Why Doctors Hate Science ?

Thank God doctors in the United States are free to treat patients as they deem best, free from interference by faceless bureaucrats.

If bureaucrats were in charge, physicians might have to prescribe the newest hypertension drugs as a first-line therapy,

do MRIs to diagnose back pain and give regular Pap tests to women who have had total hysterectomies. Oh, wait—they do. All these medical practices are common, despite rigorous studies showing how useless or wrongheaded they are. Definitive studies over many years have shown that old-line diuretics are safer and equally effective for high blood pressure compared with newer drugs, for instance, and that MRIs for back pain lead to unnecessary surgery. And those Pap tests? Total hysterectomy removes the uterus and cervix. A Pap test screens for cervical cancer. No cervix, no cancer. Yet a 2004 study found that some 10 million women lacking a cervix were still getting Pap tests.

Centro Virtual de la Divulgación de las Matemáticas

Best Home Server Software

Media files, data synchronization, and remote backups, oh my! Home computing has advanced to a point where it's practical to run your own home server, and we're running down the five best tools for the job

Trillion Dollar Bailout (an interactive game)

Punish greedy fat cats and save honest peoples! Hand out moneys to homeowners. Put the hurt on dudes in suits! Do it right and save the world!

Getting a handle on spin

The response of quantum dots to an electric field can be greatly enhanced by forming quantum dot molecules: two InAs quantum dots are stacked on top of each other, separated by a GaAs barrier a few nanometers thick. The pair of dots can be controlled by applied voltage such that they share a single hole [4]. Normally the hole energy levels of the two dots are much different (because of differences in structure), tunneling between dots is negligible, and the dot states are atomiclike. However, when the two dots are tuned by an applied electric field to have the same hole energy, resonant tunneling of the hole becomes significant, and the state of the hole becomes molecularlike. The two atomiclike states combine to form a molecular “bonding” orbital with enhanced wave function in the barrier, and a molecular “antibonding” orbital with suppressed amplitude in the barrier.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo

Dirac's achievements as a theoretical physicist were clearly remarkable. However, his personality, as the title of Graham Farmelo's book implies, was very odd indeed. Upon meeting him one soon discovered (if one had not been forewarned) that he had no small talk and little appreciation of other people's. Irony was foreign to him. His utterances were few and far between, and their main function was to communicate information about matters that were important to him, such as theoretical physics. The many mismatches between his style of communication and that of most other people gave rise to a large number of humorous anecdotes, many of which are quoted in this book.

Linux for Busy People

For people who always wanted to try out Linux but never had the time or the energy ( or courage to risk moving to a Linux only environment) here is a great application which allows you to keep Linux as well as Windows for double booting environment. You need 256 mb ram and 5 gb hard disk and you are good to go. It is a single click download and install to try out Ubuntu Linux and it preserves your Windows too. If you wanted to try out R with Linux , then it is an easy way out for you ( and me). Saves quite a lot of money per desktop per OS and per office productivity software. Sounds good to be true – well the site is http://wubi-installer.org/.

Bizarre bird behavior predicted by game theory

A team of scientists, led by the University of Exeter, has used game theory to explain the bizarre behaviour of a group of ravens. Juvenile birds from a roost in North Wales have been observed adopting the unusual strategy of foraging for food in 'gangs'. New research, published in the journal PLoS One (on Wednesday 25 February 2009), explains how this curious behaviour can be predicted by adapting models more commonly used by economists to analyse financial trends.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis

Liz Smith Leaves the NY Post for wowOwow!

Beginning next week Liz Smith will be posting more news, hot gossip and opinions all the time on wowOwow — free from the constraints of newspaper deadlines. Thursday will be the last Liz Smith column for The New York Post — the first time in 33 years that Liz Smith’s column will not be in a New York newspaper. This sad news for the New York print business is spectacular news for us. Our fabulous and beloved Diva of Dish will be here on wowOwow, posting exclusive-to-Liz breaking celebrity news as it happens. It will, occasionally, be highlighted with audio and film and all the tools of an internet-entrepreneur.

Google’s Gmail service crashes across world

The email service went offline at around 10.25am GMT, and the outage appears to have affected users throughout the UK as well as across Europe, and even as far afield as Australia and India. It appears that only web-based Gmail access is affected, and users can continue to send and receive messages using other devices, such as mobile phones and third-party mail clients. Google could not confirm what had caused the outage. “A number of users are having difficulty accessing Gmail,” said the company in a statement. “We are working to resolve the problem. We know how important Gmail is to users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologise for the inconvenience.

