Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Vision Quest

In many Native American groups, it is a turning point in life taken before puberty to find oneself and the intended spiritual and life direction:


Vision Quest

When an older child is ready, he or she will go on a personal, spiritual quest alone in the wilderness, often in conjunction with a period of fasting. This usually lasts for a number of days while the child is attuned to the spirit world. Usually, a Guardian animal will come in a vision or dream, and the child's life direction will appear at some point. The child returns to the tribe, and once the child has grown, will pursue that direction in life. After a vision quest, the child may become an apprentice of an adult in the tribe of the shown direction (Medicine Man, boatmaker and so on) [source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_quest].


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Antipsychotic

A tranquilizing psychiatric medication primarily used to manage psychosis including delusions or hallucinations, as well as disordered thought, particularly in schizophrenia and bipolar disorders:

Antipsychotic (or Neuroleptic)


A typical antipsychotic is Chlorpromazine, abbreviated CPZ; marketed in the United States as Thorazine.


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Permafrost

In the Arctic tundra, temperatures are below freezing for nine months out of the year; soil in the Arctic remains permanently frozen, making agriculture impossible; this soil is called:

Permafrost


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Monday, March 21, 2011

ITU

The specialized agency of the United Nations which is responsible for information and communication technologies:

ITU (International Telecommunication Union)

Flag of ITU
Flag of ITU

The ITU comprises three sectors, each managing a different aspect of the matters handled by the Union, as well as ITU Telecom:

Radiocommunication (ITU-R)
Managing the international radio-frequency spectrum and satellite orbit resources is at the heart of the work of the ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R).

Standardization (ITU-T)
ITU's standards-making efforts are its best-known — and oldest — activity; known prior to 1992 as the International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee or CCITT (from its French name "Comité consultatif international téléphonique et télégraphique")

Development (ITU-D)
Established to help spread equitable, sustainable and affordable access to information and communication technologies (ICT).

ITU TELECOM
ITU Telecom organizes major events for the world's ICT community. ITU Telecom World 2011 is ITU Telecom's 40th Anniversary with the first event in 1971.

[read more ...]

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Sunday, March 20, 2011

BigTable

A distributed storage system developed and used by Google for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size (petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers):

BigTable

BigTable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in BigTable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, BigTable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by BigTable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of BigTable [source: http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html].


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Cadmium

A chemical element with the symbol Cd, chemically similar to zinc and mercury, occurs as a minor component in most zinc ores and therefore is a byproduct of zinc production:

Cadmium

Cadmium

Cadmium is a soft, malleable, ductile, bluish-white bivalent metal. It is a long-living heavy metal, abundantly present in the environment, which accumulates in the body; as one of the environmental toxins (including Mercury, Tin, Lead, Aluminum, Arsenic, and Cadmium) affects brain fitness and destroys brain cells.


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Extrasensory Perception

Perception by means other than through the recognized physical senses; sensed with the mind, as in telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition:


Extrasensory Perception

Notes:

Telepathy is the induction of mental states from one mind to another.

Clairvoyance is an extrasensory perception in which knowledge of objective events is acquired without the use of the senses. A person said to have the ability of clairvoyance is referred to as a clairvoyant.

Precognition, also called future sight, extrasensory perception of a future event. It involves the acquisition of future information which cannot be deduced from presently available sense-based information or laws of physics and nature. The related terms, premonition and presentiment refer to information about future events that is perceived as emotions.


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Face Perception

The process by which the brain and mind understand and interpret the face, particularly the human face:


Face Perception

Note: Face Perception should not be mistaken for Facial Perception or Facial Vision.



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Facial Perception

The ability to judge the distance and direction of objects through the sensation felt in the skin of the face, commonly experienced by those who are blind:


Facial Perception (also called Facial Vision)

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Stereognostic Perception

The ability to recognize objects by the sense of touch:


Stereognostic Perception


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Saturday, March 19, 2011

Source Amnesia

An explicit memory disorder in which someone can recall certain information, but not where or how it was obtained:


Source Amnesia


"The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer's hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man's curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don't remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true." [source: The New York Times]


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Friday, March 18, 2011

Angiography

A medical imaging technique, employed inside the organs of the body, and the blood vessels especially the arteries, veins and the heart chambers; traditionally done by injecting a radio-opaque contrast agent into the blood vessel and imaging using X-ray-based techniques such as fluoroscopy:


Angiography (or Arteriography)

Angiography (or Arteriography)


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Fluoroscopy

An imaging technique commonly used by physicians to obtain real-time moving images of the internal structures of a patient through the use of an equipment that consists of an X-ray source and fluorescent screen between which a patient is placed:


Fluoroscopy


Fluoroscope
Fluoroscope
[image source: www.russomd.com]

For more information click here.

