Monday, September 21, 2009

Conscious learning at Vegetative state!

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, I'm not a fan of neuroscience per se, but I find deep interest in human psychology and cognition. Its only interest though, I've not yet done my home-works on these subjects!

I first read about the condition in New Scientist, its been a while... (may be I took that issue from Chittagong British Council which means it was at least 4 years back!) The article was patients who lost their motor function, yet have unaffected sensory perception. I wish I could do something for them. Being trapped inside the body and no communication with the world around you... its hard for me imagine how it feels! But we, the human being, survive.

The issue is closely intertwined with the patients in vegetative state, as declared by doctors. In a recent research, it was revealed that some of the patients in this state have their conscious learning part intact and their ability of conscious learning correlates with their prospect of recovering later on. This is an interesting result indeed. I would recommend reading the following link:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=learning-in-vegetative-state


Monday, July 13, 2009

After 19 days... Jackson still going strong in charts

I was checking out this week's last.fm chart, Micheal Jackson at the top: expected. But the way he was leading... most loved, top artist, top track, even in hyped track (some of the less famous tracks of Michael)... hyped artist included Jacksons and Michael's brother Jermaine!

10 Apple top album includes 3 Michael ones!

19 days and still leading all the charts, I don't buy the conspiracy theories, but at least Michael's sister La Toya Jackson is literally right, "He was worth more dead than alive."

Saturday, July 04, 2009

Moving my 360 blog to wordpress

Yahoo 360. Once it was part and parcel of my life; Apart from serving as a diary which bears marks of the history of certain part of my life, I had 81 friends, a huge fan base and more than 22000 web visits. Unfortunately yahoo has decided to shut down its 360 service on 13th July 2009. Like most of the fans of this service, I'm utterly disappointed. But at the end, I'd no choice but migrate my blog to other platforms.

There were many options, at least according to Yahoo!

  • Migrate to yahoo profile
  • Migrate to wordpress, blogger or other platforms
Couple of google searches and I myself found following additional options:

  • Import tool at My Opera
  • Import tool at Multiply
Yahoo profile seems okay, the only problem is I couldn't find the comments! Besides no image, no html imports. Only texts being imported. Its disappointing. I tried with blogger, but failed due to absence of any sort of import option!

All of the rest three imported part of my blog!!!

  • Wordpress imported without the images.
  • My Opera imported only the comments.
  • Multipy imported only the blogs, leaving the comments behind.
It felt like yahoo willingly ignored its 360 users! Considering all these facts, I opted for wordpress, manually added all the images (wasn't easy with 125 posts!) and tags. Now its in shape, at least to some extent.

The social networking face is missing from wordpress, but at least I've the blog!

I kept the weblink similar to my 360 one!

http://neelsky2000.wordpress.com/

Friday, July 03, 2009

How language shape our cognition

Apart from Molecular Biology, there are certain other subjects on which I've deep interest. Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience (unlike some of my peers who are quite enthusiastic about the subject, I'm not a fan of general Neuroscience) as well as Linguistics. While going through my google reader updates from wordorigins, I ended up in this page on How does our language shape the way we think?

This is quite an informative review on the interface between human cognition and linguistics! Clearly described and well reviewed. Some facts discussed are indeed worth pondering.

Anyone interested in human language development and its effect on shaping our thoughts and emotions should give a look!

I've already hyperlinked to the web-page, in case you couldn't find, the link is given below:
How does our language shape the way we think?

Friday, June 26, 2009

Nature, Science and Michael...

It has been a long day :p Slept a lot, the only productive part of it was going through the current issues of Nature (Volume 459 Number 7250 pp1033-1160) and Science (Volume 324 Number 5935 pp1603-1754).

If you're reading Nature or Science, definitely you're going to find something interesting, no matter what is your taste or interest. Anyway, to me, current issues of both of the journal lacked the usual glamour, generally I cant pick my clear favourate. One article in Science really caught my attention, the group assayed DNA-Protein interaction of ~100 mice Transcription Factor (TF) DNA Binding Domain (DBD); Vol 324 p 1720. Another paper on formation of functional centromere by synthetic heterochromatin was worth mentioning; Vol 324, p 1716.

