"Two large-scale studies published in the journal Circulation, report that the chances of surviving cardiac arrest are no better -- and may be worse -- when bystanders perform mouth-to-mouth breathing than if they press on the chest without interruption."

"Many countries are debating whether they should have population policies. Here are two – very different – examples of nations that rapidly reduced their birth rates."

“In a study of consititutional psychopathic personalities especially the sexual deviants, it was found during a routine physical examination that the gag reflex was frequently absent. This was a more definite finding in those homosexuals who admitted fellatio. ... The positive test, i.e., the absence of the gag reflex, depends on the desensitization of this area due to conditioning, this being brought about by the repeated control of the reflex during the act of fellatio … Frequently it proved valuable in detecting the malingerer who attempted to obtain a discharge by professing homosexuality. Presented with the gag test findings the soldier would invariably change his story or admit having lied for selfish gains.”

"Consumers loudly campaigned for another Barbie® career. The winner of the popular vote is Computer Engineer. Computer Engineer Barbie®, debuting in Winter 2010, inspires a new generation of girls to explore this important high-tech industry, which continues to grow and need future female leaders."

"By allowing kids to explore activities on their own, parents not only help children pinpoint the pursuit that fits them best, but they can also prevent young minds from obsessing over an activity, a new study finds."

"Daniel Dennett on secular ecstasy."

"I had several small plastic Ponies that I used to play make-believe with my friends. But I had one larger, plush My Little Pony, a bright-green stuffed horse with a vivid pink mane and tail that I played with all by myself. I would sit for hours on my own, braiding and rebraiding its tail. I developed a system for braiding the tail of my Pony that taught me about mathematical concepts-- from division to recursion."

"Using off-the-shelf chemicals, Tarnovsky soaked chips in acid to dissolve their hard outer shells. Then he applied rust remover to help take off layers of mesh wiring, to expose the chips' cores. From there, he had to find the right communication channels to tap into using a very small needle.

The needle allowed him to set up a wiretap and eavesdrop on all the programming instructions as they are sent back and forth between the chip and the computer's memory."

"Data generated from this simulation suggest that the current system combining patent and open source protection for inventions generates significantly lower rates of innovation (p<0.05), productivity (p<0.001), and societal utility (p<0.002) than does a commons system. Further, the empirical data generated using PatentSim suggests that commons systems can generate significantly greater amounts of innovation, productivity, and social utility than currently predominating patent systems that combine both patent and open source protection for inventions."

"Since September 27, 2007, I have been documenting the graffiti left in public study areas in the Joseph Regenstein Library ("the Reg"): the study nooks tucked into the stacks, the whiteboards in the all-night study space, and the study carrels in the reading rooms."

"Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts."

The research, carried out in the UK and Belgium, involved a new brain scanning method.

Awareness was detected in three other patients previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state.

"The government hopes introducing safer pint glasses, still made of glass, will help reduce injuries. As well as the human cost, it also hopes it will reduce the financial burden of alcohol-related crime, which currently costs the NHS £2.7bn a year.

Now, two new prototypes for beer glasses have been unveiled, as part of a programme involving the Design Council. Launched by the Home Office's Design and Technology Alliance, the aim is to use design to tackle crime."

"This device (video below) shreds your sensitive business documents and turns them into new toilet paper. ...

At half an hour per roll, that would take 100,000 hours—about 11 years. So the White Goat may not make economic sense yet (unless we put a price on the trees being saved) but surely the next version will be cheaper and smaller, right?"

"For this week's Photoshop Contest, I asked you to make some improvements to Apple's iPad. Some of these entries are definite improvements. Others? Uh, not so much."

"We have developed an extension to the popular Firefox browser that contacts network notaries whenever your browser connects an HTTPS website."

"I'll give you an example: repeatedly in the AdelaideNow website one will see commentary from Aaron Fornarino of West Croydon. That person doesn't exist," Atkinson said on the air. "That name has been created by the Liberal Party in order to run Liberal Party commentary."

