Glider

Whatever software or other AVAs you use, and whatever you do with it, the first thing to remember is that it is only to support your presentation, not make it for you. You are the presenter. You should make more use of your voice (modulation), face and body (orientation and animation) than you do of the AVA, otherwise (and this is very commmon), you will leave the audience with the impression that you might just as well have started the AVA and then gone down the pub. Your audience connsists of people and people respond the strongest to other people. Multitasking in humans is a myth so, use slides sparingly and with minimal text (bullet point place markers and navigation aids only if possible). While a person is reading, they cannot be listening. Try it for yourself. Take a paragraph from a book and put on a short You tube presentation or something else verbal. Read the paragraph and see how much of what was said you actually heard. Slides and so-on are generally better used for things like diagrams and flow charts that you can talk to. Modulate your voice for emphasis and aim for the back. The tendency in presentations is to regress to a monotone 'reading voice' at conversational volume. This signals to the audience that even you find the content boring, and they will switch off (especially those who can't hear you). Move. Orient toward the audience and feel free to move your arms for emphasis. If you feel like walking about a bit, do so (if there's room). Basically, it's your opportunity to engage freely in attention seeking behaviours. If you want to present well, the first thing you need is the audience's attention and the second thing you need is to keep it. Engage your audience. Look at their faces. It's one animal with many eyes. You can get a lot of feedback about how your presentation is going across by scanning faces and it gives you the chance to make on-the-wing adjustments to pace and tone and even the opportunity to clarify points you can see weren't fully understood. Enjoy it. The more enthusiasm you show for it, the more chance your audience will be enthused by it. One of the best lectures I gave this year was essentially trashing homeopathy for an hour and a half. It got a lot of positive feedback

Yeah, I'd like to see somebody try to 'attempt conception' after soaking his stones in ice water too.

I think it'd be really good though. Have the more famous scientists appear on chat shows and bang on about the Oscars or BAFTAS and famous music awards and whatever and how the politics of them and their voting systems needs to change and who should/should not have won and why...you know the kind of stuff. I think it woiuld make a nice point. 'Here I am, a person whose fame alone qualifies me to make loud public assertions about anything at all' I wonder how long it would be before some actor/singer stood up and shouted 'what the hell do you know about it?'

Nobody who has died has ever been revived.

Stalking, chasing and pouncing behaviours are instinctive (have you never played with a kitten?). The cub learns how to put them together for best effect (i.e. refine them so they end in a kill) from their mother. If you watch lion cubs, they will instinctively stalk, chase and pounce on each other in play as soon as they leave the den. It is instinctive practice. Babies immersed in water will never perform a non-intuitive stroke like butterfly or crawl. These have to be learned. However, like almost all other animals, when submerged, they will instinctively orient themselves and move to the surface using a kicking stroke that is entirely instinctive. See for example.

Yes. There's huge amounts of research in this area. 'Kin preference' is a major factor in this. Humans evolved to prefer (i.e. be more likely to help, feed, support, protect and so-on) members of their own family, as that provided an advantage. As the population grew, the idea of 'kin' expanded to encompass 'extended family group' and on to 'people who look like me' and on to 'people who signal in some way that they believe what I do'. Humans are so prone to this that you could take any group of say 20 people in a large room. Split them in to two groups of 10 and set each group a task (even the identical task, just performed as separate groups), and within a very short space of time, each group will think the other group is rubbish at the task, is performing less well than their own group and will generally ascribe less positive attributes to members of the other group than to their own group. An early study into this was the Robbers Cave experiment (Sherif, 1954). This occurs simply by virtue of being arbitrarily split into two groups. When the groups are self-formed and with some identifying feature, the effects are stronger. This, like many other thing about human beings, is a 'misfiring' (as Dawkins would put it), of an adaptive behavioural feature. This characteristic of humans provides huge advantage when wandering as small bands across the serengeti, but less of an advantage, and often a considerable disadvantage when living cheek-by-jowel with say, 10,000,000 other people (2007 estimate of the population of Los Angeles). It takes geological time to change such characteristics and humans haven't changed much in many thousands of years. You could, if the technology existed, clone somebody from the cradle of civilisation (Sumaria, 4,000 BCE, Egypt, 3,000 BCE), and raise them in any modern city and neither they nor anyone else would know. They, and we, carry exactly the same hard-wired characteristics that our ancestors evolved and passed to on us through the hominid population bottleneck 90,000 - 120,000 years ago. In fact, it could well be that the population bttleneck was a key factor in ensuring this particular characteristic was passed on. Kin preference would certianly have been an advantage to small groups when resources are scarce.

