November 27, 2007, 9:09 PM CT

Cuter scooter defined by electricity

It's energy efficient, it's clean, compact and simple, and, above all, it's very cool.

All of these factors could be significant in getting people to adopt a lightweight, electrically powered scooter designed by William J. Mitchell, the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences, and several of his students in MIT's Smart Cities Group, in collaboration with SYM, a major scooter manufacturer in Taiwan, and ITRI, Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute. A prototype of the new design was a hit at the Milan Auto Show, where it was unveiled earlier this month.

Motor scooters are a very popular form of transportation in Asian and European cities, Mitchell said, because they provide convenient, inexpensive transportation. But conventional scooters, using inefficient two-stroke gas engines, are also a source of local air pollution. The new design "was all about providing a clean, green, silent electric scooter that would provide, even better, the same kind of urban mobility," he said.

As an added bonus, the simplicity of the electric design, which eliminates the powertrain by putting motors directly inside each of the two wheels, made it possible to design the scooter so that it could be folded up to about half its size, making it even easier to store in crowded urban environments......... Posted by: Jim      Read more         Source

November 26, 2007, 3:37 PM CT

The proof is in the tree bark

A study by Indiana University scientists found the chlorinated flame retardant Dechlorane Plus in the bark of trees across the northeastern United States, with by far the highest concentrations measured near the Niagara Falls, N.Y., factory where this chemical is produced.

The study, by Xinghua Qui and Ronald A. Hites of the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs, was published online last week by the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Hites is a Distinguished Professor and director of the Environmental Science Research Center at SPEA; Qui is a postdoctoral research scientist.

Hites said the study demonstrates that tree bark can be used as nature's own passive sampling device for detecting the presence and relative concentrations of chemicals in the air. Rough, porous and high in lipids, tree bark soaks up airborne gases and particles, then keeps them protected from the elements.

"It's really a very convenient technique," Hites said. The sampling doesn't hurt the tree, and "you get an integrated measurement of what the tree has been exposed to over the last few years."

The study, "Dechlorane Plus and Other Flame Retardants in Tree Bark from the Northeastern United States," provides the first data on the prevalence of the chemical in the atmosphere outside of the Great Lakes area. It identifies the epicenter of DP concentrations as being near the factory where the chemical is produced by OxyChem (Occidental Petroleum Corp.). Concentrations in tree bark within a few miles of the factory were several thousand times higher than those found in bark at more distant sampling sites, including Indiana, Virginia and Maryland......... Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source

November 26, 2007, 3:32 PM CT

Do Middle-School Students Know How Well They Learn?

Given national mandates to 'leave no child behind,' grade-school students are expected to learn an enormous amount of course material in a limited amount of time.

"Students have too much to learn, so it's important they learn efficiently," says Dr. John Dunlosky, Kent State professor of psychology and associate editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. Today, students are expected to understand and remember difficult concepts relevant to state achievement tests.

However, a major challenge is the student's ability to judge his own learning. "Students are extremely over confident about what they're learning," says Dunlosky.

Dunlosky and his colleague, Dr. Katherine Rawson, Kent State assistant professor of psychology, study metacomprehension, or the ability to judge your own comprehension and learning of text materials. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, their research primarily focuses on fifth, seventh and eighth graders as well as college-aged students, and how improving metacomprehension can, in turn, improve students' self-regulated learning.

One way to improve this issue is to self-test, says Rawson. After reading or studying information, wait for a short time; then try to recall or summarize the information from memory. Next, check the information recalled against the original source material. Adds Rawson: "Our research consistently shows that without checking, people often believe they've remembered something correctly when in fact they haven't." ......... Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source

November 24, 2007, 8:31 AM CT

Money motivates - especially when your colleague gets less

The feelings an individual has on receiving his paycheque depend critically on how much his colleague earns. Hard evidence for this comes from an experiment conducted by economists and brain researchers at the University of Bonn. They tested male subjects in pairs, asking them to perform a simple task and promising payment for success. Using magnetic resonance tomographs, the scientists examined the volunteers' brain activity throughout the activities. Participants who got more money than their co-players showed much stronger activation in the brain's "reward centre" than occurred when both players received the same amount. Details of the study are published on Friday, November 23rd, in the renowned academic journal "Science".