This morning, AdelaideNow took great delight in posting a picture of Fornarino posing with a Mac and his young daughter. He's a second-year law student who moved to the area last year and "lives in a flat on Port Rd, about 500m from Mr. Atkinson's electorate office."

"Mr. Cooper starts to make a point - that allowing same sex couples marriage equality would also entitle opposite sex couples to domestic partnership equality - but he can't actually say what would be wrong with this, just that nobody can prove that it *wouldn't* be harmful so maybe it would. The judge doesn't buy it. You don't have to prove that same sex marriage is harmless any more than you have to prove that freedom of speech or the press is harmless, which it sometimes isn't.

(Aside: I didn't realize that the Prop 8 people want to discriminate against gays *and* straights. It's not just important that gays can't have marriage; straights also shouldn't have civil unions.)"

You can see that there are clearly a lot more questions that need to be answered about gaming services like OnLive both in terms of the user experience and how it will interact with the rest of the gaming community at large, both PC and console. I see a lot of potential for OnLive to revolutionize gaming and how this entertainment medium works across any number of platforms.

"The trick is to figure out which details help users identify the UI element, and which details distract from its intended meaning. Some details help users figure out what they’re looking at and how they can interact with it; other details distract from the idea you’re trying to convey. They turn your interface element from a concept into a specific thing. Thus, if an interface element is too distinct from its real-life counterpart, it becomes too hard to recognize. On the other hand, if it is too realistic, people are unable to figure out that you’re trying to communicate an idea, and what idea that might be."

"Uniform policy is increasingly taking an absurdly draconian shift in its approach to the decisions kids make about how they wear their hair, banning any style more interesting than that you would ordinarily find on an Abbey National correspondence clerk clad in a Next business suit. Uniform policies nowadays are uniformly filled with such pitifully and vehemently ignorant statements as "patterns cut into the hair are not acceptable". Not acceptable to whom? Or, "hair colour will be restricted to that found in normal hair". And normal means what, exactly?"

"Twitter is blocked in China, but yesterday the Chinese twitters made tag #GoogleCN climbed to the top ten of twitter's keywords. It is a bit touching, and a bit hopeful - A profitable, foreign company get this means filtering and block still not make Chinese people (at least some of them) losing their eyesight and judgment to what is good and what is bad.

However, they are losing, and may lose faster, along with the Cinternet's separation from the Internet. Here are the top 20 websites according to Alexa:"

"We’ve been flooded with complaints recently because our YouTube videos can't be embedded on websites, and in certain countries can't be seen at all. And we want you to know: we hear you, and we’re sorry. We wish there was something we could do. Believe us, we want you to pass our videos around more than you do, but, crazy as it may seem, it’s now far harder for bands to make videos accessible online than it was four years ago."

“OpenID Connect”, therefore, is what I’m starting to use in casual conversation as my answer to Twitter and Facebook Connect.

"The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.

But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.

Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober. "

"In the past year, researchers have developed new robots to tackle a variety of tasks: helping with medical rehabilitation, aiding military manoeuvres, mimicking social skills, and grasping the unknown. Here are the highlights."

On the Lukeywes1234 thing. ED has more infos.

"During its first six weeks of observations, it found five new planets. All are giants – four are heavier than Jupiter and one is about as massive as Neptune. They all orbit their host stars so closely that their surfaces are hotter than molten lava. "Looking at them might be like looking at a blast furnace," says lead scientist William Borucki, who presented the results on Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC. ...

One, called Kepler 7b, is about as dense as polystyrene. It is about 1.5 times as wide as Jupiter, but only about a tenth as dense, making it one of the most diffuse planets yet found."

"Ray Kurzweil, prolific inventor and Singularity enthusiast, is planning to debut Blio at CES 2010 in January. Blio is an e-reader platform, not hardware, that can be used on PC, MAC, iPhone and iPod touch."

