A Secret Hidden From Mankind – YouTube.
An image of the brain of Nan Wise, who volunteered to have an orgasm while inside an fMRI scanner – but what do the beautiful colours really tell us?
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All posts for the month May, 2012
Oldest Jewish archaeological evidence on the Iberian Peninsula.
18th century hand-coloured engraved map of the Iberian peninsula depicting various topographical features of the land, as published in Robert Wilkinson’s General Atlas, circa 1794. (Volume 2., page 666.) Titl’d A Map of Spain & Portugal, Drawn from the Beſt Authorities (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
May 25, 2012
Archaeologists of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) found some of the oldest archaeological evidence so far of Jewish culture on the Iberian Peninsula at an excavation site in the south of Portugal, close to the city of Silves (Algarve). On a marble plate, measuring 40 by 60 centimetres, the name “Yehiel” can be read, followed by further letters which have not yet been deciphered. The Jena Archaeologists believe that the new discovery might be a tomb slab. Antlers, which were found very close to the tomb slab in the rubble gave a clue to the age determination.
“The organic material of the antlers could be dated by radiocarbon analysis with certainty to about 390 AD,” excavation leader Dr. Dennis Graen of the Jena University explains. “Therefore we have a so-called ‘terminus ante quem’ for the inscription, as it must have been created before it got mixed in with the rubble with the antlers.”
The earliest archaeological evidence of Jewish inhabitants in the region of modern-day Portugal has so far also been a tomb slab with a Latin inscription and an image of a menorah — a seven-armed chandelier — from 482 AD. The earliest Hebrew inscriptions known until now date from the 6th or 7th Century AD.
For three years the team of the University Jena has been excavating a Roman villa in Portugal, discovered some years ago by Jorge Correia, archaeologist of the Silves council, during an archaeological survey near the village of São Bartolomeu de Messines (Silves). The project was aiming at finding out how and what the inhabitants of the hinterland of the Roman province of Lusitania lived off. While the Portuguese coast region has been explored very well, there is very little knowledge about those regions. The new discovery poses further conundrums. “We were actually hoping for a Latin inscription when we turned round the excavated tomb slab,” Henning Wabersich, a member of the excavation reports. After all, no inscriptions have been found so far and nothing was known about the identity of the inhabitants of the enclosure.
Only after long research the Jena Archaeologists found out which language they were exactly dealing with, as the inscription was not cut with particular care. “While we were looking for experts who could help with deciphering the inscription between Jena and Jerusalem, the crucial clue came from Spain” Dennis Graen says. “Jordi Casanovas Miró from the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona — a well-known expert for Hebrew inscriptions on the Iberian Peninsula — is sure that the Jewish name “Yehiel” can be read, — a name that is already mentioned in the Bible.” Not only is the early date exceptional in this case, but also the place of the discovery: Never before have Jewish discoveries been made in a Roman villa, the Jena Archaelogist explains.
In the Roman Empire at that time Jews usually wrote in Latin, as they feared oppressive measures. Hebrew, as on the re-discovered marble plate, only came back into use after the decline of the Roman supremacy, respectively in the following time of migration of peoples from the 6th or 7th century AD. “We were also most surprised that we found traces of Romans — romanised Lusitanians in this case — and Jews living together in a rural area of all things,” Dennis Graen says. “We assumed that something like this would have been much more likely in a city.”
Information about the Jewish population in the region in general was mostly passed down by scriptures. “During the ecclesiastical council in the Spanish town Elvira about 300 AD rules of conduct between Jews and Christians were issued. This indicates that at this time there must have been a relatively large number of Jews on the Iberian Peninsula already,” Dennis Graen explains — but archaeological evidence had been missing so far. “We knew that there was a Jewish community in the Middle Ages not far from our excavation site in the town of Silves. It existed until the expulsion of the Jews in the year 1497.”
In the summer the Jena Archaeologists will take up their work again. Until now they have excavated 160 square metres of the villa, but after checking out the ground it already became clear that the greater part of the enclosure is still covered in soil. “We eventually want to find out more about the people who lived here,” Graen explains the venture. “And of course we want to solve the questions the Hebrew inscription has posed us.”
via Oldest Jewish archaeological evidence on the Iberian Peninsula.
Terraforming: Alien or Human, It’s Here « Just Wondering – Alternative News and Opinions.
With kind permission from Zen Gardner
by Zen Gardner
May 27, 2012
This is about as creepy as it gets. But it’s right in front of our eyes.
