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POPS'Tis the Season of Election Dirty Tricks: Scaring Student Voters Other underhanded tactics seek to confuse voters about their voter registration. In 2006, voters in Virginia reportedly received fake voicemail messages from the state elections commission claiming that the voters were registered in another state and could be criminally charged if they cast their vote in Virginia.
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POPSOutstanding article on parent-child relationship This article in the Statesman Journal is one of the most thorough journalistic presentations of the importance of the first five years of child development AND the critical role that parents play. Most journalists focus on programs, but Mackenzie Ryan gets it right: Parents are the key.
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POPSCanadian Extremist A stunning example that hate does not borders respect. It is universal. At least some are taking this seriously and beginning an investigation. I'm all for free speech but this goes beyond the limits of even the loosest interpretation.
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POPSQuestioning Someone Else's Debt I almost wish dulios had not told me about the snarky comments on Clipmarks related to my indebtedness. It's called student loans. Since when are they supposed to be embarrassing? Just because my parents could not pay for me to go to college, I am supposed to be ashamed? And of course, without child support or any contributions, I raised my two youngest siblings for seven years. Sometimes I had to borrow more money in student loans to support them. I was 25 and in graduate school with custody of my 13 year old sister, and the next year getting custody of my 12 year old brother. Where else was I supposed to get money? My story is in the clipped book as Chapter 7.
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POPSHacking is Easy, Fun, But Unfortunately Still Wrong Now I don't like Palin but this doesn't mean that I agree with what this guy did. I would be pissed if someone hacked into my email. Poor guy it wasn't even worth it, he didn't even find anything incriminating....cool how he easy it was though....but yes still wrong.
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POPSThe paints of Colour-blind artist. Colour-blind artist learns to paint by hearing A COLOUR-BLIND artist who could only recognise black and white shades has learnt how to paint with a full palette by “hearing” the hues he cannot see. Neil Harbisson, 25, has been fitted with a device called an Eyeborg, which converts 360 colours into different sounds. As an art student at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, he painted only in black and white because that is all he saw. But three years ago he met Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert who came to give a lecture at the college. After the talk, Montandon was told of Harbisson’s condition and he took up the challenge of solving the problem, enabling Harbisson to paint in colour. The artist suffers from achromatopsia – or complete congenital colour blindness.
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POPSPagan group in danger of being dissolved Blakemore said PSA focuses more on learning about pagan religions than practicing them. Blakemore admits people might have some misconceptions about PSA, but thinks that even those who do not believe in pagan religions should go to a meeting. "You can come to the group and just check it out," he said. "We're not trying to convert anyone." Blakemore also realizes some people might take issue with the group's existence. "We've had people that have come to try and convert us. Most of the time they leave the group with a greater respect," he said.
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POPS Brain's Hub of Fear Found The results of the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience and the Yerkes Center, are detailed in the October issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. The genetically engineered virus was injected into the amygdala of the mice by Emory graduate student Kimberly Maguschak. The amygdala is a part of the brain thought to be important for forming memories of emotionally charged events. "We found that after beta-catenin is taken out, the mice can still learn to fear the shocks," Maguschak said. "But two days later, their fear doesn't seem to be retained because they spend half as much time freezing in response to the tone." So it appears that beta-catenin is turned on in the amygdala to help in signaling during the learning process, Maguschak said.
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POPS How A Catholic Priest Gave Us The Primeval Atom Theory
Returning to Belgium in 1925, where he worked at the Catholic University of Leuven as a part-time lecturer, his big break came two years later in 1927 when he proposed his theory of an expanding Universe to explain the movement of the galaxies, published in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels. Lemaitre was still pretty hazy about how the process of expansion could have begun. Like many scientists, he was still committed to the idea of a static Universe of unchanging size... Einstein, though interested, was largely dismissive, telling Lemaitre that, "Your calculations are good, but your physics is terrible". Einstein was also a little suspicious of the religious implications of these ideas. He declined to describe himself as an atheist (or a theist, or a pantheist) and liked to use the vocabulary of religion, most famously in his misguided rejection of much of quantum physics, "God does not play dice!" British physicist, Fred Hoyle coined the Big Bang term
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POPSTokyo's Cat Cafes Offer Serenity Mr. Maeda, of Neko JaLaLa, started the cafe with a neighbor who shared his interest in increasing public awareness of cats, particularly strays. He explains that he hopes his little cafe is the first step in raising a larger awareness of cats in a country where about 240,000 are euthanized each year, partly as a result of pet dumping. busy lifestyles of Japanese people dearly longing for a moment of peace and comfort. "I always used to play with cats back home, but now I can't, since I live on my own," says Yuka Sato, a college student who came to cafe Neko no Mise in Tokyo's Machida region after a recent long day of job interviews. "I wish I could live together with cats like this." "Basically, the visitors of this cafe are stressed," Mr. Hanada says of the escape his customers seek.
