December 11, 2007, 8:30 PM CT

New Model Of Bio-exploration In Central Asia

Two land-grant universities have developed a new approach to global bio-exploration, one that returns most of the fruits of discovery to the countries that provide the raw materials on which the research depends. The Global Institute for Bio-Exploration, a joint initiative of the University of Illinois and Rutgers University, has become a model of sustainable, non-exploitive research in the developing world.

The program began in 2003 when research teams from the two universities joined forces to work in several former Soviet Union republics under an International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups program funded with $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Based on lessons learned in Central Asia, the scientists built on this model to create the institute, which is now expanding into Africa and South America.

The institute builds relationships with and trains those in developing countries to prospect for plants that have interesting biological properties, said U. of I. natural resources and environmental sciences professor Mary Ann Lila, a co-founder of the institute.

"Rather than the typical bio-prospecting approach, where people take plants back to their labs in Western Europe or the U.S., we teach locals to conduct simple assays in the field," Lila said. When field results identify plants with potentially useful properties, the scientists do follow-up studies in the laboratory......... Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:23:58 GMT

Book Review: Fine I'll Go Online

I recently received a copy of a new online dating book called Fine, I'll Go Online!: The Hollywood Publicist's Guide to Successful Internet Dating. I'll admit that I felt lukewarm about it before I went ahead and gave it a read through. However, after reading through the entire book and dog-earing a few pages to go back and read again, my conclusion that it's a book worth checking out. Here's a brief overview of what it tells you, what I liked, what I didn't and why you should read it:

The book and author:

Fine, I'll Go Online!: The Hollywood Publicist's Guide to Successful Internet Dating is written by Leslie Oren, a Hollywood publicist who realized that the skills she'd acquired in her job made her successful with online dating. Leslie gives you insight into those skills - skills which are all about how to make you look your best from profile description to the second date.

What I liked:

The best part about this book is that it is filled with anecdotes and true stories about successful online daters. These snippets give you as a reader insight into what makes Internet dating a success for people from all walks of life. It really takes the basic lessons that Leslie shares in the book and infuses them with the life of real people.

What I didn't like:

I had the same problem with this book that I have with almost all self-help books. That problem is that the advice has to be given to women generally and I usually don't feel like it necessarily applies to me. For example, there's a section which talks about what to wear on a first date and the admonishment to essentially not look "too easy" sat uneasy for me.

Why you should read it:

If you can get over the self-help generalities, you'll find that there's some really terrific advice in this book. Online dating is all about selling yourself in a way that gets the attention of the right people while still conveying the truth about who you are. Leslie Oren's book teaches you how to do that.

An extra perk:

If you get the book, you can also get two weeks of a Match.com membership for free. If you're looking to try out a new site and haven't used Match yet, this could be a clincher for picking up your copy. Learn more from the website. Question of the Day: What's your favorite about-dating book? Posted by: Kathryn Vercillo      Read more     Source

December 10, 2007, 10:51 PM CT

People's Reactions To Government Censorship

How people respond to the U.S. government's attempts to censor some war-related images comes down to whether or not they are supporters of President Bush, a new study suggests.

Scientists at Ohio State University surveyed 600 people and asked them if they were interested in viewing photos or videos of the caskets containing dead U.S. soldiers arriving in the United States from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The catch was that, previous to being asked whether they wanted to view the images, half of the survey respondents were told about a U.S. government policy which prevents the widespread dissemination of such images through the media.

One prominent psychological theory suggests that when people are told they can't see something, they want to see it even more.

"This is not at all what we found," said Andrew Hayes, an associate professor of communication at Ohio State University and one of the authors of the study.

In general, Bush supporters expressed less interest in viewing these images than respondents who didn't support Bush in the 2004 election. However, how Bush supporters responded was affected by whether they were first told about the policy.

Among Bush supporters first told about the policy, only 28 percent expressed some interest in viewing the images, after adjusting for the influence of such factors......... Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source

December 10, 2007, 10:24 PM CT

'Howtoons' hits bookshelves

Splurt! Urgghh! Ping! Thump! Boom boom bap!