The publication of these findings is the first outcome of a new line of research being established at Bonn University. A group of scholars around the epileptologist Professor Dr. Christian Elger and the economist Professor Dr. Armin Falk want to find out just how the mind of "Homo oeconomicus" works. To this end, they are using modern imaging techniques to look into the brains of their volunteers being tested in the lab.

In the experiment now published the participants had to lie down next to each other in parallel brain scanners. They were asked to perform the same task simultaneously. Dots appeared on a screen and they had to estimate the number being displayed. They were then told whether their answer was correct. If they had solved the task correctly, they received a financial reward, which might range from 30 to 120 euros. Each participant also learnt how his partner in the game had performed and how much he would pocket in return......... Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source

November 24, 2007, 8:26 AM CT

Media diplomacy: What role for transnational news?

There has recently been a huge growth in transnational English language television channels, with the launch in the UK of Al Jazeera English, Press TV (Iran), CCTV9 (China), France 24 and Russia Today. These join existing channels such as CNN International, Voice of America and BBC World TV. But what are the purposes of these channels? Who are they for and who is watching them? Do they constitute a global group of English speaking nations, an Anglosphere?

These are some of the questions that will be debated today (Thursday 22nd November) by media professionals and academics at a workshop, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), entitled Transnational TV News and Media Diplomacy: Al Jazeera English in Context.Led by Professor Marie Gillespie of the Open University and Dr. Ben OLoughlin at Royal Holloway, University of London, the workshop will also look at some of the other reasons for the existence of these channels, besides being professional news providers and part of profit-making organisations. These include being:

• A vehicle for public and cultural diplomacy, or soft power, in world politics. - these channels appear to offer nation-states a means to project their voice, their policies and their interpretations of events in the global media to assert and maintain a presence in the global Anglosphere.........
  
  
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November 21, 2007, 5:19 AM CT

During biggest travel weekend

Thanksgiving marks the heaviest travel weekend of the year and that means large increases in the number of fatal car crashes, especially in rural areas. And nowhere is that more true than in states that dont adequately enforce seat belt laws.

The University of Minnesota Center for Excellence in Rural Safety (CERS) today released an analysis showing a strong correlation between states lacking strong seat belt laws and states with a high proportion of fatalities on rural roads.

For some reason, the states struggling most with rural fatalities are not using one of the most powerful tools at their disposal, said CERS Director Lee Munnich Jr., of the University of Minnesotas Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

Of the 10 states with the highest percentage of fatalities in rural areas in 2005, none had primary seat belt laws, or laws that allow law enforcement officers to pull people over for not using their seat belts. In contrast, 13 of the 20 states with the lowest percentage of fatalities in rural areas had enacted primary seat belt laws. See chart at the end of this release for how states measure up. To view a graphic map of 2005 Rural Fatalities and Primary Seat Belt Laws, By State, visit http://www.ruralsafety.umn.edu/state/2005/SeatBeltLaws.html......... Posted by: Jim      Read more         Source

November 19, 2007, 8:43 PM CT

The Earliest Chocolate Drink Of The New World

The earliest known use of cacao--the source of our modern day chocolate--has been pushed back more than 500 years, to somewhere between 1400 and 1100 B.C.E., thanks to new chemical analyses of residues extracted from pottery excavated at an archaeological site at Puerto Escondido in Honduras. The new evidence also indicates that, long before the flavor of the cacao seed (or bean) became popular, it was the sweet pulp of the chocolate fruit, used in making a fermented (5% alcohol) beverage, which first drew attention to the plant in the Americas.

