Word: networks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...period of sleep, the volume of connections between nerve cells in the brain decreased, a condition that Tononi theorizes offsets the wakeful brain's activity. During waking hours, the brain keeps adding new information about its environment, forming new circuits and new connections in an ever thickening neural network. But even the fruit-fly brain has its limits and, like any computer, needs a fail-safe shutdown mode as it gets close to overload. That's where sleep comes in. (See pictures of how animals sleep...
...Tononi and a growing number of other scientists believe that sleep - not just in flies but also in higher-order mammals - may perform such a pressure-releasing role. During sleep, researchers theorize, the brain actively prunes the neural network laid out during waking hours, trimming away weaker connections that haven't been used in a while or weren't strong enough to begin with. The stronger connections are believed to be filed during sleep into long-term memory, where they can be accessed again and again as needed. All this nocturnal tidying creates room for new connections to be formed...
More change might flow from a landmark trial underway in Istanbul. The case pits the state against a shadowy ultra-right-wing network allegedly led by retired generals. Prosecutors accuse the group of staging bomb attacks and assassinations in a bid to overthrow the ruling Justice and Development Party and create a pretext for military rule. Turkey is no stranger to coups - the military has stepped in to push the government this way or that three times in as many decades. As recently as 2007, a veiled threat prompted early elections...
...University of Chicago, Assistant Treasury Secretary nominee Alan Krueger of Princeton and several other key aides. Sunstein has been nominated to be Obama's regulatory czar. Even National Economic Council director Larry Summers has done work on behavioral finance. And Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan is organizing an outside network of behavioral experts to provide the Administration with policy ideas...
...What is true is that social network sites have had trouble making money. MySpace was supposed to be a big part of the revenue growth at News Corp. Wall St. thought Murdoch was a genius to buy it. Last year, News Corp had to admit that MySpace would not hit its revenue targets. That is usually not the hallmark of a property that is going to take over the Internet. Analysts believe that MySpace rival Facebook had revenue of $265 million last year. That is astonishingly low for a company that had 57 million unique visitors in the U.S. last...