Glider

By George, they've got it! You're starting to see how we've felt in the UK for years. Can we do house prices next?

How could one pressure a person into admitting to a 'crime' in such a puiblic and humiliating way if that person did nothing wrong? What kind of pressure would that take? Was Prof. Schatten holding Hwang woo suk's family hostage or something?

The bit about Nairobi sounds very strange to me. Nairobi is the capital city of Kenya. It's a few miles south of the equator. No way is Nairobi too cold for malaria, nor has it ever been.

I'm not in the US. In the UK, where the BAC limit is the same (80mg/100ml), if a roadside breath test shows you to be above the limit, you will be arrested on suspicion of drink driving. However, you cannot be convicted purely on the evidence of a roadside breath test. Once back at the police station, you would be required to provide a further two samples for the Intoximeter equipment, which is accurately calibrated and is used to provide the evidence of your BAC that is presented in court. The reading that used is the lower of the two samples. At this stage, a refusal to provide a specimen is an offence that is treated in law as the equivalent of being convicted with a BAC above the legal limit. If your breath-alcohol level is between 40 and 49 µg, you will be offered the opportunity to take a blood or urine test as an alternative. If the police fail to offer this alternative they have not applied the procedure correctly and this can be used as a defence in court.

Yes (see here http://science.howstuffworks.com/breathalyzer6.htm) but they're not that accurate. All they do is provide 'sufficient grounds' for arrest. If you are arrested for being drunk in charge of a vehicle or whatever, the arresting officer will say "I am arresting you on suspicion of...". Further evidence in the form of a blood sample must be taken for prosecution.

I live in the Northern hemisphere and by a bizarre coincidence the sun does exactly the same thing there.

Just to be pedantic, the lady was (battling) Bessie Braddock and his reply was "And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning".

I have seen the same things. They do bleed, some not so much, some profusely. However, as to the pain thing, the relationship between a noxious stimulus (e.g. tissue damage) and the experience of pain is correlational, not causal. If the noxious stimulus (NS) - pain relationship was causal, then NS would always precede pain and pain would not happen without NS. In reality, whilst NS will generally result in pain, neither of these is true as there are exceptions. There are a number of documented examples of significant tissue trauma being inflicted without any apparent pain. For example, the Indian hook swinging ceremony, or surgery without anaesthetic (the patient uses self-hypnosis). There are also a large number of documented cases of pain occurring in the complete absence of any noxious stimulus (e.g. some chronic pain syndromes, phantom limb pain, pain experienced during hallucinations and so-on). Moreover, pain is a psychological state, not a physiological condition. As such, it is subject to psychological interventuion and manipulation. The experience of pain seems to depend more upon the interpretation of incoming nociceptive volleys in the limbic brain. These volleys can be reinterpreted so that activity in the nociceptive pathways does not result in the experience of pain. The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) acknowledge this in their definition of pain in which they state that "Activity induced in the nociceptor and nociceptive pathways by a noxious stimulus is not pain, which is always a psychological state, even though we may well appreciate that pain most often has a proximate physical cause.".

It's already 'in'. It's always 'in'. The ANS is responsible for all vegetative functions all the time and is outside of conscious control, which is why we need to to use psychological biofeedback techniques to influence these functions at all. Note: We can influence them, but we cannot override them. Not unless you smash your head on the floor or a table on the way to the floor. At least, no more damage than would be caused by fainting. Neurones are extremely sensitive to ischemia, but you would need to hold your breath for another 3 to 4 minutes after passing out to do any damage. The most important system as far as the body is concerned is the brain. The body will actually sacrifice other systems to protect the brain (which is also the most sensitive to blood O2 levels and is also the most greedy, using around 25% of total O2 you use). So, blood oxygen cannot drop to a level that would damage any other organ before the brain reacted. The brain would react as soon as the chemoreceptors detected a drop in blood pH (i.e. an increase in CO2). This is why biofeedback techniques include relaxation. If you are going to reduce your heart rate through biofeedback, you also need to reduce demand. The body will always respond to demand over biofeedback. Yes, it can. The hypothalamus contains comparators for blood pressure and pH (among other things). If actual values deviate too far from these comparator values, the hypothalamus sends signals to the ANS which triggers compensatory actions. For example, if the blood pressure drops too low, the ANS will trigger vasoconstriction (reducing the volume of the circulatory system) and elevate heart rate. If blood pH drops too low, then respiration will be increased.