Nature was slightly better, there were three articles on science journalsim which I thought worth reading; Vol 459, pp 1054-1057. The research article on membrane fusion (p 1091) and correlation between transcription and DNA replicatio fidelity (p 1150) was quite interesting. But I thought the paper on role of mechanical force generated by the first cardiac pump in embryonic haematopoesis is a masterpiece (p 1131).

Last but not least, I woke up this morning and my brother gave me this bad news: The King of Pop Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest. The news was really a saddening one, but we all have to die at some point of time.

Heal the world... Make it a better place... for you and for me and for the entire human race... RIP Michael.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Repairing XP Boot file

About an hour ago, my sister came to me complaining her XP doesn't start! It gives an error message which roughly says it can't find boot file at C:\Windows location. Right then I knew its a mess, definitely the boot.ini has been deleted. So I asked what happened? The initial story was, there was load shedding, when power supply resumed and the PC was tried to turn on, the message kept on appearing. Then she said, she wrote this code yesterday which deletes files and it deleted lots of files in C: drive and she thought its no big deal since the OS is installed in E: drive. By then I figured out whats wrong, I replied although the XP is installed in E: drive, the boot file is in C: drive and now the PC can't find the boot file, thus no start up.

Anyway, despite my initial thought this would be a tough task, it turned out to be an easy one! I used XP installation CD, selected repair option, then typed \help in the command prompt, there was help on command \bootcfg, I knew I was in the right place, I used the \rebuild command, I didn't understand some of the queries of the command, so googled and came up with this about.com article, a handy one, which solved my problem. Below is the link:

Repair or Replace boot.ini file in Windows XP

I thought I might share in case anyone faces similar problem.



Saturday, June 20, 2009

DST from my perspective

The country is clearly another step ahead by using DST, Daylight Saving Time, from tonight. I wont go for justifications (one of my friend, Minhaz seriously doubts its any positive effect and he put forward lots of geographical explanations, lets not go to that.)

What I felt is the government failed to publicize it. Its now just a high class educated society clock time change phenomenon, rather than being an event of mass participation. I can give an example form my own life. The guard at our house today refused to open the gate at 7 am, he was insisting the gate will be opened at 7 but now its only 6 am. My brother, to his utter annoyance, failed to convince him that 7 is 7 and all the offices, schools, colleges and universities will start according to the new time schedule.

But the fact is, I'm not surprized at all, its the way things work in our beloved country. We have some highly talented individuals at the administration who execute their decisions without even the need of planning, let alone the concept of proper planning. Its ridiculous to start DST when technically we have already finished summer and on the brink of the longest day of the year (21st June, DST should be evenly distributed at the both side of the longest day, i.e. if DST is in operation for two months, one should be before the longest day, the rest should be after it).

Hail us and our leaders...


Image courtesy:
http://pakistaniat.com/images/Daylight-savings-Time.jpg


Saturday, January 03, 2009

Catching Cold by reading New Scientist !!!

Theoritically right now I should not be writing blogs, I should have been checking different universities or taking rest :p

Anyway, couple of days back I was reading this article on Common Cold in New Scientist I brought from British Council. It was kind of interesting. Three suggestions were there if you want to avoid cold (don't sue me if you still catch cold):

  1. Avoid direct contact with children, they are miserably efficient in transmitting viruses.
  2. Avoid having cold feet, I'm not quite sure how this works, but I think the mechanism is if your feet is cold, the blood flow is directed to feet reducing the flow at the nose, thus reduced immunity! (No reference please, I'm not quite sure about the mechanism myself)
  3. Finally, wash your hand regularly. In case you shake your hand with a person who has cold, you can also catch! Wash them, be safe :)
The funny thing is after reading the article, I wasn't feeling that much good! The very next day I caught cold! Is there any mechanism of catching cold by reading New Scientist article on Common Cold :p