It's not exactly cutting-edge technology, but those could be the sounds of future scientists and engineers in the making.

In a series of colorful, fun-filled comic-book pages, cartoon kids Celine and Tucker set up a home workshop and then proceed to build a whole series of toys and gadgets out of leftover items. They are the heroes of a just-released MIT-spawned book called "Howtoons" (HarperCollins, 2007), designed to inspire youngsters all over the world with a sense of can-do adventure, and to teach them a few principles of science and engineering--and a sense of the creative possibilities all around them--along the way of just having fun.

Howtoons, which also offers a variety of pictorial home-build projects at howtoons.com, is the brainchild of Joost Paul Bonsen, program director of MIT's new Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, and writer and engineer Saul Griffith, who earned his Ph.D. at MIT and earlier this year won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award. "What we hope is that kids everywhere will not look at throwaway stuff the same way ever again," Bonsen says. Instead, they will realize than an old plastic bottle "can be a rocket or a submarine or any number of things."

The idea for Howtoons came about when Bonsen and Griffith were MIT graduate students (Bonsen at the Sloan School of Management and Griffith at the Media Lab). They helped to organize some workshop parties for local schoolchildren and invited MIT professors to come and bring their families. At these workshops, some of the construction projects that ended up in the book evolved spontaneously as people tinkered and experimented with a variety of simple materials. The impetus for developing the concept into a business plan came when they took a class in developmental entrepreneurship taught by Legatum Center founder and faculty director Alex "Sandy" Pentland......... Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 03:09:05 GMT

Why Customers Buy

Do you understand why your customers buy from you?

Understanding customer behavior is very import and a blog entry from United Entrepreneurs has a questionnaire that you can give to your customers to find out more of not only what they buy from you but WHY they buy from you.

Why is this information so important?

The reason why this information is so important is that you need to understand why your customers choose you so that you know what you are doing right, what attracts people to you, and what you may want to look at changing to attract more customers to your business.

Take a look at the questionnaire and adapt it to your needs. Remember the more information you have the more competitive you can be. Posted by: John Dornoff      Read more     Source

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 03:02:42 GMT

Conrad Black to get between six to eight years in jail

In the lead-up to his sentencing, an unrepentant Conrad Black declared that jail would be a bore. Now he has just discovered he will have up to eight years of boredom behind bars.

Judge Amy St Eve has ruled that sentencing guideline range is between six to eight years, according to the latest news reports. That means Black, who celebrated his 63rd birthday in August, could be in his 70s when he gets out. Still, it's better than 24 years the prosecutors were seeking.

In another blow to prosecutors, the judge ruled that she would using the sentencing guidelines from 2000, not the harsher ones of 2007, and bagged the prosecutors' loss claim of $32.5 million. Instead, the loss claim has been put at $6.1 million, slightly above the $5.5 million Black's lawyers were seeking. The judge's leniency is striking given the pressure she was under to impose a longer term in the light of Black's lack of remorse and his repeated attacks on the US judicial system.

Still, professing his innocence, Black has claimed he will be vindicated on appeal.

Professor Peter Henning has a good summation of what to watch out for, including which prison, at his White Collar Crime Prof blog.

So what should Black expect once he gets to jail? Check out The Times. As a non-American, Lord Black cannot qualify for a "minimum-security" Club Fed prison camp. Instead, he will be sent to "low-security" US prison. That means he will have to share a dormitory with drug offenders and child pornographers. Posted by: leon      Read more     Source

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:07:46 GMT

Bohai Investment Fund Goes After Banking

After making its debut investment earlier this month in a basic industrial sector of the Chinese economy, China's first home grown private equity fund is continuing to take a different path than foreign PE funds in China - by investing in banking.


The Bohai Fund announced last week that it is buying a ten percent stake in Chengdu City Commercial Bank Co. for around billion yuan (about US$135 million), according to Wall Street Journal writer Rick Carew.