I have the same thing. I have been teaching for 10 years at undergraduate levels and 8 years at postgraduate level and last year got my contract as senior lecturer. It'e still upsetting to have to deal with cases of palgiarism. However, consider the following: Plagiarist students are attempting to steal their degree. If they succeed, they will be unqualified to hold that degree. When they are subsequently employed and their employer finds out how crap they are, they will blame the instition that awarded the degree. Thus, all those students who earned their degree will have their qualification devalued. In the long term, academic plagiarism is not a victimless crime, it is theft (of previous work and of the resulting qualification if they get away with it). So, don't look at it as being nasty to one student, look at it as protecting the interests of all those students who are working for their qualification. That is a part of your job. As long as all the students have plagiarism and it consequences fully and clearly explained to them in their first year (ours do), then your reporting the cases you find is simply fulfilling your duty to all your other students. If you let cases of plagiarism slide, you might make a friend and help one 'student' (I use apostrophes because in my experience, those who plagiarise rarely actually 'study'), but you are letting all the others down. Of course, you can use your judgement case-by-case, depending on degree of plagiarism/collusion and how deliberate you find the act was as to whether or not you take the formal route and report it, but you can never let it slide. You would be failing your other students if you did so. As Phi says, it sounds like you want to be liked and be a good teacher. I admit, teaching is a lot easier if the students like you, but to be effective, you have to be liked for the right reasons (i.e. respected). The students have to trust that you will be fair and do right by them and that includes not letting certain students get away with something the good students feel they would not get away with themselves.

Yes, synaesthesia results in actual experiences/sensations. These are unique to the individual (no two synaesthetes share the same stimulus -experience relationship) and they remain unchanged over time which means the synaesthetic sensation evoked by a particular stimulus will always be evoked by that stimulus.

Yes it would. The cardiovascular system is directly controlled by the Autonomic Nervous Sysytem via feedback from baroreceptors in the carotid arteries and chemo receptors in the aorta and elsewhere, which monitor pressure and pH (i.e. CO2 conc.). If these move too far away from physiological norms, It triggers the hypothalamus to make compensatory changes via the appropriate division of the ANS. None of this is under conscious control. So, whilst we might be able to slow our heart rate through biofeedback, the ANS would not allow it to go lower than what was physiologically necessary at the time.

How can it be bad for your health?

Yes, they would.

Yeah, it's preferable, otherwise the whole thread is just ripples from one stone in the pond. However, my last post was just an attempt to reintroduce the core element of the issue, which seems to have been forgotten. The thread has turned into a theological/moral/ethical debate and I was just hoping that it doesn't reflect KU's reality.

Why would we in the UK be unfamiliar with Freemasonry? Where do you think it came from?

I wonder how Lily's doing.

Sperm whales eat them. Apparently they haven't yet worked out how to avoid this, either by hiding or by working cooperatively to warn each other or ward off the predator.

Interesting posts. In my opinion, I think you both need to decide what is the important thing here, the consistency (or lack thereof) in the book, or your daughter's wellbeing. Your daughter needs consistant parenting. Conflicting messages from each parent will only confuse her and cause her problems later on. It is up to you and your wife to sort out between yourselves what is the best for your daughter, before issuing edicts unilterally. My personal opinion is that such decisions need to be made without recourse to the bible because small children usually ask "Why?", and I don't believe "Because the bible says so!" is an appropriate answer because it demonstrates to the child a lack of reasoning, no evidence for the decision and the abdication of parental responsibility (but then, I'm an atheist). However, if you turn this into a theological debate with your wife, then you are both sidelining your daughter and putting her second to a book. She won't thank either of you for that once she's old enough to work it out.

