March 5, 2013

Interesting Links

Over the weekend, I caught up on some interesting stories that you might find interesting.

Students prefer print to e-textbooks

What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks is reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study habits.

The Double Agent Who Infiltrated Al Qaeda

Even Obama knew the name of the Danish double agent who never got his due for helping lead U.S. drones to Anwar al-Awlaki. Now he's telling his own story.

More Good News About The 'Scientific Accident That May Change The World'

Ric Kamen's lab at UCLA had found a way to make a non-toxic, highly efficient energy storage medium out of pure carbon using absurdly simple technology. Today, we can report that the same team may well have found a way to make that process scale up to mass-production levels.

Looking back: the long reach of time at Neoneocon

My mother was raised by four people, two of whom had been born during the early 1850s. All four of them had held and reassured my mother when those booming noises had announced the end of the Great War in that scene that constituted her first memory. So, although my mother became a modern woman who smoked cigarettes, drove a car, went to college, and voted as soon as she turned twenty-one (in that order, I believe), two of the people closest to her in her youth remembered the Civil War vividly.
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But my father’s family also had an exceptionally long reach back in time. My paternal grandfather was born around 1860 and died in the 1920s. But he was the youngest of twelve children, the eldest of whom was a sister of his born in the year 1838.

Please let that sink in for a moment: my own grandfather’s sister was born in 1838. Not only that, but she lived to be over 100 years old and dance at my parents’ wedding. She appears in photos of the occasion, a small figure wearing a black headscarf, almost impossibly old and wrinkled but smiling.

Norwegian TV show about a fireplace sparks nationwide debate after furious viewers say wood was stacked with bark facing 'the wrong way'

But in Norway, a television program on the subject of wood has become quite the burning issue, after splitting the country straight down the middle on how it should be stacked.

Nearly a million people, 20 per cent of the Norwegian population, tuned in to the program when it was aired during prime time on Friday night. But the angry responses started almost as soon as it had begun.

19 Mindblowing Historical Doppelgangers

 Paul-Revere Jack Black
 Caesar-Augustus Vladimir Putin

Posted by Jill Fallon at March 5, 2013 11:30 AM | Permalink