"The thing is, magic is a branch of applied mathematics, and the inmates here are not only mad: they’re computer science graduates. That’s why they came to the attention of the Laundry in the first place, and it’s also why they ultimately ended up in the Farm, where we can keep them away from sharp pointy things and diagrams with the wrong sort of angles. But it’s difficult to make sure they’re safe. You can solve theorems with a blackboard if you have to, after all, or in your head, if you dare."

Boeing is equipping factory-floor workers with a modified VR setup - and rapidly cutting the time it takes to wire new jetliners.

All about HTML5's new features.

"As part of an upcoming TypePad homepage redesign, I wanted to know how many people are using Facebook, Twitter and OpenID to log in to TypePad."

"My subject line said (in full), 'meep.' The body said (in full), 'Meep.' Yesterday I received a reply email from Assistant Principal Mark Strout, which said (in full) "Your E-mail has been forwarded to the Danvers Police Department."

"...HT​ML parser, application and existence for all time like Visual Basic only worse he comes he comes do not fi​ght he com̡e̶s, ̕h̵i​s un̨ho͞ly radiańcé destro҉ying all enli̍̈́̂̈́ghtenment, HTML tags lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo​͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ik͏e liq​uid pain, the song of re̸gular exp​ression parsing will exti​nguish the voices of mor​tal man from the sp​here I can see it can you see ̲͚̖͔̙î̩́t̲͎̩̱͔́̋̀ it is beautiful t​he final snuffing of the lie​s of Man ALL IS LOŚ͖̩͇̗̪̏̈́T ALL I​S LOST the pon̷y he comes he c̶̮omes he comes the ich​or permeates all MY FACE MY FACE ᵒh god no NO NOO̼O​..."

"An anti-censorship group holding an event Sunday at the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, was disrupted by UN officials who demanded removal of a poster that mentioned Internet firewalls in China."

"FireEye's formal effort to shutdown this botnet stared last night. The research team here worked in multiple directions simultaneously. The purpose was to work against all the fallback mechanisms so fast that bot herders wouldn't get a chance to counter react."

"Now, you might want to show your Wow to family and friends. You might want to show your Wow, even, to other people out there in the world. But the site is neither messaged or built that way. It's an archetypal example of the corporation wanting to do something community-enabled and just not getting it: 'Hey customers! Send your most special memories to our corporate PR department!'"

"On Tuesday voters in Takoma Park, Maryland, got to try out a new, transparent voting system that lets voters go online to verify that their ballots got counted in the final tally. The system also lets anyone independently audit election results to verify the votes went to the correct candidates."

"The most common response I am seeing to the Maine referendum is, "How dare they think they can vote on my civil right to marry whom I please?!" Here's the thing: you don't have a civil right to gay marriage. We want to think of civil rights as forces of nature, but they are compacts within society. And gay marriage has not been defined as a civil right by the U.S. government..."

"The group is developing silk-silicon LEDs that might act as photonic tattoos that can show blood-sugar readings, as well as arrays of conformable electrodes that might interface with the nervous system."

"I am a postman and concerned at the absence in the media of any account of how mail delivery is organised and what Royal Mail's modernisation programme entails."

"I wasn't the least bit surprised to quickly discover a handful of Wave-based roleplaying games already in progress, and many more in various stages of planning. In the past few days, I've watched games from the sideline and talked to some Game Masters and gamers—there seems to be an emerging consensus that Google Wave has as much RPG potential as any platform since the venerable and proverbial tabletop."

"It’s a pretty sobering video. Skier Chris Cardello is riding a line in Haines with a helmet cam for Rage Films. An avalanche breaks off all around him, and he’s buried, while the cam continues to roll. He manages to get his Avalung into his mouth, and thanks to a speedy rescue, he’s pulled out alive after just five minutes. The incident happened last April, but it’s just as relevant today as ever."

"The walls are made of stone, intricately carved out into an art form reminiscent of the flow seen in ancient Indian art. They looked like lotus petals, almost soft, but overall just aesthetically overwhelming. It was so clean, so fresh... the cool air inside was very refreshing compared to the blistering heat outside. There was a complete working fireplace in the main area that looked like a devilish face. The domes at the top of the cave were fashioned with lights, and the bottoms were covered in a sealant that was pocked with flecks of real gold. This sealant was everywhere actually, with the gold accentuating every curve of this hidden masterpiece."

