By Halley Bondy/For The Star-Ledger

Alexandra Pais/New Jersey Local News ServiceLazarous Kapambwe, representative of the Republic of Zambia to the United Nations talks to students at West Orange High School on Wednesday April 21, 2010. WEST ORANGE — Logan Svitzer was sitting in his U.S. history class here when his cell phone rang. He answered, but didn’t understand the person on the other end and hung up. He subsequently received a text message, which he ignored. Then the phone rang two more times.

Annoyed by the disruption, Svitzer’s teacher, Robbin Sweeney, grabbed the cell and called back the number. On the other end was a man saying he was Lazarous Kapambwe, the Zambian ambassador to the United Nations. Sweeney was certain it was a prank or a con.

But after 10 minutes on the phone, Sweeney became convinced Kapambwe was telling the truth. Kapambwe was urgently trying to get a hold of a fellow diplomat from Sierra Leone to discuss a proposed reform of the UN Security Council. But the phone number he had stored in his phone was one digit off.

“He was eloquent and apologetic, and he had a vast knowledge of Zambia,” Sweeney said. “I made a deal with him. I said, ‘Since you’ve taken up so much of my class time, why don’t you come speak to my school?’”

That was in the fall. Today, Kapambwe went to the school to make amends. He spoke to about 300 students, encouraging them to consider careers in diplomacy.

“I apologize for what happened, but nothing happens without a purpose,” he said. “Many of you are about to graduate. Today I hope I will recruit a few people into diplomatic service.”

Kapambwe spoke cheerfully about his home country of Zambia, which he described as a peaceful place that boasts 74 languages. Zambia, which is landlocked by Tanzania, Zimbabwe and other larger countries, is about the size of Texas and has about 13 million residents, Kapambwe said. Zambia is also home to the Victoria Falls, a renowned tourist spot.

Zambia has also had its share of internal strife.

“You remember how in your country you were fighting for your independence? Well, we had the same problems,” Kapambwe said. “We were under colonial rule until 1964, and for a poor, new country, diplomacy through the United Nations can mean life or death.”

As for the confusing phone call last year that eventually brought Kapambwe to West Orange, they can now laugh about it.

“I learned that anger and annoyance at a wrong phone call will never get you anywhere,” Sweeney said. “Maybe a wrong call can make you a new friend.”

I found this article online and felt compelled to share it with you guys.

(credit: Radio Praha)

Among the souvenirs that tourists bring back from a visit to Prague are little clay figures of the Golem – a giant linked to one of Prague’s best known legends. What few of them know is that there is a fierce battle underway for ownership rights, which has sent a much larger version of the clay monster into hiding.

I found this online and had to share it with you guys.

Bananas and Monkeys

Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the other monkeys with cold water.

After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result – all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him.

After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked.

Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done round here.

And that, my friends, is how company policies are made.

Switching languages can also switch personality: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study.

Researchers David Luna from Baruch College and Torsten Ringberg and Laura A. Peracchio from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studied groups of Hispanic women, all of whom were bilingual, but with varying degrees of cultural identification.

They found significant changes in self perception or “frame-shifting” in bicultural participants — women who participate in both Latino and Anglo culture.

“Language can be a cue that activates different culture-specific frames,” the researchers said in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

While frame-shifting has been studied before, they said this research found that people who are bicultural switched frames more quickly and easily than people who are bilingual but living in one culture.

The researchers said the women classified themselves as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English.

“In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted,” they said.

In one of the studies, a group of bilingual U.S. Hispanic women viewed advertisements that featured women in different scenarios. The participants saw the ads in one language – English or Spanish – and then, six months later, they viewed the same ads in the other language.

Their perceptions of themselves and of the women in the ads shifted depending on the language.

“One respondent, for example, saw an ad’s main character as a risk-taking, independent woman in the Spanish version of the ad, but as a hopeless, lonely, confused woman in the English version,” said the researchers.

This five-story, blood-red waterfall pours very slowly out of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys. When geologists first discovered the frozen waterfall in 1911, they thought the red color came from algae, but its true nature turned out to be much more spectacular.

Roughly 2 million years ago, the Taylor Glacier sealed beneath it a small body of water which contained an ancient community of microbes. Trapped below a thick layer of ice, they have remained there ever since, isolated inside a natural time capsule. Evolving independently of the rest of the living world, these microbes exist in a world with no light or free oxygen and little heat, and are essentially the definition of “primordial ooze.” The trapped lake has very high salinity and is rich in iron, which gives the waterfall its red color. A fissure in the glacier allows the subglacial lake to flow out, forming the falls without contaminating the ecosystem within.

The existence of the Blood Falls ecosystem shows that life is indeed possible in the most extreme of conditions. Life could perhaps exist on other planets with similar environments and similar bodies of frozen water – notably Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa. But regardless of extraterrestrial life, the earth’s Blood Falls are a wonder to behold both visually, and scientifically.

Source: Atlasobscura.com

It’s a slow day in some little town……..
The sun is hot….the streets are deserted.
Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich tourist from back west is driving thru town.
He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store.

The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the psychologist, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit.
She, in a flash rushes to the motel and pays off her room, she used as an office, with the motel owner.
The motel proprietor now places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money & leaves.

NOW,… no one produced anything…and no one earned anything…however the whole town is out of debt and is looking to the future with much optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen is precisely how the U.S. and Canadian Governments are conducting business today!

HAARETZ ARTICLE: Most people go to the Western Wall to pray, but now some will also head there to pay.

