The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread

[Raithe]

The Register - SysAdmins unplanned revenge after sudden sacking

 

 

 

On-Call Here we are again on a bright British Friday morning, which means it's time for On-Call, in which readers recollect their ramblings into the real world to fix things up.

This week, reader "James" has shared a story “from my days as a Sysadmin, at the dawn of the broadband area, when I worked for a very well known company supplying fantasy wargaming products.”

 

Said company decided it needed an office in Europe, supplied by a warehouse in Nottingham.

 

“To connect the sites, the ERP system needed a link between the sites,” James recalls. But the company's preferred telco was a few weeks away from launching its broadband product. The European office couldn't wait, however, so James “used an aggregated on-demand international ISDN connection so the databases could sync as required.”

“This was massively expensive, but was only needed for two weeks before we could place the order for broadband. The system worked fine unattended, and everyone was happy as the ERP system worked flawlessly.”

 

Despite the outbreak of happiness, “a week later the IT Manager called me into a meeting with HR to inform me I had been made redundant, effectively immediately.”

James was escorted from the premises by security and prevented from speaking to his colleagues.

Before he placed an order for broadband.

 

“Two months later,” James wrote, “I received a call from the horrified IT Director (the IT Manager himself had been made redundant straight after me), to ask if I knew why they faced an ISDN bill for over £100,000.”

 

Remember that bit at the start of the story about this happening at the “dawn of the broadband age”? Back then, data connections weren't cheap. So by marching James without a handover, his former employer had missed the chance to learn about the expensive ISDN connection.

 

“I had great delight in telling them I knew exactly why the bill was so large and had they not made me redundant they would have not blown the whole year's IT investment budget in a single month,” James recalls. “Even better, they had gone over the cancellation period, locking them into a year's contract.”

 

Failing to properly debrief James therefore became a very, very expensive mistake.

 

 

[Agiel]

Apollo 17 mission live:

 

http://apollo17.org

[Raithe]

Heh. All the data is out there for collection. Where is privacy? 

 

 

The Top 10 Searches from Pornhub Prove That Nothing Is Too Private Anymore

 

 

Off the top we should say this article is SFW. It's simply an infographic of what NSFW-minded people are searching for on a popular porn site, hopefully when in the privacy of their home and not at work. So, let's get to it–we mean the info you perv. Get your mind out of the gutter. 

The data has been collected by Pornhub from 2009–2015 and breaks down the highest ranking searches across the globe. If you learn anything from this it should be: nothing you do on the Internet is truly private.

[Raithe]

For the lawyers in the audience...

 

Huffington Post - For the First Time Ever, a Prosecutor will go to jail for wrongfully convicting an innocent man.,

 

 

 

Today in Texas, former prosecutor and judge Ken Anderson pled guilty to intentionally failing to disclose evidence in a case that sent an innocent man, Michael Morton, to prison for the murder of his wife. When trying the case as a prosecutor, Anderson possessed evidence that may have cleared Morton, including statements from the crime's only eyewitness that Morton wasn't the culprit. Anderson sat on this evidence, and then watched Morton get convicted. While Morton remained in prison for the next 25 years, Anderson's career flourished, and he eventually became a judge.

 

In today's deal, Anderson pled to criminal contempt, and will have to give up his law license, perform 500 hours of community service, and spend 10 days in jail. Anderson had already resigned in September from his position on the Texas bench.

 

What makes today's plea newsworthy is not that Anderson engaged in misconduct that sent an innocent man to prison. Indeed, while most prosecutors and police officers are ethical and take their constitutional obligations seriously, government misconduct--including disclosure breaches known as Brady violations--occurs so frequently that it has become one of the chief causes of wrongful conviction.

 

What's newsworthy and novel about today's plea is that a prosecutor was actually punished in a meaningful way for his transgressions.

 

I give speeches about the Innocence Movement, and tell stories from real cases, all around the world. No matter where I am, when I finish speaking the first question usually is, "What happened to the police/prosecutors who did this to the poor guy?" The answer is almost always, "Nothing," or worse, "The police officer was promoted and now is the chief of his department." The adage that the powerful go unpunished is no truer or more visible than with police officers and prosecutors in America--even when they send innocent people to prison from their misconduct.

 

My client Roger Dean Gillispie of Dayton, Ohio, for example, spent 20 years in prison as a result of police misconduct. In 2007, we presented overwhelming evidence that the police officers, like Anderson in the Morton case, failed to turn over evidence to the defense before trial that would have cleared Gillispie. We also supplied the court with evidence that the police officer in charge had harassed and intimidated witnesses helpful to the defense, and had manipulated the evidence. Before going to court to clear Gillispie, we met with the local prosecutors, hopeful that they wouldn't tolerate such misconduct and would do a thorough (and neutral) investigation to get to the truth. Instead, they simply denied everything in knee-jerk fashion, and fought to keep Gillispie in prison until a federal court finally found government misconduct and threw out his charges in December 2011. To this day, the police officer in the case has not been investigated by a neutral, independent body. The only thing he has received is promotions.

