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Thursday, May 24, 2007Shouting CompetitionNandu and Sandhu organized shouting competition.Three participant came to took part in it. First Dog:Barked as much as he can... Second Tiger :fearing and heavy voice jumped in the whole room but judge not got impressed. Third Ass: He shout in his long stop gap again long call but again judge not get impressed. Nandu:Whom you think should win in this shouting competition. Sandhu:none of them. Nandu:Why? Sandhu:Because we didn't call potential winners. Nandu:Whom? Sandhu:Only people who shout long on and on are" POLITICIAN".  
Female hammerhead sharks can reproduce without having sex, scientists confirm. The evidence comes from a shark at Henry Doorly Zoo in Nebraska which gave birth to a pup in 2001 despite having had no contact with a male. Genetic tests by a team from Belfast, Nebraska and Florida prove conclusively the young animal possessed no paternal DNA, Biology Letters journal reports. The type of reproduction exhibited had been seen before in bony fish but never in cartilaginous fish such as sharks. Parthenogenesis, as this type of reproduction is known, occurs when an egg cell is triggered to develop as an embryo without the addition of any genetic material from a male sperm cell. See how parthenogenesis takes place The puzzle over the hammerhead birth was reported widely in 2001, but it is only with the emergence of new DNA profiling techniques that scientists have now been able to show irrefutably what happened. The investigation of the birth was conducted by the research team from Queen's University Belfast, Nova Southeastern University in Florida, and Henry Doorly Zoo itself. The scientists say the discovery raises important issues about shark conservation. In the wild, these animals have come under extreme pressure through overfishing and many species have experienced sharp declines. If dwindling shark groups resort to parthenogenesis to reproduce because females have difficulty finding mates, this is likely to weaken populations still further, the researchers warn. More at:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6681793.stm
Thanks to new technology, the seemingly uncanny ability of many top athletes to anticipate opponents’ and teammates’ maneuvers might now be taught to average competitors. Often, the best players in a sport aren’t the fittest or strongest, but those with “field vision” - knowledge of where teammates are at all times, where the ball is headed and what opponents plan to do. Such talent has long been assumed to be innate, and impossible to teach, reports Jennifer Kahn in Wired (no link available). But now, a movement in sports training aims to use technology to show ordinary athletes how to think like superstars. Damian Farrow, a scientist at the Australian Institute of Sport outside Canberra, relies on a host of gadgets to identify how elite athletes operate. One device that tracks where players’ eyes turn during a game showed that the best players continually dart their eyes around the field, while those who make poor passing decisions focus for too long on certain targets. By tracking vision in another way, he found that top tennis players unconsciously read their opponents’ body language a third of a second before the ball is hit to predict where a serve is headed. Mr. Farrow says not all of the new approaches being used in professional and amateur sports are effective. In particular, he is dismissive of an approach used by some Major League Baseball teams in which players are instructed to increase the speed of their responses to a computer game to improve their field vision. Elite and average athletes perform equally well on the test, he says, so whatever skill it develops probably isn’t useful in baseball. Mr. Farrow also criticizes the emphasis on many elite youth sports academies place on structured drills. Unstructured play can be the best way for young players to develop perceptual skill that will pay off down the road, he says. “What do we do instead? We put children in regimented … programs, where their perceptual abilities are corralled and limited. More at:http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/05/22/some-uncanny-sports-skills-can-be-taught/
A few decades ago, the most popular science fiction epics were works like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy or Frank Herbert’s Dune series—stories that were set thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the future but involved human beings more or less like us and societies more or less like our own, but with more advanced technology. Today, by contrast, many of the genre’s top writers are unwilling to speculate more than 20 years ahead. The acceleration of technological advance, they argue, has begun to make traditional visions of far-future humanity look increasingly myopic and parochial. One increasingly popular vision of that rapidly accelerating progress is called the Technological Singularity (or, sometimes, just the Singularity)—a concept evoked not just in science fiction novels by the likes of Charles Stross and Bruce Sterling but in works of speculative nonfiction, such as the futurist Ray Kurzweil’s popular 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. No name is linked more tightly to the idea of the Singularity than that of Vernor Vinge, 63, who for four decades has written stories about the ways humanity and its technologies are building a future that may be impossible for us even to imagine. “It seems plausible,” Vinge says, “that with technology we can, in the fairly near future, create or become creatures who surpass humans in every intellectual and creative dimension. Events beyond such a singular event are as unimaginable to us as opera is to a flatworm.” Vinge, who was also one of the first science fiction writers to conceive of cyberspace, formalized these ideas in an essay written for NASA in 1993 and published later that year in the Whole Earth Review. The article noted several trends that together or separately might lead to the Singularity: artificial intelligence, which could lead to “computers that are ‘awake’ and superhumanly intelligent”; computer networks that achieve such intelligence; human-computer interfaces that “become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent”; and biological improvements to the human intellect. “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” Vinge predicted, adding somewhat ominously that “shortly after, the human era will be ended.” A number of Vinge’s novels, including Marooned in Realtime (1986) and A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), have dealt obliquely with the concept, typically by telling the stories of human beings who have escaped, one way or another, the Singularity’s explosive transformations. But in his most recent book, last year’s Rainbows End (just out in paperback from Tor), Vinge comes toe to toe with imminent change. Humanity, within a couple of decades of the present day, is on the brink of something transformational—or else on the brink of destruction—in large part because almost everyone is connected, usually via wearable computers, to tomorrow’s In- ternet. The result is a struggle between those who would hobble our independence to make us safer and those who are willing to risk skirting the edge of destruction to see where the Singularity takes us. It’s just the quality of speculation you’d expect from an author whose previous novel, A Deepness in the Sky (1999), won not only a Hugo Award but also a Prometheus Award for the best libertarian novel of the year. Vinge is a mathematician and computer scientist as well as a novelist; he is now retired from his faculty position at San Diego State University to a life of writing, lecturing, and consulting. Contributing Editor Mike Godwin interviewed him, in part via email, in the weeks following his appearance last year as a guest of honor at the 16th annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference in Washington, D.C. At that conference Vinge spoke about both the Singularity and a “convergence” of technological trends that threaten to drastically limit individual freedom. Reason: In your speech you foresaw efforts to build ubiquitous monitoring or government controls into our information technology. What’s more, you suggested that this wasn’t deliberate—that the trend is happening regardless of, or in spite of, the conscious choices we’re making about our information technology. Vernor Vinge: I see an implacable government interest here, and also the convergence of diverse nongovernmental interests—writers unions, Hollywood, “temperance” organizations of all flavors, all with their own stake in exploiting technology to make people “do the right thing. More at:http://reason.com/news/show/119237.html
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