list at all ages. And people keep claiming it’s not guns that kill people!
Instead, it attenuates the relationship between the opinion climate and voicing opinions except among a small number of participants who believe surveillance is not justified. Those who firmly believe that the govern-ment’s monitoring programs are unacceptable decide whether to share their views entirely independently of both perceived surveillance and the opinion climate. […]Although not directly measured, the individuals who comprise this group may very well be members of the avant-garde who are highly educated and vocal about their views regardless of circumstances, and individuals who are so turned off by sur-veillance that they are unwilling to ever share political beliefs online. In support of this speculation, a post hoc OLS regression predicting unjustified surveillance atti-tudes revealed that greater political knowledge (β = .30, p < .001) and low willing-ness to self-censor (β = −.16, p < .10) were significant and marginally significant predictors. [...] For the remainder—and majority—of participants, being primed of government surveillance significantly reduced the likelihood of speaking out in hostile opinion climates. [...]Theoretically, it adds a new layer of chilling effects to the spiral of silence[...] the participants in this study who were the most susceptible to conformist behavior were those who supported these controversial surveillance policies. These individuals expressed that surveillance was necessary for maintaining national security and they have nothing to hide. However, when these individuals perceive they are being monitored, they readily conform their behavior—expressing opinions when they are in the majority, and suppressing them when they’re not.[...] those holding the dominant opinion eagerly volunteered their ideas (over 6 on a 7-point scale), but the “nothing to hide” group seemed to experience some degree of dissonance when their views were in the minority, as they were inclined to “hide” them.
Source: Under Surveillance – 1077699016630255.full.pdf
From Under Surveillance: Examining Facebook’s Spiral of Silence Effects in the Wake of NSA Internet Monitoring
by
Elizabeth Stoycheff
Important stuff if you want to run a democracy.
We present a new human-computer interface that is based on decoding of attention through pupillometry. Our method builds on the recent finding that covert visual attention affects the pupillary light response: Your pupil constricts when you covertly (without looking at it) attend to a bright, compared to a dark, stimulus. In our method, participants covertly attend to one of several letters with oscillating brightness. Pupil size reflects the brightness of the selected letter, which allows us–with high accuracy and in real time–to determine which letter the participant intends to select. The performance of our method is comparable to the best covert-attention brain-computer interfaces to date, and has several advantages: no movement other than pupil-size change is required; no physical contact is required (i.e. no electrodes); it is easy to use; and it is reliable. Potential applications include: communication with totally locked-in patients, training of sustained attention, and ultra-secure password input.
When practicing and learning a new skill, making slight changes during repeat practice sessions may help people master the skill faster than practicing the task in precisely the same way, Johns Hopkins researchers report.
Source: Want to Learn a New Skill? Faster? Change Up Your Practice Sessions – 01/28/2016