 

Rogue cops and prosecutors going unpunished is the rule rather than the exception. In Illinois, two police officers whose improperly grueling interrogation techniques led to the wrongful conviction of Juan Rivera and others were not penalized when their 3rd degree tactics came to light. Rather, they were recently hired at taxpayer expense to teach interrogation courses to other police officers around the state.

 

A recent study found prosecutorial misconduct in nearly one-quarter of all capital cases in Arizona. Only two of those prosecutors have been reprimanded or punished. This led the Arizona Republic to conclude:

 

There seldom are consequences for prosecutors, regardless of whether the miscarriage of justice occurred because of ineptness or misconduct. In fact, they are often congratulated.

Other studies/articles with similar troubling results can be found here, here, here, and here.

 

Fortunately, there is something very simple that judges across the country can do to eradicate this problem. All judges, state and federal, should issue the standing "ethical rule order" proposed by the Hon. Nancy Gertner and Innocence Project Co-Founder Barry Scheck. The proposed order requires prosecutors to disclose, pre-trial, all evidence that "tends to negate the guilt of the accused or mitigates the offense." Details regarding the proposed ethical rule order, including all the justifications supporting it, can be found in this article by Barry Scheck.

 

The reason such standing ethical rule orders are important is that they allow prosecutors, like Ken Anderson, to be held in criminal contempt if they are later found to have engaged in misconduct. Anderson could be punished today only because such an order had been issued in the Morton case.

 

Today's conviction of Ken Anderson stands out as an extreme aberration in a society where police and prosecutorial misconduct goes largely unpunished. But it is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, today's result will deter rogue cops and prosecutors in the future from engaging in similar misconduct. But this will happen only if judges across the country do what the judge did more than 25 years ago in the Morton case: issue an order requiring that proper disclosure to the defense, or risk criminal contempt proceedings.

 

[Leferd]

http://www.businessinsider.com/swanluv-fund-wedding-refund-divorce-2015-12

 

So the premise is that they'll pay for your wedding but if you end up divorcing, you'll have to pay them back + interest. Me not being shy around a good wager --for this to be a good bet, you don't have to think your marriage will never die, just that this startup'll die first!

[Raithe]

Korean Pop band held at LAX after officials accuse them of being sex workers

 

 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials detained the South Korean pop band Oh My Girl at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) last week after suspecting the young women of being sex workers.

 

On December 9, the eight band members—in Los Angeles for a photo shoot and concert—were denied entry to LAX and held for 15 hours while officials questioned them, according to a statement from Oh My Girl’s management.

Eventually the band gave up and went back home.

 

From the statement:

A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection told the Los Angeles Times that it could neither confirm nor deny the group’s story. But “Korean-language media in Los Angeles have reported anecdotally that young South Korean women are increasingly facing scrutiny from immigration authorities based on the suspicion that they may be entering the country to illegally work in the Koreatown nightlife scene,” the Times reports.

 

After the misunderstanding was resolved, we were sent back to the airport immigration office, and had communication with the airport staff, and our opinion was not straightened out. And in the previous step, our phones were seized and it was an extreme situation where we could not contact anyone outside. The company was detained for a long period of 15 hours, and we decided to go back to Korea because of the members who were tired physically and emotionally.

 

The person in charge of customs asked Oh My Girl and the staff what relationship they had with each other, and one of the staff used the word ‘sister’ and a misunderstanding occurred. They thought it was strange that we were not blood related, but said that we were ‘sisters’. And so they took extra attention to the large quantity of items and outfits we had. And since the members are young girls, they were mistaken as ‘working women’ (prostitutes) which the U.S. has a big issue with right now.

 

An official with the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to discuss the matter, said the eight-member girl band lied to customs officials and said they were traveling to the U.S. as tourists, rather than for work and not because they were suspected of being sex workers.

 

 

Edited December 14, 2015 by Raithe

[Raithe]

And just for the artistic...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tBtuRani-0

[Elerond]

http://www.roanoke-chowannewsherald.com/2015/12/08/woodland-rejects-solar-farm/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link

 

Woodland in North Carolina rejects solar farm for quite interesting reasons.

 

Jane Mann said she is a local native and is concerned about the natural vegetation that makes the community beautiful.

She is a retired Northampton science teacher and is concerned that photosynthesis, which depends upon sunlight, would not happen and would keep the vegetation from growing. She said she has observed areas near solar panels where vegetation is brown and dead because it did not receive enough sunlight.

She also questioned the high number of cancer deaths in the area, saying no one could tell her that solar panels didn’t cause cancer.

 

Bobby Mann said he watched communities dry up when I-95 came along and warned that would happen to Woodland because of the solar farms.

“You’re killing your town,” he said. “All the young people are going to move out.”

He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.

[Bartimaeus]

Apparently, a refutation: http://thehigherlearning.com/2015/12/14/fact-check-small-town-rejects-solar-farm-because-it-would-suck-up-all-the-suns-energy/

[Elerond]

Apparently, a refutation: http://thehigherlearning.com/2015/12/14/fact-check-small-town-rejects-solar-farm-because-it-would-suck-up-all-the-suns-energy/

 

"The town would not benefit, from a tax base standpoint, from the solar farms because they are not located within the town limits, but only in the extraterritorial sections.

