The U.S. Is Increasing Its Attacks On Sprawling ISIS Oil Fields In Eastern Syria. Https://t.co/PZyFcdonkd

The beauty. pragmatism and efficacy of simulators

The picture above is from a tweet sent by NASA astronaut Terry W. Virts shows how an entire laptop can be used as a Virtual Reality headset display onboard the ISS.

“SAFER” virtual reality simulator- the jet pack we can use to get back to ISS if we floated away during a spacewalk.

Link

Miss El Salvador

Could we truly be blind to race?

Professor Osagie K. Obasogie’s research on how blind people perceive race reveals that understanding race is not simply based on visual cues, but based how we’re socialized and what we’re taught.

When asked what race a person was, the respondents who were all blind at birth, largely defined race by visually observable indicators, such as skin color, facial features and other physical characteristics.

And contrary to what many might think, the UC Hastings professor found that blind people don’t rely on audible cues as a way to identify a person’s race, because many of them have learned that speech is an unreliable marker of someone’s race.

Instead, Obasogie’s subjects understood race visually based on the physical traits that they were taught to be markers for racial differences.

In the study, subjects recalled childhood experiences where they were told what people of certain color look like or even smell like.

And people around them often reinforced racial biases by patrolling racial boundaries, such as telling them they can’t date outside their race, or implying that the person next to them could be potentially dangerous. Obasogie told NPR:

“Blind people aren’t any more or less racist than anyone else. Indeed, part of the point of this project is that vision has very little to do with it. What matters are the social practices that train us to see and experience race in certain ways, regardless of whether we are sighted or not.”

Read more about Obasogie’s study at Boston Globe

And thank you to Julia Wilde at “That’s So Science” for hosting the DNews episode!

Critical moment American History PAY ATTENTION President Trump’s Dizzying Series Of Interviews https://youtu.be/jSDj9E2dgWs

(Image caption: The prefrontal cortex connects to a very specific region of the brainstem (the PAG) through prefrontal cortical neurons: those labeled in purple directly project to the PAG and control our instinctive behaviours. Credit: EMBL/Livia Marrone)

Neural connection keeps instincts in check

From fighting the urge to hit someone to resisting the temptation to run off stage instead of giving that public speech, we are often confronted with situations where we have to curb our instincts. Scientists at EMBL have traced exactly which neuronal projections prevent social animals like us from acting out such impulses. The study, published online in Nature Neuroscience, could have implications for schizophrenia and mood disorders like depression.

“Instincts like fear and sex are important, but you don’t want to be acting on them all the time,” says Cornelius Gross, who led the work at EMBL. “We need to be able to dynamically control our instinctive behaviours, depending on the situation.”

The driver of our instincts is the brainstem – the region at the very base of your brain, just above the spinal cord. Scientists have known for some time that another brain region, the prefrontal cortex, plays a role in keeping those instincts in check (see background information down below). But exactly how the prefrontal cortex puts a break on the brainstem has remained unclear.

Now, Gross and colleagues have literally found the connection between prefrontal cortex and brainstem. The EMBL scientists teamed up with Tiago Branco’s lab at MRC LMB, and traced connections between neurons in a mouse brain. They discovered that the prefrontal cortex makes prominent connections directly to the brainstem.

Gross and colleagues went on to confirm that this physical connection was the brake that inhibits instinctive behaviour. They found that in mice that have been repeatedly defeated by another mouse – the murine equivalent to being bullied – this connection weakens, and the mice act more scared. The scientists found that they could elicit those same fearful behaviours in mice that had never been bullied, simply by using drugs to block the connection between prefrontal cortex and brainstem.

These findings provide an anatomical explanation for why it’s much easier to stop yourself from hitting someone than it is to stop yourself from feeling aggressive. The scientists found that the connection from the prefrontal cortex is to a very specific region of the brainstem, called the PAG, which is responsible for the acting out of our instincts. However, it doesn’t affect the hypothalamus, the region that controls feelings and emotions. So the prefrontal cortex keeps behaviour in check, but doesn’t affect the underlying instinctive feeling: it stops you from running off-stage, but doesn’t abate the butterflies in your stomach.

The work has implications for schizophrenia and mood disorders such as depression, which have been linked to problems with prefrontal cortex function and maturation.

“One fascinating implication we’re looking at now is that we know the pre-frontal cortex matures during adolescence. Kids are really bad at inhibiting their instincts; they don’t have this control,” says Gross, “so we’re trying to figure out how this inhibition comes about, especially as many mental illnesses like mood disorders are typically adult-onset.”

The Paradoxical Commandments

The Paradoxical Commandments were written in 1968 by Dr. Kent M. Keith. Mother Theresa reffered to them often. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.   If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.   If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.   The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.   Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.   The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.   People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.   What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.   People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.   Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway. © Copyright Kent M. Keith 1968, renewed 2001

Nice explanation for #Bubble_Sort, sometimes referred to as sinking sort, is a simple sorting algorithm that repeatedly steps through the list to be sorted, compares each pair of adjacent items and swaps them if they are in the wrong order. The pass through the list is repeated until no swaps are needed, which indicates that the list is sorted. 

https://youtu.be/Yaj07QdVTp8

Gave them freepythonhub:

Most of my current workflow involves some manner of data analysis / visualization / relatively light stats in an IPython notebook. A new source of data (Factset, if it helps) has well-developed interfaces for R and Matlab – both of which I’ve used extensively in the past, but barely at all in the last ~year.

My question is which – R or Matlab – is going to lend itself to more flexibility in terms of using data pulled through one of them in Python (at least in cases where switching back over to Python makes sense in the first place)? Would you rather have to use a combination of Python and R, or a combination of Python and Matlab?

Thanks!

submitted by josiahstevenson [link] [comment] [ link ]

Clearly R. By far more accessible. Open Source=free. R libraries grow fast in most areas of research. Reminds me what DEC did with the PDP-11. DEC gave them free to many selected Universities. Soon they became the standard. When grads got jobs eventually they opted for what they knew well. And demended it.

R API or Matlab API for integration with Python downstream? (x-post /r/pystats) [reddit]

#DataMining

Poland A and Poland B might be real - Borders of Imperial Germany and the 2015 Polish Presidential Race Exit Poll Results.

Orange (Incumbent): PO (Civic Platform) Party - Liberal-Conservative

Blue: PiS (Law and Justice) Party - Interventionist & Social Conservative

More interesting correlations >>