"It seems that more expressive typography will be working its way to the Web soon. But Kew isn't stopping at basic font support via WOFF. He has also been experimenting with implementing support for advanced typographic features like ligatures, discretionary forms, alternate forms, tabular figures for easier to read tables, and more, all via CSS properties."

"The pattern was projected on the town from the vantage point, then traced and painted. Photographs from the same spot in daylight make the town look flat,"

"Sandra Burt, 56, who works at A&T Food store in Clackmannanshire, was warned she could be fined for her singing by the Performing Right Society (PRS)."

"Dubbed BookServer, the open platform is meant to provide a standard means for booksellers, publishers, libraries, and individual authors to serve texts onto laptops, netbooks, smartphones, game consoles, and specialized ereaders a la the Amazon Kindle. The Archive has already demonstrated an early incarnation of the architecture with the Kindle and Sony's Reader Digital Book."

"Feature-wise, an iTunes LP is a DRM-free album in high-quality 256kbps AAC format, along with digital extras (visualizer(s), photos, videos and interviews) wrapped in a custom WebKit-powered site."

"The biggest weakness of the entire genre is this: the protagonists don't tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances. The scriptwriters and producers have thrown away the key tool that makes SF interesting and useful in the first place, by relegating "tech" to a token afterthought rather than an integral part of plot and characterization. What they end up with is SF written for the Pointy-Haired [studio] Boss, who has an instinctive aversion to ever having to learn anything that might modify their world-view."

"There’s been lots of great stuff written about why singular they is acceptable, but every time I want to smash the arguments against it, I have to waste time jumping through old Language Log posts and books and whatnot, so I figured I’d finally go about summarizing it all. Without further ado, here’s the evidence for singular they, and why you ought to stop “correcting” it."

"I have decided to take you up on your generous offer and so include below my first post for your perusal. I hope it’s not too irreverent…"

"Of 180 claims for probiotic ingredients, the EU's food agency the European Food Safety Authority (Efsa) threw out every one. Ten were rejected outright and a 21-member expert panel could not assess the remaining 170 because the ingredients for which the claims were made could not be identified. ... However Britain's best-selling yogurt drinks, Actimel and Yakult, were excluded from Efsa's findings yesterday because Danone, Actimel's maker, and Yakult, the Japanese firm which introduced probiotic drinks to the UK in 1996, withdrew their claims before they could be scrutinised."

"The PyTEC system heats mixed waste, releasing a gas that can be burned to produce five times more energy than is required to drive the system. ... The approach could see use in urban areas, reducing municipal waste volume by 95% while producing energy."

"Microsoft Research has just surfaced some of its incredibly wild multitouch mouse prototypes. Each one uses a different touch detection method, and at first glance all five seem to fly in the face of regular ergonomics."

"So what the hell are you supposed to do at these stupid parties? Nobody really knows. So we’ve created our own Windows 7 party planning guide. Try any of these activities, and your event is sure to be a smashing success."

"If a nasal spray can improve memory, perhaps we're on our way to giving some folks a whiff of common sense, such as accepting the realities of evolution," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "This is exciting piece of interdisciplinary science, since IL-6 had previously been considered a by-product of inflammation, not an agent that affects cognition."

"A brewery has launched a low alcohol beer called Nanny State after being branded irresponsible for creating the UK's "strongest beer"."

"As I write this, there's an insane dust storm that's sweeping over Sydney. I found out about it by seeing a Twitter post from Dan Hill. I'm based in San Francisco but found it so extraordinary I decided to go and see if I could spot pictures coming in and make a little gallery out of them."

"It shows the keenness of leading players in Britain’s media industry and Government to lobby the quango, which rules on complaints about TV programmes and carves up the radio and mobile phone markets."

"Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction."