The only funding the town would get is approximately $7,000 per year for specialized training for the Woodland Fire Department in the event of an electrical malfunction at the solar plant."

 

But this reasonable reasons aren't so reasonable reasons to forbid private citizen to sell their lands outside of town limits. It is just extortion by town council. 

 

Also Higher Learning's fact check is bit incomplete as it bases their fact check in same article that I posted, and decided that it has done fact checking by pointing out that there was other factors than outlandish claims by town residents behind council decision that should not surprise anybody, especially those that read the article. Of course their fact checking is mainly aimed towards those other media outlets that wrote articles based on that Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald's article, but if they really would have wanted to do fact checking they would have checked Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald's facts. So at end their refutation is just opinion based to the original article that created outlandish headlines.

 

Higher Learning refutation also forget to mention that council not only refused to give permission to this solar farm, but all future solar farms that would be build in areas that town council has say so. Quote from original article "The council later voted for a moratorium on future solar farms." and that can't be put on claim that those future farms don't benefit the town by giving it tax dollars or cheaper electricity as they are projects that don't even exist today. So there is something other in play than pure financial details of this denied project. So I would say that our fact checker should check their facts before claiming anything for sure, as original article don't give any reasons for either of council's decisions, so it is just anybody's guess what they factored and didn't factor in their decision. But also Woodland as community rejected at least partially that solar farm on those reasons that I quoted as they were given by citizens of Woodland in public comments about the farm, meaning that they are reasons why some people at Woodland thing that those farms are bad for the Woodland, even though they aren't necessary reasons why their town council didn't approve said solar farm.

[Malcador]

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article49766215.html

 

 

Usually what happens in Woodland stays in Woodland, a town 115 miles east of Raleigh with one Dollar General store and one restaurant.

 

But news of the Northampton County hamlet’s moratorium on solar farms blew up on social media over the weekend after a local paper quoted a resident complaining to the Town Council that solar farms would take away sunshine from nearby vegetation. Another resident warned that solar panels would suck up energy from the sun.

 

As outlandish as those claims seem, town officials say the Internet got it wrong.

 

It would be foolish to conclude that all the town’s residents have an aversion to solar energy, said Ron Lane, who has been on the Woodland Town Council for two years. In the past year, Lane noted, the town approved zoning changes to accommodate a trio of major solar farms, one of which is nearly completed.

 

Woodland simply got too cramped for a fourth solar installation, he said.

 

“How would you and your family like to live in the middle of a solar farm, surrounded on all four sides?” said Lane, a retired elementary school principal. “We have approved three solar farms on almost three points of the compass. This would have completely boxed the town in with solar farms.”

 

For Woodland’s elected officials, the viral response to the solar blackout became a crash course on the power of social media. The mayor and two council members had just been sworn in to office Dec. 3, the day the solar farm came up for a vote.

 

Woodland, a town of some 800 residents, is only the latest to experience a public backlash against the state’s solar renaissance.

 

Friction over solar farms has become more pronounced as North Carolina’s rapid solar buildout has catapulted the state to fourth place nationally in total solar power output. North Carolina today has more than 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity online, equivalent to a nuclear plant if all the solar panels were generating electricity on a cloudless day.

 

In the past few years, about two dozen solar farms around the state have become targets of public ire, usually over aesthetics and property values. Facing local hostility, several of these energy projects were voluntarily withdrawn by the developers, said Daniel Conrad, a staff attorney for the N.C. Utilities Commission.

 

The resistance often flares up in areas that have become magnets for solar farms – agricultural communities with cheap farmland near electrical substations where solar farms can interconnect to the power grid, said Stephen Kalland, executive director of the N.C. Clean Energy Technology Center.

 

But the state’s remarkable transformation of soybean fields into rows of indigo panels is also alarming some agriculturalists. In a Nov. 30 letter to the state’s extension agents, N.C. State University crop science professor Ron Heiniger warned that the rapid spread of solar farms “may well be one of the most important agricultural issues of our generation.”

 

Heiniger’s call-to-arms, reproduced in at least one local paper, predicts that solar farms could shift land use to such an extent that “it is highly unlikely this land will ever be farmed again.” Heiniger also denounced solar energy as a government-subsidized boondoggle that is “highly inefficient at producing energy.”

 

Strata Solar, the Chapel Hill company that had proposed the solar farm in Woodland, attempted to appease the Town Council’s concerns by increasing setbacks and making other modifications. The company hopes the project can be revived and built some day, said Brian O’Hara, Strata Solar’s senior vice president of strategy.

 

If not for the handful of public comments about solar farms stealing sunshine, Woodland’s solar moratorium would be as obscure as other local fights over solar farms. Instead, Strata Solar spokesman Blair Schooff said the company is “getting calls from all over the planet on this one.”

