BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Science 'not for normal people'

BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Science 'not for normal people': "Dr Stylianadou said: 'These results are worrying for UK science but also hold out hope. Young people see science as important and exciting. But they don't see themselves doing it.
'If we can keep young people positive about science but help them to see the full range of scientific careers, more of them may realise that a career in science can be satisfying - and for them.'
Lord May of Oxford, president of The Royal Society, which promotes science, has said 'proper targets' for the numbers of pupils opting to take science at GCSE and A-level are needed.
The number taking A-level physics dropped by 34% between 1991 and 2004, with 28,698 taking the subject in that year.
The decline in numbers taking chemistry over the same period was 16%, with 44,440 students sitting the subject in 1991, and 37,254 in 2004.
The number of students taking maths also dropped by 22%"

Well this doesnt seem shocking. Age old tale of scientists not bein marketting gurus. Well, they are NOT. I am contemplating paying for a Brian Greene lecture in Austin myself. Its soo bloody expensive. These guys should be giving free public lectures, unless they want the knowledge to remain exclusive.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Chilly welcome for Indian 'ghost'

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Chilly welcome for Indian 'ghost': "An Indian man is being refused entry to his house - because his family say he is a spirit come back to haunt them.

Raju Raghuvanshi was greeted with cries of 'ghost' and neighbours locking doors when he returned from a short spell in jail to his village in Madhya Pradesh.

He had fallen ill in prison and was taken to hospital. Relatives heard he had died and performed his last rites.

Now, unable to convince them he is alive and well, he is staying nearby and has asked the police for help."

Dogs Excel on Smell Test to Find Cancer - New York Times

Dogs Excel on Smell Test to Find Cancer - New York Times: " In the small world of people who train dogs to sniff cancer, a little-known Northern California clinic has made a big claim: that it has trained five dogs - three Labradors and two Portuguese water dogs - to detect lung cancer in the breath of cancer sufferers with 99 percent accuracy.
The study was based on well-established concepts. It has been known since the 80's that tumors exude tiny amounts of alkanes and benzene derivatives not found in healthy tissue.

Other researchers have shown that dogs, whose noses can pick up odors in the low parts-per-billion range, can be trained to detect skin cancers or react differently to dried urine from healthy people and those with bladder cancer, but never with such remarkable consistency.

The near-perfection in the clinic's study, as Dr. Donald Berry, the chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, put it, 'is off the charts: there are no laboratory tests as good as this, not Pap tests, not diabetes tests, nothing.'

As a result, he and other cancer experts say they are skeptical, but intrigued. Michael McCulloch, research director for the Pine Street Foundation in Marin County, Calif., and the lead researcher on the study, acknowledged that the results seemed too good to be true. (For breast cancer, with a smaller number of samples, the dogs were right about 88 percent of the time with almost no false positives, which compares favorably to mammograms.)

"

Idiot Box

Spent the whole day in front of my(??) machine at work. Just another usual day.
Unable to tear myself away. Feel this is the minimum I should be doing. Dont know how to measure relative performance and fruits of effort.
Need to devote more time to developing other faculties. Inability to walk away from the chair is a comfort zone thing.
Hopefully APIE is a good shakeup, eventhough I have no clue of what SAT prep involves.

Mangal Pandey rocks. Hahaha couldnt resist drawing lines between today's corporations and the company Raj 100 years back. Bloody bloodsucking leeches !! Capitalism leading to unbridled greed.

TIME.com: Meet the Hard-Nosed Do-Gooders -- Dec. 19, 2005 -- Page 2

TIME.com: Meet the Hard-Nosed Do-Gooders -- Dec. 19, 2005 -- Page 2: "Enter a different breed of M.B.A.: social entrepreneurs like Priya Haji, 35, Siddharth Sanghvi, 30, and David Guendelman, 28, who last year founded the giftware company World of Good. A for-profit, socially responsible start-up that makes grants to a nonprofit sister organization, World of Good has impressed venture capitalists who usually put their money into the latest technological innovation. But the business plan put forward by the Berkeley M.B.A.s--which won this year's Global Social Venture Competition--has VCs convinced that there's also money to be made from handmade silk scarves, woven bags, beaded jewelry and 'nonviolent' leather products (the cow must die of natural causes). The business 'can help thousands and thousands of communities,' says Haji. And within a year, it was in the black. Says Duke's Dees: 'Business doesn't know better than the nonprofit world. It just provides another set of tools that we should look at using for social good. And we should use any tools we can.'"