Not really, but I agree with your point. There are schools over here that have banned competetive sports because (they say) they're divisive and encourage terms like 'loser'. They are afraid that kids who lose races and so-on will suffer catastrophic damage to their self-esteem. In my opinion however, school is supposed to be, at least partly, a preparation for adult life. Adult life (for better or worse) involves a degree of competition; for seats on the train, for the job one is applying for, for promotion, for partners and so-on. In my opinion, schools who do not teach people how to deal with the small failures that everybody has to cope with are failing their pupils. Anybody who has never learned how to deal with disappointment is likely to respond to it like a three year old (which is about the time we begin to learn that the world doesn't revolve around us). That doesn't bode well for their professional or personal lives. What we see in University is an increasingly prevalent attitude that students have earned their degree simply by virtue of the fact they have been accepted into higher education; "I am at Uni, therefore I get a degree". This isn't helped by the increase in tuition fees, because that just encourages the idea that they have paid, therefore we owe them a degree. What they can't seem to understand is that they have only earned the right to try for a degree. They have the right to higher education, but they also have the right to learn nothing from it (i.e. fail). They have the right to attempt to fly. Equally, they have the right to hit the ground quite hard. What they really need to learn is to be able to cope with all possible outcomes, and that learning should begin early. Failure at most things in life won't kill you, which means you have to live with it. The real problems arise if you never learned how, and fail to get some sense of proportion. Funny thing is, our foreign and international students often have better grammar than our home students. When people are taught English as a foreign language, they have grammar and spelling bundled with the learning. The home students, as I say, can barely form sentences.

Tetanus shots are usually given for animal bites, as they are usually puncture wounds. The C. tetani bacterium is anaerobic and puncture wounds are a perfect method of infection. However, it doesn't usually survive exposed to air in shallow scratches. Keep an eye on it, but you should be ok. It could have been worse. It could have been a human bite and they are the worst. They always go septic.

Biofeedback techniques, relaxation and practice.

Why not use a counterweight? As the yoyo moves down. spinning out on its string, have another string attached to the axle pulling a counterweight up. The balance between the weights will determine how fast the yoyo goes. If they are nearly equivalent, the yoyo will move very slowly. You might need to use a long weight on two strings that attach each side of the main yoyo string to keep it balanced, but that's easy enough. As long as the yoyo is slightly heavier than the counterweight, it will move down and wind the counterweight up. You'd just have to play with the different weights a bit. Just a thought.

No worries. I'm still sore at the last time the media got hold of my work and mis-represented it on 3 different continents. Those bastards! Lucky it wasn't particularly imprtant, but it still bugs me. It feeds the public perception and lack of understanding concerning 'Psychologists' In the UK I think the government has a lot to do with the problem. Their approach to education is the same as for health. They want 'quick-fix' ideas and concentrate on shallow, short-term interventions. I suspect their interest is less on what real effect they can have, and more on the appearance. They introduce 'initiatives' to cut patient waiting times (not much has actually changed, just the way it's counted). Likewise, they introduce 'initiatives' to increase exam pass-rates and tell us that 'standards are increasing in real terms'. If this is true, then how is it that such a high proportion of the student intake into higher education can't form simple sentences? How the hell did they pass their exams? How did they get into University? I don't think these government 'initiatives' help anybody in the long term, apart from the government, who can say "Look what we did in the four years of our office! Patient waiting times are down (even though we're sacking 30% of all nurses), the number of school-leavers entering higher education is higher than ever (even though they can barely read or write)". Speaking for myself, I'm getting tired of teaching people introductory English. I'm not an English teacher, I'm a lecturer in Psychology. I teach Psychobiology & clinical neurosciences, research methods, health psychology. Why is so much of my time spent correcting basic grammar? Many of these students may or may not have understood what they have been taught, but if they can't explain it clearly, who the hell can tell? I don't really know about the education of teachers. It may be acceptable, it may not. I strongly suspect that their education has less to do with the state of affairs than the box-ticking 'policies' and 'initiatives' implemented by local government. I doubt that individual teachers carry much weight in the grand scheme of things. It's more likely to be down to local education authorities and their scrabbling for crumbs from the government trough. At least, that's how it appears in the UK. It's like Orwell's 1984. The government keep releasing sound-bites like "record numbers pass 'A' levels" whilst increasing numbers of the students we get into Universitiy struggle to find the sharp end of their pencils.

The tyre diameter thing is the easiest. If you don't go changing the tyre diameter, there's no reason to get all high tech. If you wanted a truly objective (and accurate) reading, the way would be to take readings directly from the surface on which you're travelling, possibly using lasers under the car.