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Showing posts with label Social Sciences. Show all posts

World’s Oldest Sculpture (35,000-year- old)

Labels: Africa, Archaeology, Human, Kostenki, National Science Foundation, Russian Academy of Sciences, Social Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder |

Scientists have discovered the oldest piece of sculpture ever created – and it depicts a voluptuous ‘pin-up’ woman. The 35,000-year- old carving shows a woman with enormous breasts and other sexual characteristics like an enlarged stomach and large thighs.

The six-centimetre carved mammoth tusk, which is thought to have been a symbol of fertility for early man, is known as ‘Venus’ and was discovered in several fragments which were then pieced together. Radiocarbon dating showed that the figurine, which was found in a German cave, is at least 35,000 years old, predating later similar finds by 5,000 years or more. The fragments were recovered along with stone, bone and ivory tools used by the first Home Sapien populations to settle in Europe.

REAL INCREDIBLE INDIA

Labels: Asia, Financial institution, India, Loan, Mumbai, Public transport, Reuters, Social Sciences, Subscriber Identity Module |

# We live in a nation where Rice is Rs.40/- per kg and Sim Card is free.

# Pizza reaches home faster than Ambulance and Police.

# Car loan @ 5% but education loan @ 12%.

# Students with 45% get in elite institutions thru quota system and those with 90% get out because of lesser merit.

# 2 IPL teams are auctioned at 3300 crores and we are still a poor country where people starve for 2 sqaure meal per day.

# Assembly complex buildings are getting ready within one year while public transport bridges alone takes several years to be completed.

Cursive Handwriting

Labels: Cursive, Education, Marshall University, Penmanship, Professor, Social Sciences, Student, Text messaging, United States, Writing |

Schools are spending less time than ever teaching the art of cursive handwriting, especially as more time is devoted to typing in the early grades. On the 2007 SAT essay questions, only 15% of college-bound students used cursive writing. The rest wrote in print. Some teachers argue that writing in script helps hand-eye coordination, even though average legibility peaks around 4th grade.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University’s College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they’ll replace it entirely before long.
“I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.”
For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of “a gift.”

New Theory for Why We Cry

Labels: Emotion, Evolution, Evolutionary psychology, Israel, Psychology, Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University, University of Texas at Austin |

We shed tears when in pain, but what purpose does crying have?
A scientist now proposes a new theory for why crying evolved — tears can act as handicaps to show you have lowered your defenses.
"Crying is a highly evolved behavior," said researcher Oren Hasson, an evolutionary biologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. "My analysis suggests that by blurring vision, tears lower defenses and reliably function as signals of submission, a cry for help, and even in a mutual display of attachment and as a group display of cohesion."
The shedding of tears due to emotions is unique to humans. In the past, researchers suggested that crying helps carry stressful chemicals away from the body, or that it simply makes us feel better, or that it lets babies signal health problems.
Now Hasson points out that when tears blur vision, they could readily handicap aggressive behavior. As such, tears reliably signal vulnerability, a strategy that can emotionally bind others closer to you.
Hasson suggested the use of tears could be to build and strengthen personal relationships. For instance, "you can show that you are submissive to an attacker, and therefore potentially elicit mercy from an enemy, or you could attract sympathy from others, and perhaps gain their strategic assistance," he told LiveScience.
Also, by sharing tears with others, "if you can get a mutual display of lowered defenses, that means we can bond, that shows that we are really friends who share the same emotions," Hasson said. "This is strictly human."
"Of course," Hasson added, "the efficacy of this evolutionary behavior always depends on who you're with when you cry those buckets of tears, and it probably won't be effective in places, like at work, when emotions should be hidden."
This new concept from Hasson "offers the most plausible hypothesis about the evolved function of tears and crying," said evolutionary psychologist David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin, who did not participate in this study. "Others have speculated about possible function of tears, but the notion that they operate through handicapping is highly original."
Hasson detailed his research in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.