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POPS6 Key Social Skills Obvious? Perhaps not - judging by how people often respond in social situations - where 'me' is the most important subject
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POPS"What If He Is?" God bless Powell for speaking the truth. As a popular personality, he hit the nail on the head.
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POPSThe 10 Weirdest Facts about American Presidents 7. Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president, was reported to be a very interesting character. When not having his head massaged with Vaseline during breakfasts in bed or riding his own mechanical bull, he was ringing the White House doorbell and then running off to hide. 8. So far, all American presidents have claimed ancestry limited to one or more of just seven nationalities: Dutch, English, German, Irish, Scottish, Swiss, and Welsh. 9. Grover Cleveland was the only president to openly admit that he had fathered an illegitimate child. 10. There were four presidents who were not actual presidents of the United States: Sam Houston, Mirabeau Lamar, and Anson Jones were all presidents of the Republic of Texas. Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America.
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POPSThe language you speak affects your personality A study of bilingual women suggests that when you switch from speaking one language to another, your personality and your perceptions change as well. I've experienced this myself switching between German and English.
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POPSSun + Water = Fuel Michael Grätzel, however, may have a clever way to turn Nocera's discovery to practical use. A professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was one of the first people Nocera told about his new catalyst. "He was so excited," Grätzel says. "He took me to a restaurant and bought a tremendously expensive bottle of wine." In 1991, Grätzel invented a promising new type of solar cell. It uses a dye containing ruthenium, which acts much like the chlorophyll in a plant, absorbing light and releasing electrons. In Grätzel's solar cell, however, the electrons don't set off a water-splitting reaction. Instead, they're collected by a film of titanium dioxide and directed through an external circuit, generating electricity. Grätzel now thinks that he can integrate his solar cell and Nocera's catalyst into a single device that captures the energy from sunlight and uses it to split water.
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POPSNewsflash about me: I got tenure! This is a personal note... This semester, I was up for tenure at the small Pennsylvania college where I work. I was just informed a few days ago that my tenure bid was approved. This clip says a little bit about what that means.
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POPSEinstein, Newton displayed autistic traits "Psychiatry tends to focus almost exclusively on the negative side of different forms of mental illness," Fitzgerald said in statement. "I want to show that psychiatric disorders can also have positive dimensions."
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POPSMe, Myself and I The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries. So what effect has capitalizing “I” but not “you” — or any other pronoun — had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot. There have, of course, been plenty of rich and dominant cultures throughout history that have gotten by just fine without capitalizing the first-person pronoun or ever writing it down at all. There have also been cultures that committed atrocities even while capitalizing “you.”
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POPSCarl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot I did a search and found several clips for a Pale Blue Dot, but this one is special. This has Carl Sagan himself speaking. Absolutely wonderful!
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POPSCashier Attacks Deaf Man for Not Talking "Upon further investigation, it appeared the suspect became frustrated when the victim wouldn't respond or acknowledge his attempts to converse," Sullivan said. "He became outraged and struck the victim in an unwarranted attack." The store's surveillance tape was erased or taped over before the officers got there.
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POPS0.3% of Saharan Sun Enough To Power Europe The visionary proposal comes as the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission released its strategic energy technology plan which highlighted photovoltaic cells as one of the eight technologies that need to be developed in the future. The plan also includes fuel cells, hydrogen, clean coal, second generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind and smart grids.
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POPSDubya dissed by world leaders: Or is it? [SEE COMMENTS] 11/21/08 Okay, CNN has come out with the official explanation . Maybe it wasn't an official snub after all. Protocol & all that. I still bet Angela Merkel thinks Bush is a dick and that he'll be remembered as the WORST PRESIDENT EVAR! We liberals don't hate America, we love America. We just hate Bush and what he stands for and what he's done to the country. Nor do we think speaking bad of the Great Leader is disloyalty to the state like the right-wing Kool-Aid drinkers seem to. ORIG COMMENT: Notice how the WORST AMERICAN PRESIDENT IN HISTORY doesn't even make eye contact with Angela Merkel of Germany, nor she with him. Guess she figures getting groped on camera by a by him once before was enough. There's an old Irish saying that 19 world leaders seem to have gotten wind of: Touch the Devil and you can't let go.
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POPSThey just don't fear heaven and earth "If anything, they are superior in many ways to us. Thinking too much about the future or worrying too much about the past is really unhealthy. The Pirahã taught me that very lesson. Living in the moment is a sophisticated way to live. I don't see depression. I don't see some of the things that afflict our society - and that's not because they don't face pressures." An interesting story.
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POPSBush gagged Surgeon General. Health, sex, smoking, cells, religion, Under Bush, the independence of the surgeon general has been placed below industry lobbying and the demands of the religious right. The Bush White House banned Dr Carmona from speaking or issuing reports on stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, prisons, mental health and international health issues, he has revealed. For years, the White House also tried to "water down" a key report on the dangers of second-hand smoke, he said. When it was published last year , the report stated that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke can cause immediate harm.
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POPSSpeaking whales Uplifting is on its way... :) I wonder when will us humans learn some things from the whales?
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POPSQUIZ: What American Accent Do You Have? If you think you don't have an accent, think again. This short quiz is a way to find out which dialect of American English you speak. Different regional accents become more prevalent in countries at different times throughout the years for various socio-economic and geographical reasons. These accents come to be perceived as "neutral" or "accent-less" by the majority during these times. For a while, the American dialect sometimes called "Standard Midwestern" has dominated but, like accents themselves, this "standard" constantly evolves. Recently, the spoken aspects of American English have trended westward along with the population center of America. Many features distinct to Northeastern accents (think NYC, Boston) are being replaced in popularity with those from Western accents (think LA) across America. This shift tends to be more prominent the younger the speaker is.
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POPSParalyzed Man Speaks Again Using Brain Implant So they knew his brain's speech centers were still functioning. They just needed a way to connect those speech centers to a speech synthesizer - an artificial mouth if you will. Researchers implanted a special kind of electrode in his brain, one that's "impregnated with neurotrophic factors" that encourage brain neurons to grow into and around the electrode. Essentially this electrode forms a very strong connection with brain neurons, which results in a strong signal that reliably comes from the same part of the patient's brain over time. Over a period of weeks, Guenther and his team worked to decode the signals coming from the man's brain. Eventually, he was able "to produce three vowel sounds with good accuracy," said Guenther. The man produces these sounds as quickly as he would normal speech, and Guenther added, "The long-term goal within five years is to have him use the speech brain–computer interface to produce words directly."
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POPSHappy Orgasm Day! Did you know that "Orgasm Day" is an official holiday celebrated in 22nd of December? I didn’t know either!