Author Archives: Guest Post

YouTube Campaign Videos More Positive Than Television Ads

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—YouTube campaign videos are more positive than ads aired on television, a new University of Michigan study shows.

YouTube videos are more positive because they are narrowly targeted to the highly informed, high motivated, usually supportive people who view a candidate’s online video, said Rob Salmond, the study’s author and assistant professor of political science. (more…)

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Picture Worth a Thousand Numbers: New Data Visualization Tool Helps Find the “Unknown Unknowns”

A research team at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has developed a software tool that enables users to perform in-depth analysis of modeling and simulation data, then visualize the results onscreen. The new data analysis and visualization tool offers improved ease of use compared to similar tools, the researchers say, and could be readily adapted for use with existing data sets in a variety of disciplines. (more…)

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U of T Research Demonstrates How Children Learn About Prejudice

How do children come to realize that they themselves might be targets of prejudice? It may depend on their age. New research conducted at the University of Toronto shows that a six-year-old may be influenced most by direct instruction about prejudice, but once that child gets closer to 10, she begins to rely more on her own experiences.

“Young children are information hungry – they are eagerly searching for general rules to help in mapping out their social worlds,” write researchers Sonia Kang, an assistant professor in the Department of Management at U of T Mississauga and the Rotman School of Management, and Professor Michael Inzlicht of the Department of Psychology in this month’s Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. (more…)

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New Understanding of Earth’s Mantle Beneath The Pacific Ocean

Washington, D.C. — Scientists have long speculated about why there is a large change in the strength of rocks that lie at the boundary between two layers immediately under Earth’s crust: the lithosphere and underlying asthenosphere. Understanding this boundary is central to our knowledge of plate tectonics and thus the formation and evolution of our planet as we know it today. A new technique for observing this transition, particularly in the portion of Earth’s mantle that lies beneath the Pacific Ocean basin, has led Carnegie and NASA Goddard scientist Nick Schmerr to new insight on the origins of the lithosphere and asthenosphere. His work is published March 23 in Science. (more…)

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Graphene and DNA

‘Wonder material’ may hold key to fast, inexpensive genetic sequencing

Look at the tip of that old pencil in your desk drawer, and what you’ll see are layers of graphite that are thousands of atoms thick. Use the pencil to draw a line on a piece of paper, and the mark you’ll see on the page is made up of hundreds of one-atom layers.

But when scientists found a way—using, essentially, a piece of ordinary sticky tape—to peel off a layer of graphite that was just a single atom thick, they called the two-dimensional material graphene and, in 2010, won the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery. (more…)

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IBM Strengthens Presence in India with New Office in Ludhiana, Punjab

LUDHIANA, India – 23 Mar 2012: IBM today announced the opening of a new branch office in Ludhiana, Punjab as part of the company’s continued geographic expansion across India.

The Ludhiana branch is IBM’s seventh new office to be opened in India in the past 12 months after those in Coimbatore, Indore, Guwahati, Dehradun, Raipur and Visakhapatnam. IBM is currently focused on increasing its presence in smaller, rapidly developing cities as India’s regions play an increasingly important part in the country’s economic growth. (more…)

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