Month: December 2008
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Snipers: Cowardly Assassins, or Surgical Soldiers?
An eye-opening look at military snipers. It might be because there’s another side to snipers and sniping after all. In particular, even though a sniper will often be personally responsible for huge numbers of deaths – body counts in the hundreds for an individual shooter are far from unheard of – as a class snipers…
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The Future of Education
Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, talks to The Telegraph about his views on the future of learning. The old-fashioned model of education still prevalent in today’s schools, involving remembering facts ‘off pat’, was designed for the industrial age. […] This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn’t deliver for the…
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Google Interviews
Stories abound of bloggers going for interviews at Google and writing up their experiences (as a cursory search will show), but I’ve never felt the need to bookmark or share any of them: they’re all rather lacklustre affairs. However, Peteris Krumins’ account of his interview at Google is informative, indepth and unflinching. In short: worth a…
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On Wealth
When the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig was accused of being “a coddled member of the silver-spoon generation” he decided to confront the accusation by retelling tales from his less-than-privileged upbringing. In doing so, however, he made some poignant remarks about wealth: The most important lesson that I learned, I believe, is that money…
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The Age of High Culture
The cover story for this quarter’s Intelligent Life is an article arguing that, contrary to most recent opinions, the population isn’t, in fact, becoming dumber and we are at the dawn of an ‘age of mass intelligence’. This quote from Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, gets to the core of the argument…
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A German View on Tackling the Recession
Bertrand Benoit, the Financial Times‘ Berlin bureau chief, discusses why the US, French and British don’t understand Germany’s “refusal to tackle the recession head-on”. What is happening is a classic clash of cultures, and anyone puzzling to grasp Germany’s anaemic reaction to the financial crisis and its economic fallout could do worse than take a…
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The Global Baby Trade
Foreign Policy looks at the international adoption trade and the corruption that has made it a lucrative industry. Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants…
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Counterfactual Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy
Counterfactual Thinking and the First Instinct Fallacy (pdf); a research paper on whether or not it’s better to change your answer when taking multiple-choice tests. The abstract: Most people believe that they should avoid changing their answer when taking multiple-choice tests. Virtually all research on this topic, however, suggests that this strategy is ill-founded: most…
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If a HDD’s Read/Write Head Were a Boeing 747
From an article discussing Seagate’s plant in Ireland (where 80% of the company’s read/write heads are produced): an impressive analogy of a HDD’s read/write head. The dimensions of the head are impressive. With a width of less than a hundred nanometers and a thickness of about ten, it flies above the platter at a speed of…
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Raising Smart Children: Concentrate on Effort, not Ability
An old Scientific American article looks at the findings from three decades of research into how to raise intelligent children. Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that…