Our planet is clearly under attack. Anyone even half awake can see the world today is careening towards disaster when there is no reason for it. Our resources are plentiful, and the vast majority of people on earth are loving, ethical and well meaning individuals.
However, those in places of authority and economic power appear to clearly be maniacal psychopaths constantly scheming for new ways to use and abuse humanity and its beautiful home called Earth, or Terra.
As in Terraforming. We’ll get to that.
You name it. Politically, economically, socially, environmentally. It appears we’ve been literally invaded by something foreign to our world and are being systematically abused, dismantled and destroyed.
Just Look at the Nuclear Nightmare No One Notices
Nuclear radiation is now officially off the charts! Never mind the constant death-dealing spray of radiation from Fukus-up-shima, humanity’s being dosed from every which way on this insane planet.
Radiation from decades of nuclear bomb tests, Fukushima showers, TSA checkpoints, medical offices, irradiated food, depleted uranium used in the war forum and industrial parts and elsewhere, leaking nuclear reactors…it’s pathetic.
And that’s not including the electromagnetic radiation baking anyone near cell masts or GWEN towers, holding cell phones to their ears, smart meters, and living in an electromagnetic smog of crossing powerlines and wifi on top of it.
And that’s all we know about.
And that doesn’t include the chemtrails and other insane geoengineering “experiments”, managed mega oil disasters and the toxification of our water table via gas fracking and other means, never mind the mad wars being waged worldwide, etc.
It’s berserk and has a source.
Why Are They Doing It?
To reduce the population? Alter our genetic make up? Produce a morphed human race only capable of subservient tasks to please a master race immune or protected from these mutative influences on a deliberately morphed planet?
I know, pretty freaky. But all actually plausible.
Depopulating is in the everyday language of the Elites. We are a scourge they’re just waiting for the right time to exterminate. That’s all. And those that are “allowed” or engineered to survive will supposedly serve them willingly and happily.
The final acquiescence will be to take the chip. That last straw that will break the back of freedom for all who succumb.
How CAN It Be!
Personally I like to think how can things like this be true, and not how they’re NOT possible. When it comes to strangeness we need not look beyond our current world.
We just need to look deeper at what’s right before our eyes.
Terraforming, it’s not just for alien worlds anymore.
The Terraforming and Depopulation Agenda
Fundamentally this is at the core of much of what we’re witnessing in today’s world. This transformation has been afoot for centuries, drugging and altering and culling the herd to keep it manageable while the would be Controllers attempt to create their perfect, illuminated utopian world…with us as their slaves.
We’re witnessing a whole new beyond-Orwellian stage now in their war to change and control humanity and our environment.
If you’re following the trends and social memes that have surfaced over the past few years, an accelerating pattern unfolds. While our skies are sprayed with chemicals creating a consistent metallic haze worldwide, blocking the sun and poisoning our population, plants, animals, water and soil for future generations, our food chain is also being genetically modified with such reckless state-sponsored abandon it makes your head spin.
On top of that, while more and more chemical toxins are added to our food and water, our population is given vaccines and pharmaceuticals to further alter our natural make up and behavior. The media and science promote our ‘embracing” of new exponentially increasing technological changes and to eventually literally accept chips in our bodies for social and economic control. If you watch closely you’ll see an onslaught of propaganda encouraging us to become “transhuman”, a concept heavily promoted in the music industry and Hollywood.
Why Are They Doing This?
This battle for Earth and the seeming preparation by covert powers for their esoteric plans and purposes has been unfolding for millennia. Let’s look at a few aspects of this struggle for dominion by generations of power mongers a little deeper.
War On Terra? Yup. Worldwide Dominion Is Their Goal
The Illuminati elite and their minions clearly seek to subdue all peoples of the earth in a great culmination of thousands of years of planning, manipulation and wicked social engineering. As we know, true history has been buried, twisted and rewritten by not just the victors, but the Controllers who play both sides from the shadows to this very day.
However, there is a growing awakening sweeping our planet, and as a result essential facts have been coming to light for some time now. Their once secret (or occult) plans and methods are being exposed and brought to light for all to see.
It’s called “the awakening”. And it’s something they fear.
Psycho-Social Control – The Illuminati Hegelian Dialectic
It is important to understand how they can subjugate whole nations and populations. This is obviously a huge subject as they use many methods including fear, intimidation, outright fabrications, phony suppositions and even witchcraft and literal mind control techniques in addition to their drugging and food altering technologies.