That cacao's popularity on the world stage began with its role in an alcoholic beverage does not surprise archaeochemist Dr. Patrick McGovern, Senior Research Scientist, Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA) at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and one of five authors of the scientific research article on the discovery ("Chemical and archaeological evidence for the earliest cacao beverages," by John S. Henderson, Rosemary A. Joyce, Gretchen R. Hall, W. Jeffrey Hurst, and Patrick E. McGovern) would be published on-line in Early Edition the week of Nov. 12 http://www.pnas.org/ and in the November 27, 2007 print issue of PNAS USA (pp. 18937-18940, Issue 48, Volume 104).

"This development probably provided the impetus to domesticate the chocolate tree and only later, to prepare a beverage based on the more bitter beans," suggested Dr. McGovern. "An alcoholic beverage from the pulp, carrying on this ancient tradition, continues to be made in parts of Latin America"......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

November 19, 2007, 8:25 PM CT

How Do We Make Sense of What We See?

M.C. Escher's ambiguous drawings transfix us: Are those black birds flying against a white sky or white birds soaring out of a black sky?

Lines in Escher's drawings can seem to be part of either of two different shapes. How does our brain decide which of those shapes to "see?" In a situation where the visual information provided is ambiguous - whether we are looking at Escher's art or looking at, say, a forest - how do our brains settle on just one interpretation?.

As per a research findings published this month in Nature Neuroscience, scientists at The Johns Hopkins University demonstrate that brains do so by way of a mechanism in a region of the visual cortex called V2.

That mechanism, the scientists say, identifies "figure" and "background" regions of an image, provides a structure for paying attention to only one of those two regions at a time and assigns shapes to the collections of foreground "figure" lines that we see.

"What we found is that V2 generates a foreground-background map for each image registered by the eyes," said Rudiger von der Heydt, a neuroscientist, professor in the university's Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute and lead author on the paper. "Contours are assigned to the foreground regions, and V2 does this automatically within a tenth of a second."........ Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source

November 19, 2007, 8:10 PM CT

Student Facebook use predicted by race

New research from Northwestern University finds that college students choice of social networking sites -- including Facebook, MySpace and Xanga -- is correlation to their race, ethnicity and parents education.

The findings challenge discourse about the democratic nature of online interaction and fly in the face of conventional wisdom suggesting that all college students communicate via Facebook, the popular social networking site (SNS) launched in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate.

That race, ethnicity and the education level of ones parents can predict which social network sites a student selects suggests theres less intermingling of users from varying backgrounds on these sites than previously believed, says Eszter Hargittai, author of "Whose Space" Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites.

That study, now in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, finds that Facebook is the social networking site of choice for white students, that Hispanic students prefer MySpace and that Asian and Asian-American students are least likely to use MySpace.

While prodigious users of Facebook, Asian and Asian-American students were found to use the less popular social network sites Xanga and Friendster more than students from other ethnic groups. It found no statistically significant SNS choices for black students......... Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source

November 18, 2007, 9:13 PM CT

New control techniques for preventing aircraft crashes

TU Delft will demonstrate how improved control techniques can reduce the risk of aircraft crashes. The demonstration involves reconstructing troubled flights such as the El Al flight which crashed in the Bijlmer area of Amsterdam in 1992 in a flight simulator and adding the newly developed technology.

The presentation in Delft forms the final phase of a research project involving the GARTEUR international research partnership (participants include TU Delft and the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR) into Fault Tolerant Control. This involves techniques for keeping damaged aircraft in the air for longer and enabling continuing flight control. The key to this is to improve control techniques which enable the aircraft to continue to be controlled. The implemented improvements are based on the analysis of flight data from aviation accidents by the NLR. This has led to improved interpretation of the (defective) condition of the aircraft.

On Wednesday 21 November, these improved techniques will be demonstrated to the general public at TU Delft. Many realistic accident scenarios will be taken as examples, including the Bijlmer crash. These will be reconstructed using TU Delfts Simona flight simulator, but this time also using the newly-developed control techniques. Simulator experiments have shown that the new techniques make it easier for the pilot to land seriously-damaged aircraft safely......... Posted by: Jim      Read more         Source