Social websites harm children's brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist

But while the sites are popular - and extremely profitable - a growing number of psychologists and neuroscientists believe they may be doing more harm than good. Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, believes repeated exposure could effectively 'rewire' the brain. Psychologists have also argued that digital technology is changing the way we think. They point out that students no longer need to plan essays before starting to write - thanks to word processors they can edit as they go along. Satellite navigation systems have negated the need to decipher maps.

See A Fish With A Transparent Head

Today there's a new addition to the "real life is stranger than fiction" category. Check out the fish Macropinna microstoma. It has tubular eyes and a see-through head.

The Anderson-Higgs mechanism

To understand the Higgs mechanism, imagine that a room full of physicists quietly chattering is like space filled only with the Higgs field....

... a well known scientist walks in, creating a disturbance as he moves across the room, and attracting a cluster of admirers with each step ...

... this increases his resistance to movement, in other words, he acquires mass, just like a particle moving through the Higgs field ...

... if a rumour crosses the room ...

... it creates the same kind of clustering, but this time among the scientists themselves. In this analogy, these clusters are the Higgs particles.

References

P. W. Anderson. Plasmons, Gauge Invariance, and Mass.
Phys. Rev. 130, 439 (1963)
 
Peter Higgs. Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons.
Phys. Rev. Letters 13, 508 (1964)

STATPHYS 24, the XXIV International Conference (2010)

The STATPHYS Conference series takes place every three years in a different continent to enhance the international relevance and visibility of the leading world event in the broad field of Statistical Physics and all its interdisciplinary developments. Recent meetings have been held in GENOVA (Italy), BANGALORE (India), CANCUN (Mexico) and PARIS (France). STATPHYS 24 will be the first time this event is held in Australia and only the second time in the southern hemisphere. The entire Australian scientific community enthusiastically supports this meeting and warmly welcomes all international participants.

SourceTool Search engine accuses Google of antitrust violations

TradeComet.com, a small New York-based Internet search engine company, has filed suit against Google, accusing the king of Web search of violating antitrust laws. TradeComet, in a statement, said it filed a complaint this week in US District Court in New York asserting "Google violates antitrust laws by eliminating competition and choice." "Google's anticompetitive conduct eliminated TradeComet as a competitor," said the company, which was founded in September 2005.

Nueva estatua de cera de Britney Spears

Tanto es así, que el museo de cera más famoso del mundo, el Madame Tussauds, ha añadido hoy día 16 de Febrero en su sede de Londres, una nueva figura de Britney Spears, imitando el momento inicial de su regreso musical el pasado año 2008, cuando recogía sus flamantes premios VMA por Piece Of Me en Los Ángeles. El parecido es realmente asombroso… aunque el premio que la Britney de cera sostiene no es un Moon Man de los VMA, pero el resto es increíble.

Ashley Judd Calls for End to Mountaintop Mining

Judd was among some 500 people who gathered outside the Kentucky state Capitol on Tuesday for a rally in support of legislation that would essentially end the practice of blasting away mountaintops to unearth coal. The actress who was born in northeastern Kentucky said she visited mountaintop removal sites last September and was unprepared for the destruction she saw. She described "barren moonscapes" and "nothingness" where Appalachian peaks once rose skyward.

Higgs Boson: Race for 'God particle' heats up

The particle, whose existence has been predicted by theoreticians, would help to explain why matter has mass. Finding the Higgs is a major goal of Cern's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). But the US Fermilab says the odds of its Tevatron accelerator detecting the famed particle first are now 50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best. Both machines hope to see evidence of the Higgs by colliding sub-atomic matter at very high speeds. If it exists, the Higgs should emerge from the debris. The LHC has been out of action since last September when an accident damaged some of the magnets that make up its giant colliding ring. Project leader Lyn Evans conceded the enforced downtime might cost the European lab one of the biggest prizes in physics. Cern and Fermilab officials squared up at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago.

Perseverance Is Paying Off for a Test of Relativity in Space

For 46 years, Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist, has promoted the often perilous fortunes of Gravity Probe B, perhaps the most exotic, “Star Trek”-ish experiment ever undertaken in space. Finally, with emergency financial help from a pair of unusual sources, success is at hand. Conceived in the late 1950s, financed by $750 million from NASA and launched into orbit in 2004, the Gravity Probe B spacecraft has sought to prove two tenets of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The first, called the geodetic effect, holds that a large celestial body like Earth will warp time the way a rubber sheet stretches when a bowling ball is placed on it. The second, known as frame-dragging, occurs when the rotation of a large body “twists” nearby space and time; turn the resting bowling ball, and the rubber sheet twists.