This should certainly be fun. There are interesting photos showing links within the male and female brain. I posted the link at the bottom.

The hardwired difference between male and female brains could explain why men are 'better at map reading'

And why women are 'better at remembering a conversation'
Steve Connor Author Biography

Science Editor

Monday 02 December 2013

A pioneering study has shown for the first time that the brains of men and women are wired up differently which could explain some of the stereotypical differences in male and female behaviour, scientists have said.

Researchers found that many of the connections in a typical male brain run between the front and the back of the same side of the brain, whereas in women the connections are more likely to run from side to side between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

This difference in the way the nerve connections in the brain are “hardwired” occurs during adolescence when many of the secondary sexual characteristics such as facial hair in men and breasts in women develop under the influence of sex hormones, the study found.

The researchers believe the physical differences between the two sexes in the way the brain is hardwired could play an important role in understanding why men are in general better at spatial tasks involving muscle control while women are better at verbal tasks involving memory and intuition.

Psychological testing has consistently indicated a significant difference between the sexes in the ability to perform various mental tasks, with men outperforming women in some tests and women outperforming men in others. Now there seems to be a physical explanation, scientists said.

“These maps show us a stark difference - and complementarity - in the architecture of the human brain that helps to provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others,” said Ragini Verma, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

“What we've identified is that, when looked at in groups, there are connections in the brain that are hardwired differently in men and women. Functional tests have already shown than when they carry out certain tasks, men and women engage different parts of the brain,” Professor Verma said.

The research was carried out on 949 individuals - 521 females and 428 males - aged between 8 and 22. The brain differences between the sexes only became apparent after adolescence, the study found.

A special brain-scanning technique called diffusion tensor imaging, which can measure the flow of water along a nerve pathway, established the level of connectivity between nearly 100 regions of the brain, creating a neural map of the brain called the “connectome”, Professor Verma said.

“It tells you whether one region of the brain is physically connected to another part of the brain and you can get significant differences between two populations,” Professor Verma said.

“In women most of the connections go between left and right across the two hemispheres while in men most of the connections go between the front and the back of the brain,” she said.

Because the female connections link the left hemisphere, which is associated with logical thinking, with the right, which is linked with intuition, this could help to explain why women tend to do better than men at intuitive tasks, she added.

“Intuition is thinking without thinking. It's what people call gut feelings. Women tend to be better than men at these kinds of sk**l which are linked with being good mothers,” Professor Verma said.

Many previous psychological studies have revealed significant differences between the sexes in the ability to perform various cognitive tests.

Men tend to outperform women involving spatial tasks and motor sk**ls - such as map reading - while women tend to better in memory tests, such as remembering words and faces, and social cognition tests, which try to measure empathy and “emotional intelligence”.

A separate study published last month found that the genes expressed in the human brain did so differently in men and women. Post-mortem tests on the brain and spinal cord of 100 individuals showed significant genetic differences between the sexes, which could account for the observed g****r differences in neurological disorders, such as autism, according to scientists from University College London.

For instance, one theory of autism, which is affects about five times as many boys as girls, is that it is a manifestation of the “extreme male brain”, which is denoted by a failure to be able to show empathy towards others.

The latest study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the differences in the male and female “connectomes” develop during at the same age of onset of the g****r differences seen in psychological tests.

The only part of the brain where right-left connectivity was greater in men than in women was in the cerebellum, an evolutionary ancient part of the brain that is linked with motor control.

“It's quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men really are,” said Rubin Gur of Pennsylvania University, a co-author of the study.

“Detailed connectome maps of the brain will not only help us better understand the differences between how men and women think, but it will also give us more insight into the roots of neurological disorders, which are often sex related,” Dr Gur said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-hardwired-difference-between-male-and-female-brains-could-explain-why-men-are-better-at-map-reading-8978248.html

Unkindly, but due to allergic issues, your floor must have been completely vacuumed and inspected for me to be shoeless. I am, literally, deathly allergic to tetanus and do not go barefooted. I will wear slippers with some medium sole. I can bring new and clean to not create dirt.

It was 60% completed by June and wrapped. I completed another 25% by September. Again, all wrapped. The only thing left are the little persons, my spouse and progeny. It drives everyone absolutely crazy when they speak of the hurly burly, and I have a blank look as to the issue.

Quite to the contrary, Ginnyt, I agreed with your post, completely. I was just making the point that everybody has their detractors. You did not offend me with your comments, at all. They were spot on, IMHO!

I am tired, frankly, of others spending all their time on the OPP posting negative topic matters, usually about the President. I find it says a lot about people who have so much h**e in them without a positive approach to resolving that h**e.

It would eat away at me, 'til I couldn't live with myself.

Health Overhaul FloridaEvery leader has his great challenge. FDR had WW2. JFK had a trip to the moon. Ronald Reagan had the Cold War. George W. Bush had 9/11. Barack Obama has a website.

ObamaCare loyalists are calling the bid to repair the broken site a “moonshot” and quoting lines from Apollo 13 as if trying to fix an overgrown government website is like surviving a return to earth with a damaged spacecraft. America has gone from challenges like building 75,000 combat aircraft in a single year during WW2 and beating the Soviet Union to the moon… to trying to make a website work.