The deal was formally announced on Thursday, November 23, according to the China Economic Review. This was the second investment in Chengdu City Bank in the last few months. While foreign PE funds have avoided banking, Malaysian businessman Quek Leng Chan invested almost two billion yuan in the bank in October, obtaining just under a 20% stake according to ChinaRealNews. Quek invested the money through Hong Leong Bank Bhd., whicc he owns. Posted by: Greg Cruey      Read more     Source

December 6, 2007, 8:23 PM CT

This Is Your Brain on Violent Media

Violence is a frequent occurrence in television shows and movies, but can watching it make you behave differently?.

Eventhough research has shown some connection between exposure to media violence and real-life violent behavior, there has been little direct neuroscientific support for this theory until now.

Scientists at Columbia University Medical Center's Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that watching violent programs can cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active (shown in Figure 1).

In a paper in the Dec. 5 on-line issue of PLoS ONE (published by the Public Library of Science), Columbia researchers show that a brain network responsible for suppressing behaviors like inappropriate or unwarranted aggression (including the right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, or right ltOFC, and the amygdala) became less active after study subjects watched several short clips from popular movies depicting acts of violence. These changes could render people less able to control their own aggressive behavior. Indeed the authors observed that, even among their own subjects, less activation in this network was characteristic of people reporting an above average tendency to behave aggressively. This characteristic was measured through a personality test......... Posted by: Gina      Read more         Source

December 6, 2007, 8:12 PM CT

Organized high school activities lowers risk of smoking

Scientists from the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania reported today that students who participate in high school sports or individual physical activity are less likely to smoke than their classmates. The new study indicates that the protective effect of participation extends at least three years beyond graduation. The Penn team discovered, however, that girls do not derive the same level of protection from school sports as do boys.

Daniel Rodriguez, PhD, Research Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, reported that an adolescents self-assessment and sense of physical competence was an important aspect in smoking prevention. Students who feel successful continue to participate and are less likely to start negative behaviors. I visualize this as a fork in the road, Rodriguez said. If you are successful, then you continue doing sports. If you are not successful, then you are now in need of other reinforcement and start looking for other things. In that case, things like smoking become open to you.

Given the data, Rodriguez recommends that parents make an effort to get their children involved in organized activities whether it is a physical sport, like track and field, or some other organized activity, like the chess team and that they teach them how to properly evaluate their own skills. It is important that children learn to compare their current skills or performance to their past performance and not to that of their teammates or opponents. That way they can feel good about their skills, even if they are not the best at something......... Posted by: Jim      Read more         Source

December 6, 2007, 2:57 PM CT

Bush proposal for HIV-positive visitors

The Bush administrations proposed rule for waivers allowing some people with HIV to visit the United States is even more restrictive, burdensome, and arbitrary than the rule it is intended to replace, as per the HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA). Furthermore, it does nothing to address a fundamental flaw in U.S. policy barring people with HIV from entering the United States.

The law denying entry to people with HIV has no basis in science or public health and should be repealed, said HIVMA Chair Arlene Bardeguez, MD, MPH, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. People with HIV have been barred from entering the United States since 1990, despite the fact that HIV infection is a manageable condition that is not transmitted through casual contact. Individual exceptions for short visits may be granted on a case-by-case basis, but only through an intrusive, stigmatizing, and unscientific waiver process.

On World AIDS Day last year, President Bush promised to revisit the waiver process. The appropriate remedy would be to repeal the law. Instead, what the administration has come up with does nothing to make the process easier and in some important ways makes matters worse.

The proposed rule imposes requirements on people with HIV that are not imposed on visitors with any other chronic medical condition such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer: Visitors applying for a waiver need to demonstrate to a consular officer in their home country that their HIV infection is under control and will not require medical attention; that they have ample supplies of medicines for the duration of their trip; and that they have sufficient financial assets or insurance to cover any medical expenses that may arise. How a consular officer with limited or no knowledge of HIV disease is supposed to make determinations about the state of the applicants HIV infection or the adequacy of his or her drug supply is not specified. Furthermore, by placing these extra burdens on those who disclose their HIV status, the proposed rule makes it less likely that visitors will do so......... Posted by: Tom      Read more         Source