 

By Monday, the story was trending on Reddit, DailyKos and The Huffington Post as well as the United Kingdom’s Independent and the Hindustan Times in New Delhi, India.

 

Lane, the Woodland councilman, said the town has received profanity-laced voice mails and enraged emails from people around the country.

 

Ultimately, he said, the Strata Solar project was not doomed by irrational fears. The photovoltaic panels were proposed just 50 feet from residential homes, and the project was too close to State Route 258 leading into town.

 

“We’re not opposed to the solar farm itself, just that particular location,” Lane said. “We wanted to make sure they didn’t overtake the town.”

[Gfted1]

Pre-crime arrives in the UK with a crowdsourced watch list.

[ShadySands]

China 'social credit': Beijing sets up huge system

[Wrath of Dagon]

You'd think this happened in the US, until you get to the end and find out he's only suing for $7000: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/22/man-sues-fallout-4-developer-for-making-game-so-addictive/

[Malcador]

 

Data is always interesting. That Soviet tally sure kept on going.

[Sarex]

-snip-

Data is always interesting. That Soviet tally sure kept on going.

 

Should have ****ing stayed out of that war, especially considering how many people we lost in WW1...

[Raithe]

io9 - How to make people fall in love with your ridiculously competent hero
 
 

We all love characters who are good at what they’re doing. Nobody wants to root for someone who screws up constantly or walks into traps we can see a mile away. But at the same time, it can be hard to love someone who’s too perfect. So how do you make us believe in, and love, a major badass?
 
So I’ve been working for a couple months on this essay about how to make a character competent and believable/relatable. And with this week’s tempest-in-a-stormtrooper-helmet about whether Rey is somehow TOO competent, this issue became suddenly timely. So here are the thoughts that I was already noodling on for the past several weeks.
 
The rise of the super(smart) humans
 
It’s hard to deny that characters in fiction, and especially heroes, have been getting more competent over the past 20 years. There are a few reasons for this trend.
For one thing, pop culture is full of "competence porn"—stories where part of the enjoyment is watching super-clever people solve problems and make decisions. If you consider procedurals (on television) and techno-thrillers (in books) to be competence porn, then this is arguably the most important type of fiction there is.
 
At the risk of oversimplifying, we are in an age of information overload and technological miracles. We all have access to vastly more data than our ancestors, and can do things with bioinformatics and robotics that would have seemed insane not long ago. Our biggest fantasy is to be the undisputed master of our own creations.
 
We’re also living in the age of "the smartest man in the room," the Sherlock Holmes-inspired archetype of the dude who is always 27 jumps ahead of everyone else and is great at everything (except for social skills.) This character is pretty much always a man—but because of his ubiquity, he raises the floor for all other characters, male and female.
 
And finally, even most casual consumers of pop culture are experienced visitors to imaginary worlds at this point. We’ve all been to Narnia and Westeros enough times to know what to expect. We wouldn’t eat any ****ing Turkish delight, because we’re not assclowns. We’ve endlessly dissected the dumb decisions and failures of our imaginary heroes, and we want to identify with people who at least have a level of ball-handling that matches our own familiarity. People complain whenever they figure out key plot information in a story before the characters do.
 
(You could argue this is also one reason why there’s less "portal fantasy" and more fantasy about heroes who were born in the magical world and know their way around. But that’s a topic for another day.)
 
And yet, even as audiences have increasingly less patience with characters who don’t immediately get the hang of things, there’s a contrasting problem, which threatens to turn the whole thing into a no-win situation.
 
It’s hard to identify with people who are too smart
 
At the same time as we demand characters who have a PhD in spaceships, we also have a hard time identifying with characters who are too brilliant. This is kind of a catch-22, and it’s probably more of a problem with female characters than male characters. (Again, see "the smartest man in the room," who never has to be relatable as long as he’s witty and cute.) But even male characters risk becoming annoying if they’re too sagacious.
 
Part of the problem is that we don’t just want to admire these brilliant characters—we want to identify with them. That means that they have to be recognizably us, only much, much better at everything than we are. You can’t really identify with a character who does everything right, or who never faces any insurmountable challenges. And there’s also a suspension of disbelief issue, if a character becomes so smooth and kick-ass that you start to question if such a paragon could actually exist.
 
So it’s sort of like walking a narrative tightrope: You gotta make your main character(s) good at their job, but not TOO perfect to believe in. On the one side: snapping crocodiles. On the other side: burning lava. But the good news is, this tightrope is more like a super wide bridge and there’s a railing. So really, it’s fine.
 
So how do you avoid falling into the lava?
 
The first, and most important thing, is to recognize that "competent" does not mean "infallible" or "unbeatable." You can be the most careful driver in the world, signaling before making a turn even in there’s nobody else on the road and checking your tire pressure regularly, and all that good stuff, and still have an accident. We’re not talking about omnipotence here.
 
In fact, I’d argue that people want to invest in, and look up to, characters who are really, unusually, good at what they’re doing—so that they can then watch those characters make mistakes and deal with huge setbacks. Nobody is ever going to enjoy a story where the plot synopsis reads, "And then nothing bad ever happened and everybody drank hot cocoa in front of a nice fire, the end."
 
