[silk] Finger Lengths Predict musical and athletic ability
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-01-23-finger-ratios_N.htm Could finger lengths predict musical and athletic ability? By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY Palm readers may not be the only ones who can tell a lot about people by examining their hands. Recently, scientists in North America and Europe have looked to the relative lengths of index and ring fingers for clues about a variety of characteristics, including musical ability, athletic prowess and, in a study just released, osteoarthritis risk. The researchers believe that the difference between the two fingers' lengths signifies the level of testosterone exposure in the womb. The longer the ring finger compared to the index finger, the thinking goes, the higher the exposure. Scientists express the fingers' relative lengths as a ratio, computed by dividing index finger length by ring finger length. Men tend to have longer ring fingers than index fingers, or ratios less than 1, and women tend to have index and ring fingers of equal length, or ratios of 1. Don't worry if your finger ratio looks to be more like that of the opposite sex, says Marc Breedlove, professor of neuroscience at Michigan State University. There's less of a sex difference in finger ratios than there is in height, he says. "I wish it was a better marker … of prenatal testosterone," he says. "It's not a very good correlation. It's easy to find women who have more masculine ratios than some men." Still, Breedlove says, short of a time machine, he doesn't know of a better tool with which to assess prenatal testosterone exposure. Just made the connection Giacomo Casanova, the famous womanizer who died in 1798, observed in his memoirs that the ring finger is longer than the index finger. But it wasn't until 1998 that British psychologist John Manning first linked the index-ring finger ratio to prenatal hormone levels. "It's been known for about a hundred years that there's this tiny sex difference in the ratio, but it's so small that one wouldn't think it's particularly important," says Manning, who recently retired from the University of Central Lancashire and is now associated with Southampton University. Manning had been studying whether body asymmetry — in which, say, a finger on one hand is longer than the same finger on the other hand — is linked to such traits as fertility. He noticed that in young boys, but not young girls, ring fingers tended to be longer than index fingers. He speculated that prenatal hormone exposure played a role. "The sex difference almost certainly arises before birth," Manning says, adding that it can be seen in fetuses at nine weeks' gestation, "and it doesn't change at puberty." Since 1998, Manning has published studies suggesting that male symphony orchestra musicians have lower finger ratios than less-musical men, that heterosexual men have lower ratios than homosexual men and that people with lower ratios tend to do better on certain tests of spatial ability. But "the links with sports are the strongest I've found," Manning says. "They're particularly strong with endurance running." He theorizes that prenatal testosterone benefits the cardiovascular system. "I think the goal is to see whether you can find any evidence that prenatal testosterone makes any difference at all," Breedlove says. "If you do see a relationship between the digit ratios and whatever symptom you're looking at, then you have to wonder." For example, he says, "how might prenatal testosterone influence how your joints feel when you're 55 years old? Ten years ago, no one would have even asked the question." The link to osteoarthritis British rheumatologist Michael Doherty and his collaborators at the University of Nottingham did just that in a study in the January issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism. Osteoarthritis is more common in men, Doherty says, and, he and his co-authors write, increased activity and physically demanding sports could contribute to the condition through repetitive joint trauma. So it makes sense that a lower finger ratio, thought to be more common in men and in athletic individuals, would be linked to a higher osteoarthritis risk. By comparing about 2,000 osteoarthritis patients with about 1,000 people without osteoarthritis, Doherty's team found that is indeed the case. The strongest link: osteoarthritis of the knee in women whose ring fingers were longer than their index fingers. Even after accounting for such osteoarthritis risk factors as physical activity and higher current testosterone levels, Doherty and his co-authors found that a relatively long ring finger was itself a risk factor. If they had studied elite athletes, though, perhaps they would have seen a link between physical activity and osteoarthritis risk, Doherty says, noting, "we're just one study." Although finger ratio is easily measured, says Michael Peters, a psychology professor at Ontario's University of Guelph, "I don't see it becoming a powerful diagnostic predictor anytim
Re: [silk] Will India Become the New Vanguard of the Open Source Movement?
On 25-Jan-08, at 10:53 AM, Venkatesh Hariharan wrote: Charles, I am sending a link to a photo of my friend, artist Ramesh Thorat. I had photographed him against the backdrop of one of his paintings. He lives in Mumbai so he is definitely more than an hour's drive away :-) He is one of the most sincere and committed artists that I know of. http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/364639958_9146ea4323.jpg?v=0 My former colleague Swaroop Biswas is now a full time artist. Also Mumbai-based. His blog features his art: http://www.swaroopbiswas.blogspot.com/
Re: [silk] Is Wikipedia reliable ?