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Saturday, March 12, 2011

Aerobic Exercise / Cardiovascular Exercise / Cardio

Physical exercise that intends to improve the oxygen system:


Aerobic Exercise (also known as Cardiovascular Exercise or simply as Cardio)


Varieties of Aerobic (Cardiovascular) Exercise [source] :

Indoor

Stair climbing
Elliptical trainer
Indoor rower
Stairmaster
Stationary bicycle
Treadmill

Outdoor

Cross-country skiing
Cycling
Inline skating
Jogging
Nordic walking
Football
Rugby
Soccer
Parkour

Indoor or Outdoor

Kickboxing
Swimming
Jumping rope
Circuit Training

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Memory Tips

Memory Tips by Lumos Labs, Inc. (http://www.lumosity.com)



Certain mental techniques can enhance your ability to remember. Have a go at experimenting with some of the below to see what works best for you.

Acronyms
Create a phrase using the first letter of a series of items you’d like to remember.
For example, to remember to pick up milk, eggs, bread, cereal, Nutella, and avocados, one might create the phrase:
My Entire Book Collection Needs Attention (M.E.B.C.N.A); bizarreness can add to memorability.

Chunking
Breaking down a long series of units into easy-to-remember groupings can make things more manageable and help improve recall. This is the reason why phone numbers are typically grouped into three and four digit units. We suggest this technique for Lumosity’s Monster Garden, Memory Matrix, and Moneycomb exercises; think of clusters of stimuli in terms of what recognizable shapes they make, e.g. “L” or “T” shaped is easier to remember than “three long by two wide”.

Caffeine
In moderation, caffeine can temporarily boost your memory and shorten reaction times. A couple of cups of coffee or a few cups of tea also provide antioxidants for bodily health.

Visualizing
Creating detailed imagery and associations can help with solidifying memories over the long term. The more creative you can get with your imagination, the better: if you meet someone named Nick, perhaps envision him with a white beard and think of him as St. Nick.

Napping
Taking power naps, from 10-20 minutes, can help consolidate memories and learning. Sleeping longer, however, can end up making you groggy.

Memory Jogs
Writing down reminders and strategically placing them in your home, car, and workplace is a good way to jog your memory about important tasks or events.

Brain Training
By strategically exercising your brain it is possible to improve working memory along with other cognitive abilities. This has been shown to be true even late in life.

Enrich Your Environment
Enriching your environment through engaging people, media, and new experiences can improve learning, cognitive reserve and even reinvigorate faded memories. Go on a day trip or work in a volunteer setting!

Catching ZZZZs
Getting enough sleep at night helps consolidate learning and the formation of new memories from the day’s experiences. People typically do best with 7-9 hours a night.

Breathing
Deep, slow breathing can de-activate the “flight or fight” side of your nervous system, protecting the brain from the damaging memory effects of excessive stress.

Hydration
Proper hydration boosts the speed of neuronal firing. Unfortunately, most people are chronically dehydrated, due in large part to the prevalence of alcohol, caffeine, sugar and high protein foods. Eight glasses of water per day is ideal.

Sugar
Consumption of concentrated sugars can spike insulin levels, resulting in fatigue and compromising cognitive functioning. Keeping to complex, instead of simple, carbohydrates helps slow and balance sugar absorption, resulting in more stable energy levels. Complex carbohydrates generally include those in wholegrain form.

Breaking a Sweat
Periodic cardiovascular exercise has been shown to reduce the toxic effects of prolonged stress and stimulate the production of new hippocampal neurons (important for learning and the formation of new memories).

Green Leafies
Vegetables such as kale, collards, chard and spinach have high levels of anti-oxidants which help protect your brain from daily wear and tear.

Dark Chocolate
Eating dark chocolate, the darker the better, also helps protect the brain. This is because chocolate has one of the highest anti-oxidant contents of any food. Keeping it dark minimizes the negative impact of excessive fat and sugar.

Being Social
Engaging people exercises diverse areas of the brain, keeping your cognitive processes active and fit.

