ChannelNate Blog and ReBlog

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The Extinct Human Species That Was Smarter Than Us
The superintelligent Boskops had small, childlike faces and huge melon heads.

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. “Just as we’re smarter than apes, they were probably smarter than us,” they speculate. More insightful and self-reflective than modern humans, with fantastic memories and a penchant for dreaming, the Boskops may have had “an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.” Lynch and Granger base their characterization on our current understanding of how the human brain works, describing in detail its physiology and structure and comparing it with the brains of other primates. They also explore what the Boskops’ big brains tell us about evolution (why didn’t they survive?) and about the future of human intelligence (can we engineer bigger brains?).

Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong  :
Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

1: It makes employees unhappy

I’ll let you read the rest of the list but that first one is something I observed at the original Gandalfo’s deli in Provo, Utah in the early 90’s. Craig Gandalph seemed to be more loyal to his employees than his patrons, which endeared him to his employees and brought some measure of reciprocal loyalty. It was off putting to the customers, but when a customer was being rude or demeaning to an employee, Craig had swift attitude and words for that customer. Among those employees were Craig’s first crop of franchisee’s and many of them expressed to me the desire to foster that collegiality to a degree. It was part of the esprit de corps or whatever. But if the food hadn’t been adequate or nostalgic I probably wouldn’t have gone back. I personally didn’t find it endearing to be made fun of by Craig. By Nancy Krueger, maybe, but not Craig.

Bird Brains Suggest How Vocal Learning Evolved:

“Gesturing is something that goes along naturally with speech. The brain areas used for gesturing may have been co-opted and used for speech,” Jarvis said.

This explains why I do it. - Nate

flickrvision:

http://flickrvision.com/

Watch a map and pcitures as flickr images are uploaded from around the world. Pretty cool.

Immersive Media:

http://www.immersivemedia.com/

This kind of immersive video has been around for a while but immersive media brings a pretty slick accessibility to the whole endeavor.

ABC News: ‘Iceman’ Continues to Baffle Doctors:

Kamler said the answer lies deep in the brain. “It’s a mystery that we have not yet come close to solving, although we do have tantalizing clues,” he said. “It tells us that there’s enormous potential within the brain that is going untapped. And if we can study them more, and study people like them more, maybe we can unleash that potential for the rest of us.”

Boys And Girls Brains Are Different: Gender Differences In Language Appear Biological:”One possibility is that boys have some kind of bottleneck in their sensory processes that can hold up visual or auditory information and keep it from being fed into the language areas of the brain,” Burman said. This could result simply from girls developing faster than boys, in which case the differences between the sexes might disappear by adulthood.Or, an alternative explanation is that boys create visual and auditory associations such that meanings associated with a word are brought to mind simply from seeing or hearing the word.While the second explanation puts males at a disadvantage in more abstract language function, those kinds of sensory associations may have provided an evolutionary advantage for primitive men whose survival required them to quickly recognize danger-associated sights and sounds.If the pattern of females relying on an abstract language network and of males relying on sensory areas of the brain extends into adulthood — a still unresolved question — it could explain why women often provide more context and abstract representation than men.Ask a woman for directions and you may hear something like: “Turn left on Main Street, go one block past the drug store, and then turn right, where there’s a flower shop on one corner and a cafe across the street.”Such information-laden directions may be helpful for women because all information is relevant to the abstract concept of where to turn; however, men may require only one cue and be distracted by additional information.”< I would love to see how this research translates into “major implications for teaching children.”

Older Girls With ADHD Have More Depression, Anxiety, Smarts:The researchers found that older girls, in contrast to younger ones, often internalized their feelings, were withdrawn, complained about their physical health, had social problems and showed symptoms of anxiety and depression.Studies on boys, in contrast, have suggested that depression and ADHD seem to develop independent of each other. According to Kato, this new study showed “the nature of the association between the course of theses two disorders in females is unclear” and should be studied.“Older girls with ADHD in our study also showed areas of strength,” Kato says. “We were able to identify a large proportion of older participants by their higher verbal IQ scores,” a finding she termed “unexpected because ADHD symptoms have been consistently associated with lower IQ scores, especially verbal IQ scores.”