http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623133523.htm

 ----------------

 Can A Little Extra Weight Protect People From Early Death? Underweight, Extremely Obese Die Earlier Than People Of Normal Weight

 ScienceDaily (June 29, 2009) — Underweight people and those who are extremely obese die earlier than people of normal weight—but those who are overweight actually live longer than people of normal weight. Those are the findings of a new study published online in Obesity by researchers at Statistics Canada, Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, Portland State University, Oregon Health & Science University, and McGill University.

 "It's not surprising that extreme underweight and extreme obesity increase the risk of dying, but it is surprising that carrying a little extra weight may give people a longevity advantage," said David Feeny, PhD, coauthor of the study and senior investigator for the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research.

 "It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn't mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds," said Mark Kaplan, DrPH, coauthor and Professor of Community Health at Portland State University. "Our study only looked at mortality, not at quality of life, and there are many negative health consequences associated with obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes."

 "Good health is more than a BMI or a number on a scale. We know that people who choose a healthy lifestyle enjoy better health: good food choices, being physically active everyday, managing stress, and keeping blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels in check," said Keith Bachman MD, a weight management specialist with Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute.

 The study examined the relationship between body mass index and death among 11,326 adults in Canada over a 12-year period. (BMI uses height and weight to estimate body fat.) Researchers found that underweight people had the highest risk of dying, and the extremely obese had the second highest risk. Overweight people had a lower risk of dying than those of normal weight.

 This is the first large Canadian study to show that people who are overweight may actually live longer than those of normal weight. An earlier study, conducted in the United States and published in 2005 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed similar results.

 For this study, researchers used data from the National Population Health Survey conducted by Statistics Canada every two years. During the study period, from 1994/1995 through 2006/2007, underweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die. But overweight individuals were 17 percent less likely to die. The relative risk for obese people was nearly the same as for people of normal weight. The authors controlled for factors such as age, sex, physical activity, and smoking.

 The study was funded by grants from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. Authors include: Heather Orpana, PhD, Statistics Canada; JM Berthelot, Canadian Institute for Health Information and McGill University; Mark Kaplan, DrPH, Portland State University, David Feeny, PhD, Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research; Bentson H. McFarland, MD, PhD, Oregon Health & Science University and Nancy Ross, PhD, McGill University.

 If you want to know more about health risks related to your weight and BMI, ask your doctor or get more information at http://kp.org/weight.

 http://www.natpryce.com/articles/000748.html

 It has some pictures. Go there to see and understand them.

 (From here: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-06/why-your-voice-sounds-different...
)

 ---------------

 It sounds different because it is different. "When you speak, the
vocal folds in your throat vibrate, which causes your skin, skull and
oral cavities to also vibrate, and we perceive this as sound,"
explains Ben Hornsby, a professor of audiology at Vanderbilt
University. The vibrations mix with the sound waves traveling from
your mouth to your eardrum, giving your voice a quality — generally a
deeper, more dignified sound — that no one else hears.

 Through a loudspeaker or recording device, you pick up sound only
through air conduction. "The sound we're used to hearing has a lower
frequency from the bone vibrations," Hornsby says. "We like that
because it sounds rich and full." Many people cringe at the playback
sound because our brain struggles to accept that this foreign voice is
our own.

 http://talktohimselfshow.zip.net/

 Por incrível que pareça, consegui ler até o final sem me distrair. Deve ser porque dou prioridade total a artigos sobre eliminação de distrações.

 ----------------------------------

 Como se concentrar em meio a tantas distrações

 Abra mão do mito do "multitasking" para levar uma "vida focada"

