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Domain: unige.ch
Stories and comments across the archive that link to unige.ch.
Stories · 4
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Humans Simply 'Hardwired' For Laziness, Study Says (studyfinds.org)
Zorro shares a report from Study Finds: [...] A new study shows we may just have to chalk it up to our brains simply being hardwired to prefer hanging on the couch instead of the chin-up bar. Researchers from the University of British Columbia and University of Geneva sought to better understand the brain chemistry behind what they refer to as the "exercise paradox." This happens when people pledge to engage in regular physical fitness, but instead find themselves becoming less active. "Conserving energy has been essential for humans' survival, as it allowed us to be more efficient in searching for food and shelter, competing for sexual partners, and avoiding predators," explains Matthew Boisgontier, a postdoctoral researcher in UBC's brain behavior lab at the department of physical therapy, and senior author of the study, in a UBC release.
So Boisgontier and his co-authors recruited 29 young adults who wanted to improve the level of exercise in their lives to take part in a computerized test. The test required them to move a human figure on the screen either towards images of physical activities or away from images of sedentary activities that would randomly appear, and then again vice versa. Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalograph to monitor their brain activity during the exercise. The results showed that participants tended to move towards the active images or away from the sedentary ones at the fastest rates. "We found that participants took 32 milliseconds less to move away from the sedentary image, which is considerable for a task like this," says study co-author Boris Cheval, of the University of Geneva, in a university release, adding that this finding went against the so-called exercise paradox. -
Human Eye Could Detect Spooky Action At a Distance
KentuckyFC writes "The human eye is a good photon detector--it's sensitive enough to spot photons in handfuls. So what if you swapped a standard photon detector with a human eye in the ongoing experiments to measure spooky-action-at-a-distance? (That's the ability of entangled photons to influence each other, no matter how far apart they might be.) A team of physicists in Switzerland have worked out the details and say that in principle there is no reason why human eyes couldn't do this kind of experiment. That would be cool because it would ensure that the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled, albeit for a short period time. The team, led by Nic Gisin, a world leader on entanglement, says it is actively pursuing this goal (abstract) so we could have the first humans to experience entanglement within months." -
The History of Programming Languages
Dozix007 writes "For 50 years, computer programmers have been writing code. New technologies continue to emerge, develop, and mature at a rapid pace. Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages and O'Reilly has produced a poster called History of Programming Languages, which plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline." -
Groupware for Small Consulting Organizations?
vrmlguy asks: "I've worked for several small consulting organizations over the past few years, and have discovered an unmet need. Every place I've worked has developed lots of code (usually scripts) that rarely gets reused except by the person who wrote it. Management always talks about 'knowledge management systems', but nothing ever gets off the ground. Does anyone know of something that works? I've looked at the CMS Info and TECFA Portals Pointers web sites, but haven't found much that seems to meet my needs. What I think that I need is something similar to sourceforge, but without the bells and whistles. BSCW looks like the closest fit, but I've got a few concerns about its licensing. The ideal solution would let me control any code that I upload, and search other peoples' code for stuff I can download and modify for my own use. CVS is overkill, since I expect that people will rarely check things back in that they've downloaded. Ease of use is important, since people always think it's easier to write from scratch than to search for things to reuse. Security is paramount, since there will be a lot of code that, for various contractual reasons, we don't want to share with anyone. Does anyone know of a great project that I may have missed?"