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Anatomy and Physiology: Groups should be finished with the digestive system and ready to move on to the cardiovascular (circulatory) system on Monday. We're now officially half-way through the project...
I am absolutely convinced that Google will one day take over the world:Web search giant Google may be planning to buy microblogging site Twitter, according to TechCrunch. The tech news Web site, citing unnamed "people close to the negotiations," says that if Twitter bites, it would get cash and/or publicly valued stock from Google. Just five months ago, the increasingly popular Twitter turned down a $500 million offer from Facebook that was reportedly chock full of that company's stock.Let me just say that, when the day comes, I will welcome the new Google Overlords with open arms.
The treasure Google seeks is Twitter's large database of information, which expands daily in real-time as so-called Tweeters fill their personal feeds with snippets of current events and observations (140 characters max at a time). Twitter also has a very effective search engine for mining this database, which would give Google plenty more Web pages to sell to advertisers, TechCrunch notes.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!In education circles, there's a lot of discussion about how people most efficiently learn to read. Do they learn best by learning the rules of phonics (sounding out letters and putting those sounds together to make words), or do they best learn by the rote memory of site words? Research seems to support phonics (which is why you hear commercials for "Hooked on Phonics" and not commercials for "Hooked on Memorized Words"), but this e-mail message makes it pretty obvious that as we become better readers, we tend to rely more and more on our memory of common and comfortable words to help us work quickly through a piece of writing.
...is clearly wrong. For instance, compare the following three sentences:As to whether or not readers look at individual letters or entire words, Dr. Davis goes on to say that:
1) A vheclie epxledod at a plocie cehckipont near the UN haduqertares in Bagahdd on Mnoday kilinlg the bmober and an Irqai polcie offceir
2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs
3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur
All three sentences were randomised according to the "rules" described in the meme. The first and last letters have stayed in the same place and all the other letters have been moved. However, I suspect that your experience is the same as mine, which is that the texts get progressively more difficult to read. [...] Hopefully, these demonstrations will have convinced you that in some cases it can be very difficult to make sense of sentences with jumbled up words. Clearly, the first and last letter is not the only thing that you use when reading text. If this really was the case, how would you tell the difference between pairs of words like "salt" and "slat"?
...Essentially, the author is correct, people do not ordinarily read each letter in a word individually - except in a relatively rare condition following brain injury known as letter-by-letter reading... There is also evidence to suggest that information in the shape of an entire word plays an important role in reading. For instance, "CaSe MiXiNg" substantially slows down reading. However, since "word shape" includes information on the position of internal letters (especially where they contain ascending and descending elements), word shape will be disrupted by transpositions.Confused yet? I am. But I suppose the take home message is summed up as this:
Following brief presentations of written words, people are often better at guessing what word they saw, rather than guessing individual letters in that word (the "Word Superiority Effect"). However, this demonstration does not imply that reading does not involve any process that occurs at the level of individual letters. A recent paper in Nature...show(s) that when reading words that have been distorted by presenting each letter in visual noise (like an out of tune television), readers do not perform as well as an 'ideal observer' who can recognise words based on their shape alone. Instead, their participants only perform as well as they could if they were recognising words based on their individual letters.
Clearly, the debate about whether we read using information from individual letters or from whole words is far from over. Demonstrations of the ease or difficulty of reading jumbled texts seem likely to play an important role in our understanding of this process.
When people ask how to make better coffee at home, my first question is "How much coffee is in your coffee?" One of the common problems we professionals encounter away from our own brewing is weak coffee. And there is nothing that can be done to salvage weak coffee.After going on a couple of mini-rants about America's use of volume measures in cooking (he prefers weight) and our failure to fully adopt metric units (good point) he ends with the following piece of advice:
[...]
On countless occasions I've served our coffee to people for the first time. On first sip, they say, "This is strong." By the third or fourth sip, they say, "This is good." The main surprise, I think, is that most coffee is weak and that's what people are expecting. But as soon as they actually taste the full flavor of fresh, freshly ground, full strength coffee, they have a coffee epiphany.
Many national brands recommend one tablespoon per cup. Abraham Lincoln delivered the final verdict on this one many years ago: "Waiter, if this is tea, please bring me some coffee; if this is coffee, please bring me tea." If you can see through the coffee to the bottom of the cup, you're in trouble.
We recommend at least a full coffee measure (two tablespoons) per six fluid ounces of water for all brewing methods except espresso. For my morning press pot, I use two heaping American coffee scoops (about 4.5 tablespoons) of beans (20-22 grams) for 12 fluid ounces of hot water. I always grind my coffee just before brewing -- so that aromatics go into my cup, and not the air.