  
Imagine que você deixou seu laptop de lado e desligou seu celular. Você está fora do alcance do YouTube, do Facebook, do e-mail e das mensagens de texto. Está sentado num táxi com um exemplar de "Rapt" (Extasiado), um guia de Winifred Gallagher à ciência do prestar atenção.
O tema do livro, que Gallagher escolheu depois de descobrir que sofria de um tumor maligno, é inspirado no psicólogo William James: "Minha experiência é aquilo ao qual concordo em prestar atenção". Você pode levar uma vida infeliz, focando sua atenção nos problemas. Pode se levar à loucura, tentando realizar tarefas múltiplas ao mesmo tempo e responder a todos os e-mails imediatamente.
Ou, então, pode reconhecer a capacidade finita de processar informações que tem seu cérebro e conquistar as satisfações do que Gallagher descreve como a vida focada. Soa atraente, só que, enquanto você está sentado no táxi, lendo sobre a ciência do prestar atenção, você percebe que não está prestando atenção a uma única palavra do que está na página.
A TV do táxi, que não pode ser desligada, está mostrando um comercial sobre um sujeito num táxi trabalhando num laptop -e, enquanto ele conta como seu novo cartão wireless tornou mais produtivo o percurso no táxi, você não consegue fazer nada de produtivo durante o seu próprio trajeto.
Será que ainda há, em algum lugar, um refúgio realista da idade da distração? Fiz essas perguntas a Gallagher e a um dos especialistas citados em seu livro, o neurocientista Robert Desimone, do Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Desimone vem rastreando as ondas cerebrais de símios do gênero macacus e de humanos, enquanto olham para telas de vídeo, à procura de determinados padrões que vão e vêm em flash.
Quando uma coisa iluminada ou nova pisca, ela tende a automaticamente vencer a disputa pela atenção do cérebro, mas esse impulso involuntário pode ser superado voluntariamente por meio de um processo que Desimone chama de "competição enviesada".
Ele e alguns de seus colegas descobriram que neurônios no córtex pré-frontal -o centro de planejamento do cérebro- começam a oscilar em uníssono, criando ondas gama, e enviam sinais direcionando o córtex visual a prestar atenção a outra coisa.
Para Desimone, uma terapia desse tipo pode ajudar pessoas que sofrem de esquizofrenia ou déficit de atenção, com menos efeitos colaterais que medicamentos. Se pudesse ser feita com uma luz de baixo comprimento de onda, que penetrasse o crânio, seria possível simplesmente colocar (ou tirar) um minúsculo aparelho sem fios.
Depois que descobriu como é difícil para o cérebro deixar de prestar atenção a sons, Gallagher começou a levar tampões de ouvidos em sua bolsa. Quando você está preso num metrô barulhento, disse, precisa construir seu próprio "abrigo" contra os estímulos. Gallagher recomenda às pessoas iniciar o dia de trabalho concentrando-se sobre a tarefa mais importante do dia durante 90 minutos. Depois disso, seu córtex pré-frontal provavelmente precisará de um descanso. É o momento em que você pode responder e-mails, retornar telefonemas e tomar uma bebida com cafeína (que de fato auxilia a atenção), antes de voltar a focar no trabalho. Mas, até esse primeiro "recreio", não se deixe distrair, porque depois de uma interrupção o cérebro pode levar 20 minutos para ser "reiniciado".
"O multitasking é um mito", disse Gallagher. "Não é possível fazer duas coisas ao mesmo tempo. O mecanismo da atenção é a seleção: ou uma coisa ou outra." E prossegue: "A atenção é um recurso finito, como o dinheiro. Você quer investir seu dinheiro cognitivo mandando mensagens pelo Twitter, navegando na internet ou assistindo à TV? Fazemos escolhas constantes, e nossas escolhas determinam nossa experiência".
Gallagher contou que quando se tratou do câncer, há alguns anos, conseguiu se manter relativamente bem humorada, guardando em mente o mantra de William James e também um verso de John Milton: "A mente é seu próprio lugar, e, sozinha / é capaz de converter o céu em inferno ou o inferno em céu".
"Dizia a mim mesma: 'Você quer ficar deitada aqui, prestando atenção às grandes chances de que você vá morrer e deixar seus filhos sem mãe, ou quer se levantar, lavar o rosto e prestar atenção a seu trabalho, sua família e seus amigos?'. Céu ou inferno -a escolha é sua", disse.

 http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8v80l/as_obama_talked_about_the_p...

 ----------

  > Maybe I'm wrong here, but wouldn't she just be an average journalist if this was say, anytime before 1970?

 This is a surprisingly common belief that there was a "good ol' days." There wasn't. What happens is we look back through rose-colored glasses and we only see the reporting which was notable and remembered.

 40 years from now, people are going to look back at our time and they're only going to see stories of Helen Thomas sticking up for responsible journalism and they're going to think "why aren't reporters today like those of the early 2000's when there were lots of journalists like Helen Thomas who asked uncomfortable questions to the President?"

 Excerpt from here ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/ ):

 -------------------------------

 2.1 The Dual Nature of Programs

 Many authors (Moor 1978; Rapaport 2005b; Colburn 2004) discuss the so-called dual nature of programs. On the face of it, a program appears to have both a textual and a mechanical or process-like guise. As text, a program can be edited. But its manifestation on a machine-readable disk seems to have quite different properties. In particular, it can be executed on a physical machine. So according to the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (§3.3), the two guises cannot be the same entity. Of course, anyone persuaded by this duality is under an obligation to say something about the relationship between these two apparent forms of existence.