The interesting part is not watching screw-ups screw up, but watching incredibly smart people make fatal errors. And luckily, most smart people are highly error-prone, so this is not a huge stretch. People can make mistakes for all sorts of reasons. They can make dumb choices due to emotion, or their own blind spots. You can be good at all sorts of things, but still make bad decisions in the moment. And this doesn’t just have to be a case of a normally level-headed person making a sudden rash decision—sometimes, hyper-competence can be its own downfall, because you can actually be too cautious or in control. Also, being excellent at many things tends to make one overconfident.
 
To get personal and a bit self-promotey for a second, there are parts of my novel, All the Birds in the Sky, where the drama would have been massively heightened if my characters were just a bit dumber. If they were less good at handling themselves, or if they were slightly easier to manipulate. I toyed with pushing them in that direction—but every time I did, it felt like I was going against the grain. My witch character, Patricia, and my mad scientist character, Laurence, get to be the protagonists of the story in part because they’re among the best at what they each do. And they’re clever people. But then I found that because I had avoided making my heroes too easily confused or duped, I was even more able to torture them in other ways—and it was that much more emotionally wrenching when they made horrible, totally avoidable mistakes.
 
Most people are bad at some stuff
 
Also, there is not a simple X-Y axis between super-competent and incompetent. Most people are good at some things and bad at others. To pick on this week’s shibboleth, The Force Awakens makes a big deal out of the fact that Rey is bad at shooting a blaster, and never quite gets the hang of it. She’s also not particularly great at negotiating with Simon Pegg.
 
You can also make people miss the obvious, while being hyper-aware of stuff that everybody else has missed. You can leverage their goodness at certain skillsets and not at others by showing how their blindspots lead them into trouble.One easy way to make someone believably competent is to make sure we see them being bad at unrelated stuff—the usual go-to example is cooking. No competent protagonist knows how to cook, except for Robert B. Parker’s Spenser. But it could also be singing, driving a car, or sex. As long as they’re bad at something unrelated to the plot, we can forgive them being abnormally good at their main skill.
 
You can also create a team of people, who together add up to one competent person. This is what a lot of procedurals seem to do, and it’s also a thing in superhero comics. That way, there’s plenty of flaws and mistakes to go around, but the group self-corrects because each member has one core ability that compensates for the weaknesses of the other members.
Also, unlike wizards and giant robots, competent people exist in real life. There really are people who are better at computers, or surgery, or rockets, than pretty much everybody else. These people are out there, and you can study them, albeit maybe not up close. There are habits of thought, and ways of preparing, that go along with being really good at stuff—not saying that it’s a personality type, or that all smart characters need to be socially awkward or emotionally shut down, but that there really are people in the world who are reasonably deft.
 
And finally, the most important secret of making characters into living, breathing people whom the audience can care about is just making sure they have enough of all the other stuff that characters need. Make sure they want something. Don’t let them all talk the exact same way. Give them memorable characteristics unrelated to their plot utility. Make sure you’re picking the main character who has the most at stake. And so on.
 
But anyway, once you’ve got a believable character who’s also absurdly smart and good at what they’re doing, then you can get down to torturing him or her properly. And that’s where the fun begins!

[Elerond]

Debunking hoax news is pointless because the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/12/18/what-was-fake-on-the-internet-this-week-why-this-is-the-final-column/

[Raithe]

One reason the learning styles myth persists

 

For a while, the notion that different students have different "learning styles" was pretty hot in educational settings. In one popular formulation of this idea, there are visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners. A kinesthetic learner, for example, will learn more effectively by carrying out physical educational tasks than by listening to a lecture or receiving other types of "traditional" education. What all these theories have in common is the notion that an individual student's success will be predicated not just on their own effort and ability, but on their teacher's ability to identify and cater to their individual learning style.
 
It's a nice idea, but it also appears to be wrong. Over and over, researchers have failed to find any substantive evidence for the notion of learning styles, to the point where it's been designated a "neuromyth" by some education and psychology experts. And yet it persists — Google around and you'll find plenty of information about this unsupported concept. One key question, then, is: To what extent have educators themselves gotten the message that the idea of learning styles has been more or less debunked?

For a paper in Frontiers in Psychology, Dr. Phil Newton of Swansea University decided to put himself in the shoes of an educator trying to make a good-faith effort to understand what the literature says about this subject. What would happen, he wondered, if you searched a couple of big research databases — ERIC and PubMed — for information about learning styles and read the papers that popped up? (Newton only counted those that could be freely accessed, since "if a subscription or payment was required ... access to them would vary considerably between individual educators.")
 