It could be the result of the original rootstock throwing out a shoot. Cherry trees, particularly those planted in streets, are often grafted quite high. Sometimes the original rootstock can throw out a shoot just below the graft and that will result in the effect you see. Another way this can happen is by a 'sport'. A tree can sometimes form a branch from a shoot that contains a minor mutation, giving the shoot some different property to the rest of the tree (usually in flowers, but sometimes in other ways). This is called a 'sport' and, if the difference is desirable, this can be the source of an entire new cultivar (cultivated variety). The new cultivar is propagated by cuttings as any attempt to breed usually results in a reversion to type. This phenomenon is particularly common in Satsuki Azaleas. There are many thousands of satsuki cultivars and many are the results of propagating such sports, hence the amazing range of flowers and flowering habits in satsuki azaleas. It also accounts for the higher prevalence of sports in satsuki. On some cultivars (e.g. 'Kaho' which usually has red and white striped and blotched flowers), a branch will form that will only put out flowers that are pure snow-white or solid red, in contrast to the rest of the tree. It can be quite striking to look at.

True, plus there are the differences in the proportions of the population who carry any particular type (O+ 38% A+ 34% B+ 9% O- 7% A- 6% AB+ 3% B- 2% AB-1%). The Japanese hold a popular view that personality is related to blood type, but then a significant proportion of the British read their horoscopes.

This is not true. Nature doesn't make mistakes. Mistakes require planning and a goal to screw up. Evolution has no goal and involves no planning.

Get a grip, both of you.

That's it. Synapse = presynaptic membrane (including membrane channels, vesicles etc.), synaptic cleft and post-synaptic membrane (including membrane channels etc.) Synaptic cleft = synaptic cleft.

A literal answer would be no. One of the endorphines is dynorphin, which has been found to be 6 to 10 times more powerful than morphine (Han and Xie, 1984). Han, J. S. and Xie, C. W. (1984). Dynorphin: potent analgesic effect in spinal cord of the rat. Sci Sin, 27(2), 169-177.

It's like Dara O'Briain notes; "People say 'oh, but herbal medicine has been around for thousands of years', Yes it has, and stuff that's been tested and works we call 'medicine'. The rest is just a nice bowl of soup and some Potpourri!".

This is never a good way to begin a statement. It suggests that what follows is an exception.

Dagnabbit!

I can't help but notice how improved your spelling and grammar are in this post. It's almost like your a different person.

Why are you asking pointless questions?

Defribrillators work as stated by GDG, and are used in cases of ventricular fibrillation (VF), and is why it's called a de-fibrillator. Fibrillation is where groups of myocardial cells begin to contract independently and out of phase with other groups around them, but at least there is activity. VF is a life-threatening rhythm. Ventricular fibrillation is significantly different from cardiac arrest (ventricular asystole or VA), which is a lethal rhythm. There is no activity and no fibrillation so, nothing to defibrilate. A direct charge to the myocardium (propagating to the sinoatrial and atrioventriculoar nodes) can reinitiate cardiac activity in an otherwise healthy heart. However, in people who are sick enough to go into cardiac arrest in the first place, the system is usually not sufficiently healthy to re-start by that method. If it was, it wold not have stopped in the first place.

I second this. What is the point of this question? Why did you ask it? It's not a particularly good question anyway as it's based on the assumption that belly rings or tattoos DO suggest a female might be easy. As far as I know, that hasn't been established, so questions about WHY are premature.

True, but the results count for so much. With the support of data, there usually needs to be a lot less argument. I suspect in those cases, it's mainly about the statistics. True.

I doubt there is a 'normal'. I think it depends on the topic. Experimental ones tend to be shorter than more theoretical ones as there's less argument. Mine is quite short at ~67,000 words (190 pages, excluding appendices, 41 pages). One of my cohort did a more theoretical one that came in at 120,000 words, but that was too long by most standards. In any case, I think the University has reduced the word limit from 100,000 to 80,000 words since I graduated.

Oh, cool!

I'm guessing the forums title "Pseudoscience Forums, The Original" is a function of the date?

I agree, it is pointless and it is not that accurate either. If you were talking about a computer, or a robot, then I would say you have confused the battery and the BIOS. The battery provides the energy, the BIOS directs behaviour. Different things entirely. Energy has a clear definition; the capacity of a body to do work. Instinct too has a clear definition; a hardwired (congenital) set of behavioural responses universal within a species. It's really only hippies and mystics that misuse such terms, as in 'Ooh yes, I feel you have a positive energy about you. I'm getting really good vibrations' and so-on. It's all pants. It's not really helpful to confuse or misuse terms that already have clear defintions. It never makes anything more clear (which is why mystics and mountebanks do it).

This is true and the reason men do it is that it is rewarding. I mean that in the basic biopsychological sense. Every time a man checks out a woman, it triggers the reward centres in the brain. The act itself is enough to trigger the reward so there doesn't nneed to be any intent behind it. It's an adaptive and strongly reinforced behaviour that is largely unconscious, although it can be controlled. Yes, competition and comparison. It's more calculating and less rewarding for females, but reinforced nonetheless.