The cabinet has approved a plan that would allow for sponsorship messages to be beamed onto the Western Wall, sources in the Prime Minister’s Office told Haaretz Monday.

According to the plan, any company will be able to project the image, logo or slogan of its choice on the ancient stones, for a price.

The proposal, drawn up by MK Mordechai Hidud, will take advantage of technology being developed by Kfar Sava-based start-up Kotelad. The company – the brainchild of U.S.-born Joe King – has come up with an innovative laser projector capable of beaming high-quality images onto walls, domes, minarets and steeples.

“After thousands of years of just being there, the Western Wall will finally be able to fulfill its commercial potential,” King said. “The religious and spiritual center of the Jewish people should reflect Jewish heritage – and thus be dedicated to bringing in a healthy profit.”

Kotelad held a trial run of the system last week, beaming the Coca-Cola logo onto the Wall, much to the bemusement of worshipers gathered below. And it seems that the trial was not only a technological success, with local vendors reporting a 14 percent increase in the sale of soft drinks.

The Western Wall Heritage Center plans to open an ad sales division, and sell wall space on a per-stone basis. Prices are expected to be upward of NIS 1,000 per stone per day. When no advertising is running, the wall will have the message “What are you waiting for? The Third Temple? Advertise now!” a source in the Heritage Center said.

Some companies that have already expressed an interest in the project, including Bank Discount (“Feel like you’re talking to a brick wall? Talk to us instead”), Netvision (“If God didn’t get your note, why not send an e-mail?”) and Ytong (“If it’s not Ytong, I’m not praying”). G. Yafit is reportedly also in talks to have her likeness beamed onto the wall 24 hours a day.

According to Hidud, the money raised will be used to replace the paper skullcaps that are stolen by the thousands by visitors to Judaism’s holiest site, to set up a searchable online database of the notes that people place between the stones of the Wall, and to build a 14-foot high partition between sections reserved for men and women.

(LINK to Haaretz article: http://www.haaretz.com/)

Young people who smoke marijuana more prone to delusions, study says

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REUTERS LONDON – Young people who smoke cannabis or marijuana for six years or more are twice as likely to have psychotic episodes, hallucinations or delusions than people who have never used the drug, scientists said on Monday.

The findings adds weight to previous research which linked psychosis with the drug — particularly in its most potent form as “skunk” — and will feed the debate about the level of controls over its use.

Despite laws against it, up to 190 million people around the world use cannabis, according to United Nations estimates, equating to about 4 percent of the adult population.

John McGrath of the Queensland Brain Institute in Australia studied more than 3,801 men and women born between 1981 and 1984 and followed them up after 21 years to ask about their cannabis use and assessed them for psychotic episodes. Around 18 percent reported using cannabis for three or fewer years, 16 percent for four to five years and 14 percent for six or more years. For most of the study, researchers didn’t measure the frequency of cannabis use among subjects, but rather whether they used at all.

“Compared with those who had never used cannabis, young adults who had six or more years since first use of cannabis were twice as likely to develop a non-affective psychosis (such as schizophrenia),” McGrath wrote in a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry journal.

They were also four times as likely to have high scores in clinical tests of delusion, he wrote, and a so-called “dose-response” relationship showed that the longer the duration since first cannabis use, the higher the risk of psychosis-related symptoms.

http://www.nytimes.com

I read this article and I wonder to myself, “what is it that made Pinchas decide to change the way he was leading his life just because of the fact that he found out that he is Jewish? If he really believed in the neo-Nazism that was guiding his life, so what that he found out a new fact about his families heritage?”

Perhaps all of us, myself included, need to put in a little more thought into and ask more questions about what it is that we “believe” in and where the guiding factors in our lives are really guiding us. The truth is that if we are capable of doing this not only will it help us filter out any fallacies, but it will also strengthen that which is true and real in our lives, just like it did for Pinchas.

The worst part of that is, that i believe them. Maybe their is some kind of undocumented and unresearched Dyslexia that causes you to fail tests, Who knows?

If these Crows could talk, guess what they would argue.

The New Caledonian crow, having passed so many other tests of animal cognition, has finally flunked an exam.

New Caledonian crows are valedictorians among corvids, a family of birds that includes ravens, jays and magpies. They’ve wowed scientists with their cognitive powers, even using wire as a food-fetching tool.

On one classic cognition test — retrieving a piece of food tied to a string — corvids perform so well that some researchers thought they didn’t just learn through rote trial and error, but envisioned problems in their head.

In a study published Feb. 22 in Public Library of Science ONE, researchers added a twist: They ran the string through a hole in a plywood platform. Crows could only see the food when directly above the hole. When they pulled back on the string, they’d lose sight of it. If they really did have a mental image of the task, it wouldn’t be a problem.

Twelve crows took the test: four who’d practiced on the old food-on-a-string setup, four who’d never seen it, and four who’d never seen it but could watch their reflection in a mirror.

Crows from the first group succeeded, but only after many attempts. Only one of the second group passed, also with difficulty. Two crows from the third group passed. It wasn’t the ace performance usually seen in crows.

“These results are not consistent with the hypothesis that the crows built a mental scenario,” wrote the researchers. “Our results raise the possibility that spontaneous string pulling in New Caledonian crows may not be based on insight but on operant conditioning mediated by a perceptual-motor feedback cycle.”

In other words, the crows relied on a simple trial-and-error approach. But the researchers did acknowledge that their sample size was limited, and that depth perception could be skewed in a confusing way by the experimental setup.

If nothing else, the crows did far better than finches. And even if they’re not good with spatial relationships, they’re certainly fast learners.