We watch helplessly as governments rise and fall, markets are manipulated to benefit the same greedy Illuminati robber barons, and society gets shredded with an incessant bombardment of mind-numbing hedonist media confusion.
Push Me, Pull Me: The constant stress of continual cognitive dissonance.
- Violence, sex, and rebellion are condemned while being fiercely promoted and popularized at the same time.
- In the name of so-called freedom, restraints from political correctness and phony “security” concerns shackle whole populations, which they accept gladly in the face of threats of phony external threats such as “terrorism”.
- Supposedly representative politicians make sweeping promises and habitually proceed to do the opposite.
- Religions clearly manipulate and easily sway huge masses of fabricated insecure people, subjected to an authoritarian hierarchy and told to love a god who will send them to hell if they get out of line.
- Child abuse is condemned while it’s known to be rampant and unprosecuted amongst the elite and religious orders.
- etc!…
Welcome to Dystopia.
Anyone paying attention can see they’re hitting us from all sides. And that’s on purpose…it drives us to a desired place through the use of what’s called the Hegelian Dialectic. In simple practical terms David Icke explains the Hegelian Dialectic as Problem-Reaction-Solution. (See here)
Another Example: The environment is under deliberate attack, while they pretend to champion its preservation.
Just observe the deliberate poisoning of our atmosphere with chemtrails and pollutants and unnecessary fossil fuel use, while the hypocritical big game hunting Sierra Club elites condemn us for driving cars or exhaling CO2. Tell me that’s not madness.
Then there’s the medicating of our drinking water through fluoride, chlorine, metals and other additives while we’re excoriated for challenging the government’s divine wisdom in doing so.
Look at the restrictions imposed on natural medicines and supplements while they peddle dangerous drugs to the tune of multi-billions of dollars.
And most horridly perhaps, the genetic modification of the very food we ingest for sustenance–while they outlaw home gardening, seeds and small farms!! Hard to consciously digest, so to speak….
All while they have select special organic farms they grow food for themselves.
The Truth of the Matter
The world doesn’t have to be the way it is–it’s the mess it’s in because that’s how the manipulators want it.
If Earth’s rightful inhabitants were left to natural and conscious laws of Universal design, we’d have plenty of food, free energy, rational and loving public discourse and happy interaction, and great intuitive conscious awareness where we would naturally align with the energy enhancing laws of the Universe…much like iron filings align and get charged by naturally occurring magnetic energy.
But worst of all for the Controllers or “powers that be”, we’d be empowered, and they’d be out of a job– and no longer able to literally suck our energy and life forces like the vampires that they are.
But Who’s Behind the Illuminati? What’s the Plan?
Researchers have been digging, tracing, connecting dots, speculating and formulating for a long time. Truth has intrinsic power and value, much more powerful than the opposing sorcery that tries to usurp everything for itself.
And the Truth is coming out!
That they could be an alien race of trans-dimensionals, or demon-possessed wicked Satanists out to do their masters’ bidding is up for grabs. It could be both. But rather than give you a false choice in the matter, why don’t you figure it out?
Serious Questions Here
Is there a conspiracy and hidden agenda by powerful entities, or is it all just a coincidence and convergence of essentially accidental and random evolution of influences and events? Would powerful people actually meet together and plan or “conspire” for a self-serving elitist agenda toward their idea of utopia that may not be to the liking of the world’s inhabitants? Could they be influenced or controlled to a large degree by powerful alien, trans-dimensional or spiritual entities attempting to execute some esoteric plan to create a home for their own?
Hey, who knows for sure. But ancient history from several cultures repeatedly tells the same story of a primordial invasion of earth by another species who interbred with early hominids to create what is now known as homo sapiens. How you gonna deal with that? With religious myths again to keep it at arms length through hierarchical rigmarole?
Time to get conscious. If we really believe we are all consciousness and essentially parts of an infinite Universe, maybe we better start listening to our hearts, challenging the party line and doing some serious research.
Because we are under attack.
Conclusion
The earth and humanity are clearly being transformed, and it’s not by accident and definitely not with our consent, except through our ignorance. If indeed we know the rulers of this world are up to a plan, which you’d be crazy not to believe, then our task is to see what that plan is and do our part to expose and stop it by non compliance and contributing vigorously to the wake up.
The earth is not slowly, but quickly being converted into something other than what it is naturally. The design apparently is that those who survive these manipulated changes will be the support team for these wicked trans-dimensional controllers who can survive just fine in the atmosphere they’re creating. In fact, it will probably support their life form better than the current natural earth does.