Am Freitag, 25. Januar 2008 schrieb bharat shetty: > yo, > > In a class, my prof said that - it turns out that Wikipedia was > factually correct on the material he was teaching at that time. > However, it turns out that Wikipedia has some wrong information at > places, he also said. That led me to googling and I came upon this > http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page - which promises to be a > better Wikipedia, by offering reliable content that can be trusted > upon. Any insights, enlightening comments around, o' venerable > silk-listers ? There was quite a discussion a year or two ago about the reliability of Wikipedia. Following that, some changes were made by the leaders of the project to improve reliability of the information therein, but it is obvious that it will be very hard to make sure that every article is correct. If I am not mistaken, some kind of certification is happening there now for each reliable article, and these articles ptrobably are monitored for changes, and if changes happen, they are again checked for accuracy, but I'm not sure. Martin -- Dr. Martin Senftleben, Ph.D. (S.V.U.) http://www.drmartinus.de/ http://www.daskirchenjahr.de/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [silk] Will India Become the New Vanguard of the Open Source Movement?
On Jan 23, 2008 12:01 PM, Charles Haynes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 23, 2008 6:02 AM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > galleries, afford internet connections, etc. there are a huge number of > > professional artists in india; they are less likely to live in cities or > > speak english or find space in galleries or have internet connections, > > Could you PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE point me at some of them, preferably > within a day's drive of Bangalore? I have so far been unable to locate > any, and would welcome any pointers. > > -- Charles Charles, I am sending a link to a photo of my friend, artist Ramesh Thorat. I had photographed him against the backdrop of one of his paintings. He lives in Mumbai so he is definitely more than an hour's drive away :-) He is one of the most sincere and committed artists that I know of. http://farm1.static.flickr.com/163/364639958_9146ea4323.jpg?v=0 Venky
[silk] Is Wikipedia reliable ?
yo, In a class, my prof said that - it turns out that Wikipedia was factually correct on the material he was teaching at that time. However, it turns out that Wikipedia has some wrong information at places, he also said. That led me to googling and I came upon this http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page - which promises to be a better Wikipedia, by offering reliable content that can be trusted upon. Any insights, enlightening comments around, o' venerable silk-listers ? Bharat - http://freeshell.in/~codo -- You can't say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction. * Statement (c. 1950), quoted in Genius : The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Jan 24, 2008 10:06 AM, Charles Haynes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > To bring this back around to the start of the thread... it seems to me > there would be a fair amount of selection bias in that. Fair enough. I almost certainly haven't been to half the countries you have! :) And judging by news reports, more than a few of the European governments seem to be getting very xenophobic. I count myself lucky I haven't needed to visit them. But of the countries I've been to -- some in the Schengen region, South America and Asia apart from the United States -- the one that has makes me feel the most unwelcome every time I land there is the US. Unfortunate, because the people I've met there have been among the friendliest. (Brazil and Spain still top that list.) > I don't know about you, but I tend to avoid countries with strongly xenophobic > governments, being a xeno and all. What bothers me more than > individually xeonophobia, is the apparent rise in isolationism > globally. Amen to that. Venky, the Second.
Re: [silk] "IP addresses are personal data"
Suresh Ramasubramanian [24/01/08 03:58 -0800]: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [24/01/08 12:02 +0100]: yay! so say the EU data protection regulators [1]. It is a can of worms, that ruling. For more reasons than one. Oh well. not really a ruling as such. the wp29 stuff is purely advisory, not binding
Re: [silk] "IP addresses are personal data"
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [24/01/08 12:02 +0100]: yay! so say the EU data protection regulators [1]. It is a can of worms, that ruling. For more reasons than one. Oh well. srs
[silk] "IP addresses are personal data"
yay! so say the EU data protection regulators [1]. the intriguing bit was this claim that: "Microsoft does not record the IP address that identifies an individual computer when it logs search terms. Its Internet strategy relies on users logging into the Passport network that is linked to its popular Hotmail and Messenger service." 1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/21/AR2008012101340.html
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
pointed it out to debbie saying "Look! Sheep!" It was only later when reflecting more on what I saw that I realized it had been three white sheep standing on a swiss flag, kicking a black sheep off of it. I did a little research and was saddened to discover it was a political ad by a right leaning political party, Not just right leaning, but the furthest right[0] of any of the major parties. As a follow up to that campaign, which had proved offensive (and not just for that particular poster) to many swiss, the chief rabblerouser of the party, having expected to rotate into the presidency[1] found himself instead kicked out of the government[2]. -Dave (visitors to switzerland have very little excuse to not appreciate the real, and perhaps even cuter, sheep that pop up even in relatively urban areas, wherever there's a patch of grass that needs nibbling. You know you've been here too long when you can distinguish between flocks of sheep and herds of goats[3] before running across them, by the bells alone) :: :: :: [0] their claim to be the "largest" party might be alarming, until one realizes that with the plurality of parties, the popular support that the authors of this campaign had in CH is actually lower than the popular support of Bush in the US. [1] CH is far more decentralized than dirigiste states like the US. As far as I can tell, the swiss have a president because *someone* has to be available to take visiting dignitaries to dinner. [2] you all can imagine the resulting political cartoons. [3] for what it's worth, my local sheep are black with white wool, while the goats are black in front and white in back. As usual the politicians (even these, nominally from a farmers' party) haven't let little things like reality prevent them from presenting a simplistic image.
