Watch it while it lasts and watch the following ones
The Stanford prison experiment was ostensibly a psychological study of human responses to captivity and its behavioral effects on both authorities and inmates in prison. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of both guards and prisoners living in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited “genuine” sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.
Ethical concerns surrounding the famous experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo’s former high school friend.
Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr wrote in 1981 that the Milgram Experiment in the 1960s and the later Zimbardo Experiment were frightening in their implications about the danger which lurks in the darker side of human nature.
10th April 2008
Fear: Radivoje Lajic believes he is under attack from outer space
A Bosnian man whose home has been hit an incredible five times by meteorites believes he is being targeted by aliens.
Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that all the rocks Radivoje Lajic has handed over were meteorites.
They are now investigating local magnetic fields to try and work out what makes the property so attractive to the heavenly bodies.
But Mr Lajic, who has had a steel girder reinforced roof put on the house he owns in the northern village of Gornja Lamovite, has an alternative explanation.
He said: “I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense.
“The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate.”
The first meteorite fell on his house in November last year and since then a further four have smashed into his home.
The strikes always happen when it is raining heavily, never when there are clear skies.
He said: “I did not know what the strange-looking stones were at first but I have since had them all confirmed as meteorites by experts at Belgrade University.
“I am being targeted by aliens. They are playing games with me.
“I don’t know why they are doing this. When it rains I can’t sleep for worrying about another strike.”
Like Silly Putty, the Slinky® was an accidental by-product of World War II research and development transformed into a hugely successful children’s toy.
In 1943, engineer Richard James of greater Philadelphia was working in his home laboratory to invent a set of springs that could be used to support sensitive instruments on board ships and stabilize them even in rough seas. When he once accidentally knocked one of his springs off a shelf, James saw that, rather than flopping in a heap onto the floor, the spring “stepped” in a series of arcs from the shelf, to a stack of books, to a tabletop, to the floor, where it re-coiled itself and stood upright.
Slinky
After repeated experiments proved the spring’s now famous ability to climb down stairs, James’ wife, Betty, realized the device’s potential as a plaything. She also invented a name for it: the Slinky®. In 1945, the James’ first exhibited their new toy, at the Gimbels Department Store in downtown Philadelphia. They sold 400 Slinkys® in 90 minutes—the start of a sensation that continues to this day.
The Jameses founded James Industries, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to market their product. Richard invented machines that could coil 80 feet of steel wire into a Slinky® in about 10 seconds. By the time of its 50th anniversary (1995), that same company, using those same machines, had sold over a quarter of a billion Slinkys®, all over the world.
In the 1940s, the Navy never took an interest in James’ springs. But after their success as a toy, Slinkys® began to find practical uses. High school teachers have long used them to demonstrate the properties of waves. US troops in Vietnam used them as mobile radio antennas; NASA has used them in zero-gravity physics experiments in the Space Shuttle. In the 1990s, from the playroom to the classroom, climbing down stairways and floating in space, Richard and Betty James’ Slinky® continues to educate and entertain.
Source
More references
Monday, April 07, 2008
The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day – the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs – enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern – where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 – would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the Internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel Internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.
It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle – but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.
Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds – a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.
“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”
April 4, 2008: The date was March 8th, less than a month ago. In a remote corner of Kansas, the sun was going down and the deepening twilight beckoned to photographer Doug Zubenel driving through the countryside. Something photogenic, he knew, was about to happen.
He turned his car onto an unfamiliar dirt road and proceeded into the sunset. “The brilliant sun did not allow me to see the cement railings on a bridge over a small creek. The next thing I knew, I had totaled my car!” Zubenel emerged from the wreckage, phoned 911, and while he was waiting for the tow truck to arrive, took the picture:
“It was a beautiful 1-day old crescent moon,” says Zubenel. “It looked a lot better than my car!”
This perilous scene is about to repeat itself—three times.
First – On Sunday evening, April 6th, a 2% crescent moon emerges from the glare of the sun like the wry smile of a Cheshire cat beaming through the tawny-orange sunset. Finding this delicate sliver may require some careful scanning of the western horizon and it would be wise to exit the car (or at least brake) before looking. The next night is easier.
|
|
Second – On Monday evening, April 7th, a 6% crescent materializes a little higher in the sky. Set against the cobalt-blue of early evening, the moon reveals its lovely da Vinci glow, a pale impression of the full Moon inside the vivid crescent. Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci was first to explain this phenomenon: it is Earthshine, the light of our own planet Earth illuminating the Moon’s dark terrain. A crescent moon with Earthshine is widely regarded as one of the prettiest sights in the heavens.
But the best is yet to come….
Third – On Tuesday evening, April 8th, a 12% crescent Moon moves into conjunction with the Pleiades. “Into conjunction” is astronomy jargon for “side-by-side.” The Moon will be so close to the Pleiades that, to the naked eye, they seem to touch, but that is impossible because the Pleiades are 400 light years away.
Also known as the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades are a cluster of young stars. The brightest seven of these blue-white beauties form a little dipper shape as wide about as the Moon (0.5o). In spite of their great distance, the Pleiades are faintly visible to the naked eye even from urban areas.
Right: A deep-sky exposure of the Pleiades star cluster by amateur astronomer Robert Gendler. [More]
On April 8th, the Moon will lead you directly to the Pleiades. Binoculars are recommended: scan around the Moon and you will find not just seven but dozens of sparkling stars, some of them winking in and out behind the mountainous lunar limb. The Moon itself may take your breath away as you sweep your optics across the cratered Earthlit landscape.
As on previous evenings, the best time to look is shortly after sundown, facing west: sky map. The crescent Moon, Earthshine and a star cluster in the same field of view–it doesn’t get much better than that.
Epilogue: “I have another car now and I will be heading out Sunday afternoon for an encore performance, not of the wreck, but of the Moon,” says Zubenel. He shares his story hoping that it will inspire others to photograph the upcoming display–carefully!
band annie's Weblog 