The results were discouraging. Of the 109 papers that met Newton's inclusion criteria, "Most (94%) of the current research papers start out with a positive view of Learning Styles, despite the aforementioned research which discredits their use," he writes. Moreover, a full 89 percent "implicitly or directly endorse the use of Learning Styles in Higher Education." So even an educator who does the right thing, who takes the time to search for the literature, could easily come to a false conclusion about this stuff. That's discouraging, and it's an unfortunate deviation from the scientific ideal that the truth not only emerges (eventually), but that it trickles down to those who benefit most from it. In this case, the trickle appears to be slow — perhaps because learning styles is such an intuitive and nice-seeming concept.
 
At the end of his paper, Newton offers a pretty straightforward way to chip away at this persistent misconception: 

If you have got this far in reading this perspective, you likely care about education, and about education research. It is in everyone’s interests for educational research and resources — time, money, effort, to be directed toward those educational interventions which demonstrably improve student learning, and away from those which do not. Take a second to run a Google search on your own institution — put in the domain name — youruniversity.edu or.ac.uk or whatever it is, alongside the term “learning styles”. Chances are, something will come up. Start there!

In other words, it's time for educators themselves to step up and help put this myth to bed.

[Raithe]

theAtlantic - Why the British tell better children's stories
 
 

If Harry Potter and Huckleberry Finn were each to represent British versus American children’s literature, a curious dynamic would emerge: In a literary duel for the hearts and minds of children, one is a wizard-in-training at a boarding school in the Scottish Highlands, while the other is a barefoot boy drifting down the Mississippi, beset by con artists, slave hunters, and thieves. One defeats evil with a wand, the other takes to a raft to right a social wrong. Both orphans took over the world of English-language children’s literature, but their stories unfold in noticeably different ways.
 
The small island of Great Britain is an undisputed powerhouse of children’s bestsellers: The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, The Hobbit, James and the Giant Peach, Harry Potter, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Significantly, all are fantasies. Meanwhile, the United States, also a major player in the field of children’s classics, deals much less in magic. Stories like Little House in the Big Woods, The Call of the Wild, Charlotte’s Web, The Yearling, Little Women, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are more notable for their realistic portraits of day-to-day life in the towns and farmlands on the growing frontier. If British children gathered in the glow of the kitchen hearth to hear stories about magic swords and talking bears, American children sat at their mother’s knee listening to tales larded with moral messages about a world where life was hard, obedience emphasized, and Christian morality valued. Each style has its virtues, but the British approach undoubtedly yields the kinds of stories that appeal to the furthest reaches of children’s imagination.
 
It all goes back to each country’s distinct cultural heritage. For one, the British have always been in touch with their pagan folklore, says Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of children’s literature and folklore. After all, the country’s very origin story is about a young king tutored by a wizard. Legends have always been embraced as history, from Merlin to Macbeth. "Even as Brits were digging into these enchanted worlds, Americans, much more pragmatic, always viewed their soil as something to exploit," says Tatar. Americans are defined by a Protestant work ethic that can still be heard in stories like Pollyanna or The Little Engine That Could.
 
Americans write fantasies too, but nothing like the British, says Jerry Griswold, a San Diego State University emeritus professor of children’s literature. "American stories are rooted in realism; even our fantasies are rooted in realism," he said, pointing to Dorothy who unmasks the great and powerful Wizard of Oz as a charlatan.
American fantasies differ in another way: They usually end with a moral lesson learned—such as, surprisingly, in the zany works by Dr. Seuss who has Horton the elephant intoning: "A person’s a person no matter how small," and, "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent." Even The Cat in the Hat restores order from chaos just before mother gets home. In Oz, Dorothy’s Technicolor quest ends with the realization: "There’s no place like home." And Max in Where the Wild Things Are atones for the "wild rumpus" of his temper tantrum by calming down and sailing home.
 
Landscape matters: Britain’s antique countryside, strewn with moldering castles and cozy farms, lends itself to fairy-tale invention. As Tatar puts it, the British are tuned in to the charm of their pastoral fields: "Think about Beatrix Potter talking to bunnies in the hedgerows, or A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh wandering the Hundred Acre Wood." Not for nothing, J.K. Rowling set Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the spooky wilds of the Scottish Highlands. Lewis Carroll drew on the ancient stonewalled gardens, sleepy rivers, and hidden hallways of Oxford University to breathe life into the whimsical prose of Alice in Wonderland.
America’s mighty vistas, by contrast, are less cozy, less human-scaled, and less haunted. The characters that populate its purple mountain majesties and fruited plains are decidedly real: There’s the burro Brighty of the Grand Canyon, the Boston cop who stops traffic in Make Way for Ducklings, and the mail-order bride in Sarah, Plain and Tall who brings love to lonely children on a Midwestern farm. No dragons, wands, or Mary Poppins umbrellas here.
 
Britain’s pagan religions and the stories that form their liturgy never really disappeared, the literature professor Meg Bateman told me in an interview on the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Highlands. Pagan Britain, Scotland in particular, survived the march of Christianity far longer than the rest of Europe. Monotheism had a harder time making inroads into Great Britain despite how quickly it swept away the continent’s nature religions, says Bateman, whose entire curriculum is taught in Gaelic. Isolated behind Hadrian’s Wall—built by the Romans to stem raids by the Northern barbarian hordes—Scotland endured as a place where pagan beliefs persisted; beliefs brewed from the religious cauldron of folklore donated by successive invasions of Picts, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings.
 