Don't be afraid of strong coffee. You can always add hot water to dilute it. Brew your coffee to your own taste, of course -- unless I'm coming over. If you brew it weak, you won't really be enjoying the great flavors, and there is nothing you can do to make stronger when I come to your house for a tasty cup.Preach on, brother. Preach on.
Freakonomics is asking people to list their 10 favorite living scientists. So here are the first 5 off the top of my head (in no particular order):To begin with, Earth is rotating on its axis at the familiar rate of one revolution per day. For those of us living at Earth's midlatitudes -- including the United States, Europe, and Japan -- the rate is almost a thousand miles an hour. The rate is higher at the equator and lower at the poles. In addition to this daily rotation, Earth orbits the Sun at an average speed of 67,000 mph, or 18.5 miles a second.
Perhaps that seems a bit sluggish -- after all, Mars Pathfinder journeyed to Mars at nearly 75,000 miles per hour. Buckle your seat belts, friends. The Sun, Earth, and the entire solar system also are in motion, orbiting the center of the Milky Way at a blazing 140 miles a second. Even at this great speed, though, our planetary neighborhood still takes about 200 million years to make one complete orbit -- a testament to the vast size of our home galaxy.
Dizzy yet? Well hold on. The Milky Way itself is moving through the vastness of intergalactic space. Our galaxy belongs to a cluster of nearby galaxies, the Local Group, and together we are easing toward the center of our cluster at a leisurely 25 miles a second.
If all this isn't enough to make you feel you deserve an intergalactic speeding ticket, consider that we, along with our cousins in the Local Group, are hurtling at a truly astonishing 375 miles a second toward the Virgo Cluster, an enormous collection of galaxies some 45 million light-years away.
England's leading newspaper, The Guardian, has announced that it will become the first paper in the world to publish exculsively on Twitter.
I almost forgot...it's the last day of March. Only one more day to get a "mint oreo" blizzard at Dairy Queen. Very good...very good. So Aguilar, a computer teacher, is sitting in the lounge shoveling generic Lucky Charms into his mouth. I know they’re generic for two reasons. First, what teacher can afford the real deal? That stuff is so expensive that they may as well be called Gold Bullion-O’s. Second, the marshmallow charms are not the same. Instead of clovers, moons and stars there are genie lamps, rabbit foots and something like lotto tickets or something.
Anyway, he’s just shoveling them into his mouth, hunched over his bowl, for shorter spoon travel and staring off into space, and teachers are doing they’re usual lunch thing. Some are grading while spilling crumbs all over the students’ work. Others are standing in line at the microwave looking at their watches while the current heater mumbles, “Come on, come on,” peeping through the glass hoping for their microwave soup cup to spin faster. And others are just trying to catch on eight-minute naps.
As this is going on, Aguilar, still stares, never taking his eyes off the wall across the room with the faded poster of a whale’s tail coming out of the water and some positive message underneath, and he finally says, “You know—the best way to poison teachers is to put something poisoned into some bagels or cookies around here.” After some silence he continues with, “I’m just saying,” and goes back to his Fortunate Flakes.
The crazy thing is that, sure, a good deal of the teachers (at least the ones who are awake) stop what they’re doing and stare for a moment at Aguilar, but then they go right back to their lunchtime routine.
I guess it is just that time of the year when teachers are a bit more comfortable with their demise, especially if it means missing finals.
My son just schooled me at Wii bowling. My son is 3 years old. At one point he looked at me and said "Here, Daddy, let me show you how I do it."After that, the news sinks rapidly. The far-right Republicans on the Board were not finished. They put in language to weaken the Big Bang theory, saying that there are different estimates for the age of the Universe. You can try to be coy and say this is also strictly true, but again that’s a cheat and a lie. The woman who proposed this is obviously a young-Earth creationist, and when she says "different ages", she means 6000 years. This belief in a young Earth, is, simply, dead wrong. We know the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the Earth, while younger than that, is still 4.55 or so billion years old itself. This is not some random guess, this is rock-solid (literally) science, confirmed independently from such diverse scientific fields as astronomy, physics, chemistry, anthropology, archaeology… and even the study of how languages change over time shows the humanity is older than 6000 years.I guess the bright side of this is that maybe Texas will replace Kansas as the international laughingstock when science standards are discussed. But the damage that this could potentially do to science education in one of our largest states, especially in a time when society is so worried about our children falling behind the rest of the world in science, is extremely scary. You can believe what you want...that's your right. But to force those beliefs on the rest of society by manipulating the political system is not only illegal, but is a gross bastardization of religion.
These same people on the Board added language to the standards to weaken teaching about global warming. Don McLeroy, who is a creationist and also the Chairman of the BoE, said that climate change is "hooey". They also attack the science on the complexity of the cell, and the initial genesis of life (called abiogeneisis; life from non-life). These are all standard creationist tactics.