 One immediate suggestion is that one manifestation of a program is an implementation of the other i.e., the physical manifestation is an implementation of the textual one. However, even within the confines of computer science, it is not immediately clear that the word implementation refers to just one notion. Often it is used to refer to the result of a compilation process where a program in a high-level language (the source code) is transformed into machine language (the object code). But equally often it is used to refer to the process where the source code is somehow directly realized in hardware (e.g. a concrete implementation in semiconductors). And presumably, this is the relevant notion. But without a more detailed philosophical analysis of the notion of implementation (§3.2) itself (Rapaport 2005b), it is unclear how this advances the discussion; we seem only to have named the relationship between the two apparent forms of existence. In a similar vein, others have described the relationship between the program-text and the program-process as being similar to that between a plan and its manifestation as a series of physical actions. But this does not seem to be quite analogous to the program-process pairing: we are not tempted to refer to the plan and the physical process as being different manifestations of the same thing. For example, are we tempted to think of a plan to go for a walk and the actual walk as different facets of the same thing?

 Perhaps matters are best described by saying that programs, as textual objects, cause mechanical processes? The idea seems to be that somehow the textual object physically causes the mechanical process. But this would seem to demand some rather careful analysis of the nature of such a causal relation. Colburn (2004) denies that the symbolic text has the causal effect; it is its physical manifestation (the thing on the disk) that has such an effect. Software is a concrete abstraction that has a medium of description (the text, the abstraction) and a medium of execution (e.g., a concrete implementation in semiconductors).

 A slightly different perspective on these issues starts from the question of program identity. When are two programs taken to be the same? Such issues arise for example in attempts to determine the legal identity of a piece of software. If we identify a program with its textual manifestation then the identity of a program is sensitive to changes in its appearance (e.g. changing the font). Evidently, it is not the text alone that provides us with any philosophically interesting notion of program identity. Rather, to reach an informed criterion of identity we need to take more account of semantics and implementation. We shall return to this subject in §3 and §6.

 (From http://distilledb.com/blog/archives/date/2009/06/18/python-gotcha-integer-equ... )

 ----------------

  
Python gotcha: Bizarre integer equality

 John
Thursday, June 18, 2009 @ 20:00

 Summary Python implementations can throw you a curveball when comparing integer identity.

 In Python, everything is an object. These semantics are predictable for the most part -- until they aren't. Here's a short but confusing snippet of Python 3 code, running from Ubuntu 9.04. Can you surmise why this inconsistency happens?

  >>> a = 500
 >>> b = 500
 >>> a is b
False

  >>> c = 200
 >>> d = 200
 >>> c is d
True

 In Python, is tests for identity, not equality. x is y if and only if x and y reference the same thing. Although a and b have the same value, they are distinct objects, and so comparing the two yields False, as one might expect.

 But then we're confronted with the second case. It's precisely identical to the first, just with a different assigned value. Yet it produces the opposite result. How can this be?

 The key to this puzzle lies in a peculiar implementation detail of CPython, the de facto Python implementation. As we said earlier, in Python, everything is an object, even literals. Logically, that means that two different instances should be distinct from each other, as in the first case above.

 But in CPython, when you create an integer literal in the range [-5, ..., 256], it's actually cached for performance reasons. Further references to the same literal are identical references to the existing literal, not new references. Thus c and d refer to the same cached instance, and the result is True.

 Because of another implementation detail, two literals with the same value that are in the same compilation unit will reference the same object. Comparing literals directly results in True in both cases, as we see here:

  >>> 200 is 200
True

  >>> 500 is 500
True

 More importantly, however, this illustrates the danger when is is mistakenly used to compare value equality instead of reference equality. Had you used == instead, the results are precisely what you'd expect:

  >>> a = 500
 >>> b = 500
 >>> a == b
True

  >>> c = 200
 >>> d = 200
 >>> c == d
True

 --------------------

 (...) Now, put yourself in the shoes of the iPhone thiever who will momentarily be entering the story. You might have told yourself, "Hey, free iPhone!" the night before. You might have seen the gently-threatening messages and ignored them, maybe even scoffed. Then the phone told you it was on Medill St. It talked to you in Spanish. And you saw three skinny white guys prowling in the street with a laptop computer open.

 So you take off down the road, and to your shock and horror, the honkeys follow you. You stand at your local bus stop, expecting to lose them. And they converge on your location from across the intersection, the bald one with the laptop yelling and pointing at you. You probably think the angels of death have found you. (...)