Even well into the 19th and even 20th centuries, many believed they could be whisked away to a parallel universe. Shape shifters have long haunted the castles of clans claiming seals and bears as ancestors. "Gaelic culture teaches we needn’t fear the dark side," Bateman says. Death is neither "a portal to heaven nor hell, but instead a continued life on earth where spirits are released to shadow the living." A tear in this fabric is all it takes for a story to begin. Think Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark Is Rising, Peter Pan, The Golden Compass—all of which feature parallel worlds.
 
These were beliefs the Puritans firmly rejected as they fled Great Britain and religious persecution for the New World’s rocky shores. America is peculiar in its lack of indigenous folklore, Harvard’s Tatar says. Though African slaves brought folktales to Southern plantations, and Native Americans had a long tradition of mythology, little remains today of these rich worlds other than in small collections of Native American stories or the devalued vernacular of Uncle Remus, Uncle Tom, and the slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
 
Popular storytelling in the New World instead tended to celebrate in words and song the larger-than-life exploits of ordinary men and women: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Calamity Jane, even a mule named Sal on the Erie Canal. Out of bragging contests in logging and mining camps came even greater exaggerations—Tall Tales—about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, the twister-riding cowboy Pecos Bill, and that steel-driving man John Henry, who, born a slave, died with a hammer in his hand. All of these characters embodied the American promise: They earned their fame.
 
British children may read about royal destiny discovered when a young King Arthur pulls a sword from a stone. But immigrants to America who came to escape such unearned birthrights are much more interested in challenges to aristocracy, says Griswold. He points to Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, which reveals the two boys to be interchangeable: "We question castles here."
 
In Scotland, Bateman in turn suggests the difference between the countries may be that Americans "lack the kind of ironic humor needed for questioning the reliability of reality"—very different from the wry, self-deprecating humor of the British. Which means American tales can come off a bit "preachy" to British ears. The award-winning Maurice Sendak-illustrated book of etiquette: What Do You Say, Dear? comes to mind. Even Little Women is described by Bateman as something of a Protestant "parable about doing your best in trying circumstances."
 
Maybe a world not fixated on atonement and moral imperatives is more conducive to a rousing tale. In Edinburgh—an old town like Rome built on seven hills, where dark alleys drop from cobbled streets, dive under stone buildings, and descend crooked stairs to make their way to the sea—8-year-old Caleb Sansom is one kid who thinks so. Digging with his mum through the stacks of the downtown library, he said he likes stories with "naughty animals, doing people things." Like Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows "who drives fast, gets in accidents, sings, and goes to jail." As for American books such as The Little House in the Big Woods: "There’s a bit too much following the rules. ‘Do this. Stop doing that.’ Can get boring."
 
Pagan folktales are less about morality and more about characters like the trickster who triumphs through wit and skill: Bilbo Baggins outwits Gollum with a guessing game; the mouse in the The Gruffalo avoids being eaten by tricking a hungry owl and fox. Griswold calls tricksters the "Lords of Misrule" who appeal to a child’s natural desire to subvert authority and celebrate naughtiness: "Children embrace a logic more pagan than adult." And yet Bateman says in pagan myth it’s the young who possess the qualities needed to confront evil. Further, each side has opposing views of naughtiness and children: Pagan babies are born innocent; Christian children are born in sin and need correcting. Like Jody in The Yearling who, forced to kill his pet deer, must understand life’s hard choices before he can forgive his mother and shoulder the responsibility of manhood.
 
Ever since Bruno Bettelheim wrote The Uses of Enchantment about the psychological meaning of fairy tales, child psychologists have looked at storytelling as an important tool children use to work through their anxieties about the adult world. Fairy-tale fantasies are now regarded as almost literal depictions of childhood fears about abandonment, powerlessness, and death.
 
Most successful children’s books address these common fears through visiting and revisiting the same emotional themes, says Griswold. In his book, Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature, he identifies five basic story mechanisms children find particularly compelling—snug spaces, small worlds, scary villains, lightness or flying, as well as animated toys and talking animals—all part of the serious business of make-believe.
"Kids think through their problems by creating fantasy worlds in ways adults don’t," Griswold says. "Within these parallel universes, things can be solved, shaped and understood." Just as children learn best through hands-on activities, they tend to process their feelings through metaphorical reenactments. "Stories," Griswold noted, "serve a purpose beyond pleasure, a purpose encoded in analogies. Story arcs, like dreams, have an almost biological function."
 
It turns out that fantasy—the established domain of British children’s literature—is critical to childhood development. With faeries as voices from the earth, from beyond human history, with a different take on the meaning of life and way of understanding death, Bateman says there’s wisdom in recognizing nature as a greater life force. "Pagan folklore keeps us humble by reminding us we are temporary guests on earth—a true parable for our time."
 
