Who Believes in the Giant Skeleton Myth? An Examination of Individual Difference Correlates

This study examined individual difference correlates of belief in a narrative about the discovery of giant skeletal remains that contravenes mainstream scientific explanations. A total of 364 participants from Central Europe completed a survey that asked them to rate their agreement with a short excerpt describing the giant skeleton myth. Participants also completed measures of the Big Five personality factors, New Age orientation, anti-scientific attitudes, superstitious beliefs, and religiosity. Results showed that women, as compared with men, and respondents with lower educational qualifications were significantly more likely to believe in the giant skeleton myth, although effect sizes were small. Correlational analysis showed that stronger belief in the giant skeleton myth was significantly associated with greater anti-scientific attitudes, stronger New Age orientation, greater religiosity, stronger superstitious beliefs, lower Openness to Experience scores, and higher Neuroticism scores. However, a multiple regression showed that the only significant predictors of belief in myth were Openness, New Age orientation, and anti-scientific attitudes. These results are discussed in relation to the potential negative consequences of belief in myths

Prioritizing micronutrients for the purpose of reviewing their requirements: a protocol developed by EURRECA

Background: The EURRECA (EURopean micronutrient RECommendations Aligned) Network of Excellence (http://www.eurreca.org) is working towards the development of aligned recommendations. A protocol was required to assign resources to those micronutrients for which recommendations are most in need of alignment. Methods: Three important 'a priori' criteria were the basis for ranking micronutrients: (A) the amount of new scientific evidence, particularly from randomized controlled trials; (B) the public health relevance of micronutrients; (C) variations in current micronutrient recommendations. A total of 28 micronutrients were included in the protocol, which was initially undertaken centrally by one person for each of the different population groups defined in EURRECA: infants, children and adolescents, adults, elderly, pregnant and lactating women, and low income and immigrant populations. The results were then reviewed and refined by EURRECA's population group experts. The rankings of the different population groups were combined to give an overall average ranking of micronutrients. Results: The 10 highest ranked micronutrients were vitamin D, iron, folate, vitamin B12, zinc, calcium, vitamin C, selenium, iodine and copper. Conclusions: Micronutrient recommendations should be regularly updated to reflect new scientific nutrition and public health evidence. The strategy of priority setting described in this paper will be a helpful procedure for policy makers and scientific advisory bodies. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2010) 64, S19-530; doi:10.1038/ejcn.2010.5

Globally asynchronous locally synchronous FPGA architectures

Abstract. Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) Systems have provoked renewed interest over recent years as they have the potential to combine the benefits of asynchronous and synchronous design paradigms. It has been applied to ASICs, but not yet applied to FPGAs. In this paper we propose applying GALS techniques to FPGAs in order to overcome the limitation on timing imposed by slow routing.

Asynchronous Embryonics with Reconfiguration

As embryonic arrays take inspiration from nature they display biological properties, namely complex structure and fault-tolerance. However, hardware implementations have yet to take advantage of a further biological feature at a fundamental level; asynchronous operation. Scalability and reliability are seen as two areas in which embryonic arrays could benefit from asynchronous design. This paper builds upon a previous asynchronous embryonic architecture simulation. The addition of a two-fold reconfiguration strategy that provides fault-tolerance is detailed. The simulation's design is similar to that of a macromodule library that has been implemented using Xilinx Virtex FPGAs, bringing the possibility of truly asynchronous embryonic circuits a step closer