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POPS"CIA is taking over the churches" ?!
Case in point: Daniel Ellsberg. Once a seminary student, then an officer in Vietnam, and finally working for the nation's highest intelligence organization, he was ordered to compile all the records of our war in Vietnam into a readable history. Ellsberg got them published by The New York Times, instead of keeping them secret. Otherwise known as the Pentagon Papers, these records showed how America deceived its own citizens and fostered a war in that far Southeast Asian country, of which we are still feeling the effects today. President Richard Nixon, to try to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, set up the "plumbers" spies who ransacked Ellsberg's psychiatrist office. Tricky Dick then used these same plumbers to tap the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate office buildings. Other former CIA agents, like Phillip Agee and John Stockwell, told their stories of intrigue and American meddling in the affairs of other countries. All had a religious background and a penchant for telling the
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POPSSaying "you should know better than to stand up for your rights" is abhorrent From a thread on BoingBoing, discussing 9/21/07, the day on which 19-year-old MIT engineering student Star Simpson walked into Boston's Logan International Airport wearing a home-made light-up sweatshirt, and asked an airport worker for information about a friend's arriving flight. ...in a persisting environment of anxiety over terrorism, a Boston Logan Airport worker mistook Star Simpson's LED-adorned wearable tech garment for a suicide bomb. That airport worker phoned Boston police. A small misunderstanding over a hoodie quickly became a surreal debacle during which police said they came close to killing Ms. Simpson.
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POPSRFK Jr. on Palin's Big Oil infatuation
Now John McCain has chosen as his running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a diligent student of Big Oil's crib sheets. She's something of a flat-earther who shares the current administration's contempt for science. Palin has expressed skepticism about evolution (which is like not believing in gravity), putting it on par with "creationism," which posits that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. She used to insist that human activities have nothing to do with climate change. "I'm not one ... who would attribute it to being man-made," she said in August. After she joined the GOP ticket, she magically reversed herself, to a point. "Man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming," she told Charles Gibson two weeks ago. Meanwhile, Alaska is melting before our eyes; entire villages erode as sea ice vanishes, glaciers are disappearing at a frightening clip, and "dancing forests" caused by disappearing permafrost astonish residents and tourists. Palin had to
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POPSStar trek, tracked inside school :) Researchers at the Technology-Enhanced Learning Research Group (TEL) are designing new learning environments using interactive multi-touch desks that look and act like a large version of an Apple iPhone. The team observed how students and teachers interact in classes and how Information Communications technology (ICT) could improve collaboration. They then set about designing an interactive classroom solution called 'SynergyNet' to reflect TEL's aims of achieving active student engagement and learning by sharing, problem-solving and creating IT in schools is an exciting prospect - our system is very similar to the type of interface shown as a vision of the future in the TV series Star Trek!
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POPSHer Ultimate O Now John McCain has chosen as his running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a diligent student of Big Oil's crib sheets. She's something of a flat-earther who shares the current administration's contempt for science. Palin has expressed skepticism about evolution (which is like not believing in gravity), putting it on par with "creationism," which posits that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago." She's addicted to it baby; it's her sex; it's her power. Who says it only has to turn the big boys on?
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POPS"Happy Days" Home Buyers Get Mortgages --- Politicians Get Reelected Democrats — and their community organizer “constituencies” — argued that it was “discriminatory” for banks to deny mortgages and business loans to people with poor collateral, poor credit, and dubious ability to repay their loans. Legislators replaced common sense with gouts of political oration about “redlining inner city communities,” “racist banking practices,” and other electioneering formulations that protected incumbency, but shoved bank solvency to the end of a bending limb. The CRA allowed legislators to bully banks into loaning money to people who simply weren’t credit-worthy. The only “collateral” they possessed was electoral: They could repay Democratic lawmakers on Election Day. Now, let’s fast-forward to 1993, when the Clinton administration further liberalized (a.k.a. “reformed”) the already anemic lending restraints of the CRA and created the President’s Community Development Bank, which “…