Today there may be more reason than ever to find solace in fantasy. With post-9/11 terrorism fears and concern about a warming planet, Griswold says American authors are turning increasingly to fantasy of a darker kind—the dystopian fiction of The Hunger Games, The Giver, Divergent, and The Maze Runner. Like the collapse of the Twin Towers, these are sad and disturbing stories of post-apocalyptic worlds falling apart, of brains implanted with computer chips that reflect anxiety about the intrusion of a consumer society aided by social media. This is a future where hope is qualified, and whose deserted worlds are flat and impoverished. But maybe there’s purpose. If children use fairy tales to process their fears, such dystopian fantasies (and their heroes and heroines) may model the hope kids need today to address the scale of the problems ahead.

[Amentep]

Americans write fantasies too, but nothing like the British, says Jerry Griswold, a San Diego State University emeritus professor of children’s literature. "American stories are rooted in realism; even our fantasies are rooted in realism," he said, pointing to Dorothy who unmasks the great and powerful Wizard of Oz as a charlatan.

 

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

 

This would be Dorthy who traveled with a living scarecrow, a man who consists of tin replacement parts for his original body after a witch's curse caused him to cut all of his body parts off and a talking lion; who got help from a good witch; who killed two evil witches and who eventually gets home by a pair of magic silver slippers. BUT the important thing to remember is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs was an old fraud (from Omaha, to boot!)

Edited January 8, 2016 by Amentep

[Hiro Protagonist]

US town rejects solar farm after residents say it would suck up all the sunlight

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/un-climate-conference/us-town-rejects-solar-farm-after-residents-say-it-would-suck-up-the-sunlight-20151213-glmqa6.html

 

Jane Mann, a retired science teacher, reportedly told the council meeting she was concerned the panels would prevent photosynthesis and so stop the growth of nearby plants.

[Bartimaeus]

I could swear that was already posted earlier in this thread or another...and I posted some sort of refutation of the original report (although somebody said something about the refutation not covering everything).

[Vaeliorin]

 

Americans write fantasies too, but nothing like the British, says Jerry Griswold, a San Diego State University emeritus professor of children’s literature. "American stories are rooted in realism; even our fantasies are rooted in realism," he said, pointing to Dorothy who unmasks the great and powerful Wizard of Oz as a charlatan.

 

HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

 

This would be Dorthy who traveled with a living scarecrow, a man who consists of tin replacement parts for his original body after a witch's curse caused him to cut all of his body parts off and a talking lion; who got help from a good witch; who killed two evil witches and who eventually gets home by a pair of magic silver slippers. BUT the important thing to remember is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs was an old fraud (from Omaha, to boot!)

Honestly, it sounds like someone who only saw the movie and has never read all the Oz books.

[Raithe]

While we don't have a Star Wars thread active at the moment, I'll just throw this here rather than start a new one..
 
 
io9 - The Interview with the Guy Who Played Jar-Jar Binks
 
 

Jar Jar Binks is the epicentre of so many people’s rage about the issues of the Star Wars prequels, or even Star Wars in general. But people often forget that under the CG alien was actor Ahmed Best—and he’s spent over a decade having to deal with Jar Jar’s reputation.

A new interview with Best conducted by Jamie Stangroom for a new YouTube series called These Are The Actors You’re Looking For, where he hunts down stars big and small who appeared in the Star Wars saga and asks them about their time with the franchise.

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuoLcN_fK74
 
Most people he’s interviewed so far have been happy to discuss their connection with one of the biggest franchises in pop culture history. However, the ten-minute chat with Best paints a pretty miserable picture after years and years of people lashing out about Jar Jar Binks’ role in the prequel movies:

Star Wars was my first ‘most hated’ title in anything really. It was painful. One of the biggest reasons I took it was because of the challenge of it—there was no Andy Serkis and Gollum, Navi from Avatar, Martians, John Carter.

I was to be the template for this, so I was kinda working with George to pioneer this new character form of acting and storytelling. On set we were all just so focused on the challenge of it and having so much fun that the post-Star Wars stuff was a surprise. Even though you play characters, you put a lot of your own personality into it, you get emotionally and personally invested in the work that you do, it’s your work and you take pride in it. So when your work is criticized negatively, you feel a hit.

It wasn’t just fan reaction after the release of The Phantom Menace that soured Best’s time with Star Wars. Jar Jar was prominently featured in the merchandise for the movie—leading to some ridiculous products being attached to his character, including an infamously lewd-looking Jar Jar lollipop:


3
 

Apparently the item was so poorly regarded, Best was apologized to by marketers just for it actually existing.

The worst one was a lollipop dispenser, that was ridiculous, I saw that thing and ran. That was bad, the head of marketing actually called me to apologize for that one.

You can’t help but feel sorry for the guy.
 
For those fans that loathed Jar Jar, Best provides some good news by confirming he’d say no if he was ever asked back to reprise the character. (He has briefly voiced Binks in the Clone Wars animated series, though.). But still, while it’s very easy to look at the flaws Jar Jar represents, it’s twinged with sadness when you see how Best feels about it all these years later.