Dancing
Dancing is not only a great way to reap the benefits of being social, but it also involves balancing and coordinating movement, all of which are good for your head.

New Languages
Learning a new language pushes the limits of your knowledge and contributes to cognitive reserve. This helps to prevent and slow the effects of mental decline.

Rhyming
Incorporating what you’d like to remember into a rhyme can help with later recall. A common example of this used for plumbing is “righty tighty, lefty loosey”.

Associations
Associating what you’d like to remember with an environment, feeling, or person will help recall on demand. Association is generally used to describe any learning process aside from simple habituation.

Alcohol
Excessive alcohol drinking (more than a couple of drinks per day) has been linked to brain shrinkage and mental decline.

Smoking
Smoking cigarettes constricts the arteries in your brain, limiting available oxygen. The habit has also been correlated with higher risks of stroke and decreased densities of brain gray matter.

Relaxing
Excessive stress can cause brain damage. Your hippocampus (responsible for consolidating new memories) is especially sensitive.

Game Playing
Playing games, whether online or otherwise, can stretch the mind and help build adaptive neural networks.

Rehearsing
Rehearsing new information to yourself, or aloud to others, helps reinforce associated neural networks and learning.

Meditation
Periodically calming and focusing the mind has been shown to help with attention, processing speed, and response times, in addition to relieving stress.

Paying attention
Good attention is the foundation of good memory. Pay special attention next time someone introduces himself, or when you need to remember something else specific, and notice how this affects your later recall.

Steroid

A type of organic compound that contains a specific arrangement of four cycloalkane rings that are joined to each other; examples of it include the dietary fat cholesterol, the sex hormones estradiol and testosterone, and the anti-inflammatory drug dexamethasone:


Steroid

Read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steroid



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Improve Your Memory with the Sleep Hypnos

Improve Your Memory with the Sleep Hypnos

Gerontology

The study of the social, psychological and biological aspects of aging:


Gerontology

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Psychometrics

The science behind the field characterized by the use of samples of behavior in order to assess psychological constructs, such as cognitive and emotional functioning, about a given individual:


Psychometrics

Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of educational measurement and psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and personality traits. The field is primarily concerned with the construction and validation of measurement instruments, such as questionnaires, tests, and personality assessments [read more here].


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Clinical Psychology

An integration of science, theory and clinical knowledge for the purpose of preventing and relieving psychologically based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well-being and personal development:


Clinical Psychology

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JIRK2

The protein which is more prevalent in men than women, so making men more resistant to pain than women:


JIRK2

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Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Pheasant

A family of birds characterized by strong sexual dimorphism, in which males, larger than females, being highly ornate with bright colours and adornments such as wattles and long tails, play no part in rearing the young:


Pheasant

Pheasant - Male peacock displaying!

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Monday, March 7, 2011

Airfoil (Aerofoil)

The cross section of a body that is placed in an airstream in order to produce a useful aerodynamic force in the most efficient manner possible as in wings, propeller blades, windmill blades, compressor, turbine blades in a jet engine, body of high-speed ship, etc.:


Airfoil (American English) / Aerofoil (British English)

Components of an Airfoil


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Sunday, March 6, 2011

Agouti

A large rodent that resembles the rabbit or hare in size and shape as well as in the elongated hindlegs,
which make them well adapted for speed; they are inhabitants of clearings in forested areas of the Amazon region, some range into Central America and as far as the Guianas:


Agouti

Agouti 
Agouti

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African Horsesickness

A highly fatal insect-borne viral disease of horses and mules, and a mild subclinical disease in donkeys
and zebras; normally occurs in sub-Saharan Africa but occasionally spreads to North Africa:


African Horsesickness (AHS)


African horse sickness (AHS) is a highly infectious, and deadly disease. It commonly affects horses, mules, donkeys and zebras. It is caused by a virus of the genus Orbivirus belonging to the family Reoviridae. This disease can be caused by any of the nine serotypes of this virus. AHS is not directly contagious, but is known to be spread by insect vectors (read more here).


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Tropopause

The atmospheric boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere:


Tropopause




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Acoustic Mine

A mine that either passively listens to a target’s sound noises, or periodically interrogates its environment by actively emitting acoustic pulses that may return echoes if prospective targets come within range:


Acoustic Mine

Acoustic Mine
[image source: Patria]

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Acoustics

The science of sound which endeavors to describe and interpret the phenomena associated with motional disturbances from equilibrium of elastic media:


Acoustics


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