A very sci-fi sounding plot?
Actually it’s not, nor far from many religious teachings. The problem there is manipulated religions keep the masses transfixed on a very narrow, detached narrative, wholly dependent on a self-appointed hierarchy as they wait for the cavalry to save them. While there’s clearly truth mixed in with religious teachings, the paradigms are very controlled, limiting and dis-empowering.
Meanwhile the Controllers literally get away with murder.
Any way you look at it, humanity is under attack, and they’re pulling out the stops. The more people who wake up to this heinous plot, however you see it, and take conscious action accordingly, the less power they have to execute it.
And as this vibrational change toward greater and greater conscious awareness dawns, like the sun rising after a dark night, the shadows of darkness will surely flee away.
Until then we need to light as many torches as we can!
Love, Zen
Related articles
- Terraforming: Alien or Human, It’s Here (zengardner.com)
Aliens don’t want to eat us, says former SETI director.
May 25, 2012 by Jason Major, Universe Today
SETI’s Alien Telescope Array (ATA) listens day and night for a signal from space. Credit: SETI
Alien life probably isn’t interested in having us for dinner, enslaving us or laying eggs in our bellies, according to a recent statement by former SETI director Jill Tarter.
(Of course, Hollywood would rather have us think otherwise.)
In a press release announcing the Institute’s science and sci-fi SETIcon event, taking place June 22 – 24 in Santa Clara, CA, Tarter — who was the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the film “Contact” — disagreed with both filmmakers and Stephen Hawking over the portrayal of extraterrestrials as monsters hungry for human flesh.
“Often the aliens of science fiction say more about us than they do about themselves,” Tarter said. “While Sir Stephen Hawking warned that alien life might try to conquer or colonize Earth, I respectfully disagree. If aliens were able to visit Earth that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food, or other planets. If aliens were to come here it would be simply to explore.
“Considering the age of the universe, we probably wouldn’t be their first extraterrestrial encounter, either. We should look at movies like ‘Men in Black III,’ ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Battleship’ as great entertainment and metaphors for our own fears, but we should not consider them harbingers of alien visitation.”
Tarter, 68, recently announced her stepping down as director of SETI in order to focus on funding for the Institute, which is currently running only on private donations. Funding SETI, according to Tarter, is investing in humanity’s future.
“Think about it. If we detect a signal, we could learn about their past (because of the time their signal took to reach us) and the possibility of our future. Successful detection means that, on average, technologies last for a long time. Understanding that it is possible to find solutions to our terrestrial problems and to become a very old civilization, because someone else has managed to do just that, is hugely important! Knowing that there can be a future may motivate us to achieve it.”
On the other hand, concern that searching the sky for signs of life — as well as sending out your own — could call down hungry alien monsters would make a good case for keeping quiet. And a quiet search may not get the necessary funding to keep going. I can see where Tarter is coming from.
Let’s just hope she’s right. (About the eating part, at least.)
Source: Universe Today
The Zen Mind – An Introduction – YouTube.
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- Insomnia Series: The Global Brain (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
Study: Massive bias toward pharmaceuticals at American Psychiatric Association conferences.
Published by the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-IV-TR provides a common language and standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
NaturalNews
Mike Bundrant
May 29,2012
Like most professional groups, psychiatrists attend conferences to network and catch up on the latest trends in the industry. A couple of young researchers have recently shown, however, that conferences for psychiatrists are not so different than conferences for multi-level marketers – full of bias toward target products.
Hold on a sec… Given they are an industry of professionals, we really should give them the benefit of the doubt. Okay here goes: At least the MLMers are up front about their promotional agenda.
The American Psychiatric Association doesn’t appear so straightforward.
The level of bias is mind-blowing
The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology by two young psychiatrists from the University of Michigan and Yale University, analyzes the presentations given at two recent meetings of the American Psychiatric Association.
The vast majority of research presented at conferences was funded by pharmaceutical companies. Of the industry-supported studies, 97.4 percent reported results that were positive toward the medicine that the study was designed to test, and 2.6 percent reported mixed results. No industry-sponsored studies with negative results were found!
97.4% positive news for big pharma! No negative results! Its a miracle!
Yessiree! Step right up, friends! This wondrous little elixir will soothe the nerves, tone the inward organs and lighten your heavy burden in life. And for you, ma’am, you’ll never worry about that philandering husband again. He’ll find you irresistible and that’s a proven fact! Just make the $5 co-pay and your problems are solved!
