Word: contentous
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From John Edwards' haircut to Hillary Clinton's tear, Web videos have played a well-publicized role in generating buzz about this year's presidential candidates. As influential as those viral clips may be, though, a broader role is arising for so-called voter-generated content. Civic-minded techies are increasingly bringing Web 2.0 to political activism, developing new watchdog tools that open up congressional machinery for ordinary citizens to scrutinize and critique...
...attention when you're at school. I'll just give you a very, very clear little example. We're talking about free play, not play that's monitored by adults. Because we know that when the adults are near kids, kids change what they talk about and change the content of their play. We've known that for a long time. But just picture two little kids in free play. They're inventing what they're going to do. Okay, we're going to play house. You're going to be the doggie and I'm going...
There's evidence on both sides. The systems that are involved in adding emotional content include a brain structure called the amygdala, which gets activated when we experience strong emotions, particularly negative emotions, and it does influence memory systems - in particular, a structure known as the hippocampus. So there's opportunity there to influence how strongly memories get laid down. But the hippocampus is involved in both the storage as well as the retrieval of memory. Things that are emotionally charged may simply be memories that are more likely to be accessed or used...
...Emotional content] does not necessarily mean that events are remembered more accurately, and that's an important distinction. In fact, there's a lot of evidence that all memories can be altered. It's a normal process - we're constantly taking our experience and revising it, even twisting it to our own benefit. We might be able to take control of that process in some ways, which would be particularly useful in cases of abnormal, pathological memory processing - for instance, traumatic memory processing. There have been efforts to find ways of undoing that emotional bias. We don't know...
...town hall, on July 4, when few Americans will be huddled around a television set to watch politics. McCain rejected the counteroffer as insufficient. The negotiations have since broken down, and the two sides are trading blame. "We made a serious counterproposal," Obama spokesman Bill Burton says. "They are content to snipe from the sidelines...