Again with the mean scientists! Using a statistical method called Bayesian reasoning, they argue that the life here on Earth could be common, or it could be extremely rare — there’s no reason to prefer one conclusion over the other. With their new analysis, Spiegel and Turner say they have erased the one Drake factor…
Taking advantage of a summer day in the office to tweak one of the most popular pages on my website. Five of my pages account for more than half of the traffic on my whole site, so I’ve made it a summer project to give those pages some attention, to make them worth the visit.…
Those mean scientists. First they get rid of ether, then they demote Pluto, and now this. A group of physicists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology found out that a single photon cannot travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum. The study reaffirms Einstein’s theory that nothing travels faster than…
The inter tubes are clogged with pundits mocking the AP for a story claiming that “residents are bracing themselves for temperatures near and above boiling point.” In defense of the AP, I will point out that the article does not specify the planet on which these “residents” reside, so this could be a northeastern quadrant…
Academic journals generally get their articles for nothing and may pay little to editors and peer reviewers. They sell to the very universities that provide that cheap labour. As other media falter, academic publishers have soared. Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m…
“Being literate in 2011 means being digitally literate,” says Chris Lehmann, principal of Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia that has been using social media since it opened in 2006. Sheninger and others also say it is naïve to think that kids raised online will respond to school the same way as…
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Fort Ligonier re-enactors. French and Indian War. Similar:Syllabusing Like a BossAcademiaNature walks 2012 and 2018.AestheticsFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg strides past fettered drones at Mobile World Conference. I’d like to think that all these peopl…BusinessEvita in Zelionople CultureMostly German, sometimes refreshing my high school Latin.PersonalWith actor Ken Bolden, who appears in Quantum Theatre's gripping (and hilarious,…
The tldr version: The iPad has is very useful for brainstorming, and a resource to consult during class discussions, Yes, they are good ereaders, but they are also good for collaboration and sharing (one looks at the text while another takes notes; students start a project, then swap iPads, to comment on each other’s work,…
After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights. “Climbing equipment needs to…
NPR.org » Going, Going, And Gone?: No, The Oxford Comma Is Safe … For Now. Similar:Gawker Media Files for Chapter 11 BankruptcyThis is fallout from losing an invasion …BusinessSHU Community Lines Up to Honor JoAnne Boyle's Final Trip Up the HillJoAnne Boyle liked talking about traditi…Academia20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't GetI expect my English majors not…
Great example of how a reporter can take a press release and turn it into human story by adding an anecdotal example that demonstrates why the reader should care. David J. Loehr, a playwright who lives in southern Indiana, was taking his car to the dealership when a story on the radio gave him an…
In an occurrence which became somewhat of a tradition for shuttle crews and those of the International Space Station expeditions, the Expedition 28 crew and the STS-135 Atlantis astronauts formed a microgravity circle for a portrait aboard the orbiting complex’s Kibo laboratory of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. This image was taken on July 15,…
Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids. –via Borders to Shut Down – WSJ.com. Similar:For some reason, I saw a bump in traffic to a page that linked to a "make-your-own-Trump-e… This sort of thing was funnier back …AestheticsThe phrase "debate begins" in the…
Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead. Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems,…
It’s good to see some activity in this area. I liked holding onto my college textbooks, in part for the notes. (A few weeks ago, I passed two of my college physics textbooks to my science-geek son.) It’s nice that Amazon stores your notes for you in the cloud, but it appears you have to…
Then the researchers handed over the instructions and taught the PCs a “machine-learning system so it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy.” They didn’t teach the PC how to play Civ, but they taught them how to read about it. The system had no pre-programmed notion of turn-based…
Google+ has beautiful photos and videos. Twitter? Just page after page of mind-numbing 140 character items. Now, Flipboard demonstrated to all of us that photos and videos CAN be added into the display, and the new Twitter UI does do some of that, but it just isn’t enough. Google+ is blowing Twitter away here. —Google+…
This painting, of two impish children taking advantage of a moment of unsupervised freedom as their mother naps, is one of my favorites from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, here in Greensburg. The pun in the title intrigues me, as does the amazing complexity of the children’s clothing. The painting was not there when…
We’ve all seen how Ken Burns brings old photos to life by panning and zooming. This clip demonstrates a striking effect of mapping a 2D photo onto a 3D surface. The animator has to clone in order to create the missing data — the background details that are hidden by foreground objects. But the end…