The bias in APA conference presentations matches the bias in research journals. It amounts to nothing more than marketing hype. APA conferences appear to be little more than industry funded pow-wows to pump up the team. These snake-oily tactics are shrouded in an aura of medical professionalism and scientific research.
What are doctors thinking? These are supposed to be smart people – people that we are told to trust with our health. Are they so easily bamboozled? Like one industry insider recently told me on Mental Health Exposed: Doctors are either naive to the tactics used by big pharma, or complicit. Either way, should you trust them when they whip out the prescription pad and tell you it is perfectly safe and effective?
As if this news weren’t bad enough, APA conference presenters are going so far as to make pitches for drugs that are still “on patent” – still in development! As if they were engaged in some sort of pre-sales cycle to warm up the market before drugs are even approved and ready for sale.
The worst news yet
For practitioners like me who help people improve their lives without fancy diagnoses or drugs, the worst news of all is that non-drug treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy are ignored at APA conferences. There is a huge body of research and evidence that cognitive approaches work as effectively as drugs (supposedly) work for mental health, yet this evidence is rarely presented.
The APA does not support psychiatric health that is not endorsed by pharmaceutical companies.
Sources for this article include:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522115030.htm
via Study: Massive bias toward pharmaceuticals at American Psychiatric Association conferences.
Facts in scientific drug literature may not be.
May 29, 2012
A growing concern with fraud and misconduct in published drug studies has led researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research to investigate the extent and reasons for retractions in the research.
“We were surprised to find the proportion of retractions due to scientific misconduct in the drug literature is higher than in general biomedical literature,” said Simon Pickard, associate professor of pharmacy practice and senior author of a study published in the journal Pharmacotherapy.
Nearly three-quarters of the retracted drug studies were attributed to scientific misconduct, he said, “which includes data falsification or fabrication, questionable veracity, unethical author conduct, or plagiarism. While these studies comprise a small percentage of the overall literature, health care professionals may rely on this evidence to make treatment recommendations.”
These studies can affect the treatment of thousands of patients, since scientific publications are often printed months in advance. There is an average lag in time of 39 months between the original publication and a retraction notice, Pickard said.
“Once a health care professional changes treatment options, it’s not easy to reverse,” said Jennifer Samp, a fellow in Pickard’s research group and lead author of the study. “Staying current with new findings in scientific literature is a priority for health care practitioners — especially pharmacists — and it is important for them to know when a study has been retracted, especially those with manipulated data.”
The UIC team found that a considerable number of the retracted papers were attributable to two authors, one based in Japan and the other in Germany.
Little attention was paid to the implications of scientific publication retractions until a 1998 review documented 235 instances from 1966 to 1997; 37 percent of the retractions were due to scientific misconduct.
Since the 1998 study, more interest has been given to retracted studies. In 2009, the Committee on Publication Ethics released the first set of guidelines to editors on issuing retractions.
“These guidelines should help to reduce the extent and impact of scientific misconduct,” Pickard said. “Ironically, greater detection may give the impression that fraudulent science is on the rise, when it is actually being mitigated by these policies.”
Glen Schumock, director of the UIC Center for Pharmacoeconomic Research, assisted Pickard and Samp in the study, which was funded by the UIC College of Pharmacy and Takeda Pharmaceuticals U.S.A, Inc., which funded Samp’s fellowship.
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Vaughan Bell: the trouble with brain scans | Science | The Observer.
Many of the methods on which brain scan studies are based have been flawed – as one image of a dead salmon proved
Neuroscientists have long been banging their heads on their desks over exaggerated reports of brain scanning studies. Media stories illustrated with coloured scans, supposedly showing how the brain works, are now a standard part of the science pages and some people find them so convincing that they are touted as ways of designing education for our children, evaluating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and testing potential recruits. Recently, to the chagrin of French scientists, politicians called for neuro-imaging to be used in the courts to decide on the guilt of criminals, after the technology made its dubious debut in the legal systems of India, Italy and the US.
This misplaced enthusiasm often stems from a misunderstanding about what brain scans tell us. The interpretation seems straightforward according to the popular press – the coloured blobs represent a “pleasure centre”, an “art centre” or perhaps a “love centre” – but none of this is true.