"The work of German filmmakers peddling a satirical movie called Short Cut to Hollywood, the elaborate hoax involved at least two faked websites, a faked Wikipedia entry and California phone numbers for “public safety” officials that were actually being answered by hoaxsters in Germany using Skype."

“We decided that if we’re going to do this, if we have to make sound, then we’re going to make it beautiful and futuristic,” Toshiyuki Tabata, Nissan’s noise and vibration expert, told Bloomberg. “We wanted something a bit different, something closer to the world of art.”

"People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings –– clearly they were motivated to find structure," said Proulx. "But what's more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did."

"The John Carmack keynote ranges from topics such as the ZendiMax buyout of id Software, the expansion of id Software, Rage, QuakeLive, iPhone game development, and many technical topics which are beyond my capacity to outline."

"But there's another way. Gravitational waves should also stretch and squeeze pulsars as they pass by, subtly changing the radio pulses they produce. So by monitoring an array of pulsars throughout the galaxy, astronomers should be able to see the effects of nanohertz to microhertz gravitational waves passing by. The array of pulsars should effectively shimmer as the waves wash over it, like a grid of buoys bobbing on the ocean. ... These guys say the next generation of radio telescope arrays such as the Allen Telescope Array in California and the Square Kilometer Array in Australia or South Africa, should be capable of making the required measurements. And the scientific potential of the data is huge."

"Last year, sports psychologists at the University of Münster, Germany, showed video clips of bouts to 42 experienced referees. They then played the same clips again, digitally manipulated so that the clothing colours were swapped round. The result? In close matches, the scoring swapped round too, with red competitors awarded an average of 13 per cent more points than when they were dressed in blue (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 769). "If one competitor is strong and the other weak, it won't change the outcome of the fight," says Norbert Hagemann, who led the study. "But the closer the levels, the easier it is for the colour to tip the scale.""

"This week, Jase Kuriakose an engineer at CAT turned on the UK’s first totally renewable micro grid. The systems works by combining all the wind, solar, bio mass and hydro energy we produce at CAT and storing it in a battery bank. When it needs more energy it simply connects to the grid through an intelligent electronic control device to take more, when we are producing too much it gives the energy to the national grid."

Government officials in south-east China have ordered workers to cover a 1,000 ft long steel bridge in butter to prevent citizens from using it to attempt suicide. ... "Since we put up the butter there have been no problems with these attention seekers."

"We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. This is the second post of our statistical investigation into the optimal online dating message; a note about how we protected user privacy is here."

"Video footage has been released of a robot that can leap over obstacles more than 7.5m (25ft) high. Most of the time, the shoebox-sized robot - which is being developed for the US military - uses its four wheels to get around."

But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated "leg" to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences.

"Fathers will be able to take six months' paternity leave, the government has announced. The move will allow mothers to decide to return to work after six months and fathers to stay at home for the rest of the 12 months off allowed by law."

“He is making pools out of dumpsters"

"Singularity discussions seem to be splitting up into three major schools of thought: Accelerating Change, the Event Horizon, and the Intelligence Explosion."

She poured a coffee, then touched the breakfast table. “Where are my shoes?” “Your sister borrowed them.” “Again? Where is Susan?” “She’s downtown now.” “Susan! Why did you swipe my favorite shoes again?” “Look at this dress.” “Oooh, that dress is darling.” “It would look even better on you.” “You’re right. Get it for me. You can’t have it.” “Trade you for these shoes.” “Let me check that with Henry. Yeah, okay.” Karen had another sip of fair-trade coffee. It tasted weird, but it was still hot.

"There is a war being fought between customers and many of the firms they have to deal with. It is an asymmetric conflict - the little man versus the faceless, bad customer service monoliths."

On the little man's side there are only newspaper consumer pages and a rather handy selection of laws.

Tips on changing the behaviour of the full screen mode.

"The moral is that the brevity of an e-mail message, a blog post, a text message, even a tweet, is no obstacle to powerful information, a persuasive argument, a literary moment, a zinger, a joke."

"As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions. The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software - in other words, only 136 people. It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air" but based on unspecified evidence"

"We have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology."