After attaining a PhD from Beijing Normal University, Liu became a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the United States, the University of Oslo in Norway and the University of Hawaii.

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Alex Wissner-Gross of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US and Cameron Freer from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, have now put together a mathematical model that ties this causal entropy idea - evident in a range of recent studies - into a single framework.

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He now spends his time teaching at Academy of Art University with occasional lecturing gigs in Hawaii.

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Chuck Birkeland, a coral-reef biologist at the University of Hawaii and specialist in marine protected areas, has been in the business for 30 years.

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This belief was based mainly on measurements made in the 1970s at the University of Hawaii by Kimo Walker, the grandfather of surfing research.

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In 1988 he got a degree in computer science at Tufts University--and met his future wife, Pamela, who came from Hawaii to get a degree in biology.

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Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who also has a doctorate in theology, has looked at the brains of religious people.

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Wayne Holland, currently at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and his colleagues, who have just published their results in Nature, looked at three stars: Vega (350m years old), Fomalhaut (200m years), and Beta Pictoris (between 10m and 100m years), all within a few dozen light years of the earth.

ECONOMIST: Dusty genesis