All of our experiences and abilities rely on a distributed brain network and nothing relies on a single “centre”. More than anything, the conclusions depend on the tasks volunteers undertake in the scanner and what each study tells us is limited. This small print has been repeated many times over by scientists. They bemoan how people misunderstand the subtleties and draw unwarranted conclusions. But now neuroscientists have had to come to terms with the fact that many of the methods on which brain scan studies are based have been flawed.
To understand where these flaws come from it’s important to know something about how data from the most common technique, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI, is analysed. The scanner creates a 3D map of the brain split up into tens of thousands of tiny blocks called voxels (like pixels but for volume) and each has a value that describes blood flow – used as a proxy for brain activity as more active areas need more oxygen. What you want to know is which bits of the brain are more active in certain tasks. Of course, the brain is changing all the time so scientists use statistics to check that changes in blood flow are due to the experimental tasks and not because of unrelated brain changes. The statistical problem is huge, however, as each scan has about 50,000 data points and thousands of scans are made in a single study.
Brain scanning technology is quickly approaching levels of detail that will have serious implications
When we’re talking about millions of comparisons, a big problem is false positives. Imagine you are playing two roulette wheels. Clearly, the result of one doesn’t affect the outcome of the other but sometimes they’ll both come up with the same number just due to chance. Now imagine you have a roulette wheel for every point or voxel in the brain. A comparison of any two scans could look like some areas show linked activity when really there is no relationship. Ideally, the analysis should separate roulette wheels from genuine activity, but you may be surprised that hundreds if not thousands of studies have been conducted without such corrections. To illustrate the problem, Craig Bennett and his colleagues at the University of California did a spoof experiment on a dead salmon. The standard techniques showed “brain activity” in the deceased fish.
Further illustrating the issue, Edward Vul and Hal Pashler from the University of California showed that some researchers were producing conclusions by first picking out the best results and then seeing if there was a relationship between them. To return to our roulette analogy, it would be like discarding any results that weren’t in the range of numbers 1-5 and then using only these selected results to see if any of the same numbers came up, something that is suddenly much more likely. A recent study by Anders Eklund and colleagues from Linköping University in Sweden found that they could find spurious “brain activity” related to non-existent tasks with standard settings on the most popular fMRI analysis software.
Recent advances have tried to control these problems but researchers have become much more cautious. “Our default attitude to any new and interesting fMRI finding should be scepticism,” says Tal Yarkoni, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado. “What’s particularly problematic,” he says, “is the amount of flexibility researchers have when performing their analyses… you have no idea how many things the researchers tried before they got something to work.” Psychologist Russ Poldrack, from the University of Texas, who has been at the forefront of correcting these issues, also highlights cultural issues. This flexible approach “also includes methods that are known by experts to be invalid, but unfortunately these still get into top journals, which only helps perpetuate them”. Yarkoni explains that “researchers have a big incentive to come up with exciting new findings”, meaning scientists are motivated to “torture” the data and journals are attracted by the media-friendly results.
In this light of this, stories about the discovery of “brain centres” fall flat and efforts to base public policy on brain scans become nothing short of ridiculous. But perhaps the most important problem is not that brain scans can be misleading, but that they are beautiful. Like all other neuroscientists, I find them beguiling. They have us enchanted and we are far from breaking their spell.
The secondary somatosensory cortex is colored green and the insular cortex brown in the top right portion of this image of the human brain. Primary somatosensory cortex is green in the top left. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Court says YouTube not obligated to control content | The Raw Story.
PARIS — A Paris court on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against YouTube filed by French television, saying the video-sharing website was not obligated to control content of uploaded material.
YouTube is “a priori not responsible for the content of videos posted on its website” and “is under no obligation to control the content of videos posted online,” said the ruling by the Tribunal de Grande Instance, a civil court that adjudicates major cases.
The court ordered the national private TF1 channel and its affiliates, which had sued YouTube, to pay 80,000 euros ($100,000) in court costs.
TF1 had sued YouTube in 2008 after various videos were posted on the website, including television shows and interviews to which the channel said it had commercial rights.
The channel had accused YouTube of unfair competition, saying it had profitted from the videos at TF1′s expense.
The court rejected the argument, saying the channel failed to show any loss of sales.
YouTube France hailed the decision, with chief Christophe Muller saying the ruling “represents a victory for the Internet and for all those who use it to exchange ideas and information.”
“This decision defends the right of innovation on content platforms generated by users, allowing them to do even more to help French artists and creators to reach new audiences in France and abroad,” he said.
A spokesman for TF1 said the channel was surprised by the decision and was studying options to appeal the ruling.
Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion.