Obama’s two victories were widely credited to his Internet savvy. But the digital Hope and Change campaign was really more of a bait and switch. When it came to getting elected and staying popular; he outsourced the work to private sector professionals.

Obama’s digital strategy campaign was handled by talent from successful companies like Facebook and Google; including a Facebook co-founder. His health care website was put together by the usual crony contractors who were adept at pulling the right political strings to win no-bid contracts despite their terrible track records.

The Obama campaign would never have turned over its political fate to a company whose only virtue was that a top executive had gone to college with Michelle Obama. But it had no objection to tuning over the health care and private information of millions of Americans to their tender digital mercies.

Obama put his political fortunes ahead of the health and welfare of Americans. It was only when the Healthcare.gov disaster dealt a severe blow to his poll numbers that he called in a “tech surge” of engineers from Google and other politically friendly companies who had made his campaign work.

He didn’t call them in because he cared whether Americans had access to health care. If he had; he would have called them in a lot sooner. Instead he did it to bring his poll numbers back up again.

Obama’s bait and switch promised private sector level sophistication for a giant Socialist boondoggle. The digital strategy that had made him seem tech savvy was worlds away from the grinding bureaucratic mess that made Healthcare.gov the disaster that, despite all the claims to the contrary, it still is today.

Healthcare.gov could never have actually run like Amazon or iTunes; no matter what Obama promised. That idea was as ridiculous as trying to graft a water buffalo onto a greyhound. The private sector and public sector are different species of technology workflow.

Government employees are not all incompetent i***ts and private sector employees aren’t all geniuses. There are plenty of smart people who work for the government and plenty of stupid people who work in the private sector.

It’s the process that is fundamentally different.

The Standish Group states that 94 percent of large federal information technology projects undertaken during the past decade were unsuccessful. These staggering numbers made the Healthcare.gov disaster inevitable.

Google and Facebook exist because small groups of students pushed themselves to accomplish ridiculously ambitious goals. If CGI, the primary Healthcare.gov contractor, had received a government contract to create Facebook to government specifications and with government oversight; there would be no Facebook today.

The issue isn’t difficulty level. It’s culture.

After Khrushchev’s visit to the United States; he tried to reproduce the innovations in agriculture and construction that he had been shown. These efforts proved to be a miserable failure.

Khrushchev bought seed corn from the United States and unveiled a massive corn planting campaign. But the Soviet agricultural system treated corn the way that it had wheat with disastrous results. Corn planting techniques weren’t a great mystery; but the Soviet system was a rigid bureaucracy incapable of learning anything new or adapting its methods to the task. Instead, like all bureaucracies, it tried to adapt the task to its usual methods and its ideological armor made its ignorance into a virtue.

The same thing happened with Healthcare.gov. Instead of trying to adapt the methods to the task, the system treated the construction of a website like any other policy; with rigid guidelines emerging out of constant meetings setting up an inflexible process for getting it done without actually understanding what it was that was being done.

Like the Soviet bureaucrats planting corn where it wasn’t meant to go; their American counterparts relentlessly kept spending money on a website built around their guidelines without even seeing if it worked. Like their C*******t brethren, they refused to report failure up the chain of command and instead treated success as a function of their procedures… rather than of the functional outcome.

Obama, like Khrushchev, was humiliated and caught by surprise when he realized that his grand project had fallen apart. Both Socialist leaders had thought that it was enough to order their subordinates to imitate a successful free market product without understanding that it’s the production process that makes the product. Trying to imitate the product without the production process is a recipe for disaster.

To a bureaucracy, success is not defined by how much corn you grow or how many users a website can handle; but whether every proper procedure was followed in the production of the corn or the website.

For his tech surge, Obama has been forced to go outside the government bureaucracy and its crony capitalist clingers to private sector engineers. Like Lenin’s New Economy Policy or the Soviet Union’s increasingly desperate attempts at enlisting American aid to fix its agriculture; Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the ideological government he runs is unfit for the task that he has set it to.

A temporary free market fix may eventually get Healthcare.gov working again but can’t address the roots of its failure which are not in mere code; but in the bureaucratic DNA of government. A few engineers will eventually get the website working; but they can’t fix the entire broken culture behind it.

The website doesn’t matter. Healthcare.gov isn’t Facebook or Google where the service is the product. It’s meant to serve as a distribution gateway for products that have come out of the same dysfunctional bureaucratic process. Fixing Healthcare.gov isn’t like fixing Google or Facebook. It’s like fixing Amazon’s website without fixing its corporate culture, its warehouse distribution, its advertising and its products.

No matter how many Facebook or Google vets hack the Obama campaign or Healthcare.gov; they can’t fix the underlying problem with their real product… which is government bureaucracy.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that the trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. That’s the economic trouble with Socialism. The functional trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of the free market talent to make its projects plod along without breaking down.

Obama’s solution to everything is more government. And how is the same government process that can’t make a health care website work, going to make a health care system work?

by D. Greenfield

This quote came from the Czech Republic. Someone over there has it figured out. It was t***slated into English from an article in the Prague newspaper: Prager Zeitungon.

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved e*****rate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their president."