Professor: Fractions should be scrapped

"Fractions have had their day, being useful for by-hand calculation," DeTurck said as part of a 60-second lecture series. "But in this digital age, they're as obsolete as Roman numerals are."

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DeTurck does not want to abolish the teaching of fractions and long division altogether. He believes fractions are important for high-level mathematics and scientific research. But it could be that the study of fractions should be delayed until it can be understood, perhaps after a student learns calculus, he said. Long division has its uses, too, but maybe it doesn't need to be taught as intensely.

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"Math is hard. The idea that somehow we're going to make math just fun is just a dream."

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McCain: 'There will be other wars'

Presidential candidate John McCain shocked observers on Sunday when he told a crowd
of supporters, "There's going to be other wars. ... I'm sorry to tell
you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender but there
will be other wars."

People, McCain is not a good choice for President. Haven't you been paying attention?

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Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies

Not content with spying on other countries, the NSA (National Security Agency) will now turn on the US's own government agencies thanks to a fresh directive from president George Bush.

Under the new guidelines, the NSA and other intelligence agencies can bore into the internet networks of all their peers. The Bush administration pulled off this spy expansion by pointing to an increase in the number of cyber attacks directed against the US, possibly from foreign nations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will spearhead the effort around identifying the source of these attacks, while the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon will concentrate on retaliation.

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McDonald's dishes up diplomas to go

McDonald's employees trained in skills needed to run outlets for the fast-food chain can get credit toward high school diplomas, the British government announced Monday.

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It is the first time the government has granted national recognition to corporate training schemes. But universities and colleges will have to decide whether to accept the corporate qualifications as grounds for admission.

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Target tells a blogger to go away

Early this month, the blog's founder, Amy Jussel, called Target, complaining about a new advertising campaign that depicted a woman splayed across a big target pattern--the retailer's emblem--with the bull's-eye at her crotch.

"Targeting crotches with a bull's-eye is not the message we should be putting out there," she said in an e-mail interview.

Target offered an e-mail response:

"Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets," a public relations person wrote to ShapingYouth.

Not a good move, Target.

Read more.

imagination is more important than knowledge

From explodingdog.com

Must We Fear Adolescent Sexuality?

But if the American data appear to confirm conventional wisdom that raging hormones and peer
pressures put teenagers at risk of making unwise sexual decisions, public health data from other
countries challenge this commonly held knowledge. International comparison demonstrates that
developed countries vary dramatically in the degree to which the sexual maturation of teenagers
leads to adverse outcomes. No country forms a more stark contrast for comparison with the United
States than does the Netherlands: Dutch teenagers are far less likely to either become pregnant or
contract an STD than are their American peers.

A fascinating article and well worth the read.

Read more (PDF version).

Or html version.

Same-Sex Couples Just as Committed as Heterosexual Counterparts

Same-sex couples are as committed and happy in their romantic relationships as heterosexual couples, find two studies in the January issue of the journalDevelopmental Psychology.

The authors of the studies say their findings challenge the stereotype that same-sex relationships aren't as healthy or secure as heterosexual pairings.

I know quite a few heterosexual pairing that are not healthy or secure.

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Spouses Who Fight Live Longer

Preliminary results from a survey of married couples suggest that disputing husbands and wives who hold in their anger die earlier than expressive couples.

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"The key matter is, when the conflict happens, how do you resolve it?" Harburg said. "When you don't, if you bury your anger, and you brood on it and you resent the other person or the attacker, and you don't try to resolve the problem, then you're in trouble."

The findings add to past research showing that the release of anger can be healthy.

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Why did colleges stay mum on MPAA stats?

John Heidemann was skeptical about what the movie industry was saying about campus piracy.

A researcher in the Information and Science Institute at the University of Southern California, Heidemann had heard the film studios' claim that college students downloading movies on campus were responsible for 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses to piracy.

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So, working with a team of researchers last summer--the famous Hollywood sign on the mountain clearly visible from his workplace--Heidemann and the group came up with a way to track file-sharing use on USC's network. Following a 14-hour monitoring of the system, the team concluded that between 3 and 13 percent of those on the school's network were using peer-sharing technology and accounted for between 21 and 33 percent of overall traffic, he said.

There was no way for Heidemann to discern whether the information being transferred was pirated. But even in a worst case scenario, 13 percent indicated that only a small minority of USC students were engaged in illegal file sharing. The MPAA's claims "did not hold in our analysis," he said.

This was an example of a university not relying on the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to tell it what was happening on its network. But USC is the exception rather than the rule.

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Truth was first US casualty in Iraq war: study

US President George W. Bush and his top officials ran roughshod over the truth in the run-up to the Iraq war lying a total of 935 times, a study released Wednesday found.

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Senate delays eavesdropping vote

The Senate on Thursday signaled support for granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the government conduct warrantless eavesdropping, a sign that the contentious provision may be headed for approval next week.

And we let them get away with doing this.

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US scientists close to creating artificial life: study

The move, which comes after five years of research, is seen as the penultimate stage in the endeavour to create an artificial life form based entirely on a man-made DNA genome -- something which has tantalised scientists and sci-fi writers for years.

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Teen sex advice podcast gains popularity

The 28-year-old mother of three speaks from experience, and her video podcast, the Midwest Teen Sex Show, is attracting thousands of viewers.

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Fulton to pay students in after-school program

Forty students from Creekside High and Bear Creek Middle schools in Fairburn will be the first to try the "Learn & Earn" program, where students will get paid to attend after-school tutoring programs.

Students will make approximately $8 an hour, and be eligible for bonuses if their grades improve, said Kirk Wilks, district spokesman. The initial students are in the eighth and 11th grades.

I don't have a good feeling about this.

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Forced annulment keeps couple apart

It was the police, delivering news that a judge had annulled their marriage in absentia after some of Fatima's relatives sought the divorce on grounds she had married beneath her.

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Fatima's case underscores shortcomings in the kingdom's Islamic legal system in which rules of evidence are shaky, lawyers are not always present and sentences often depend on the whim of judges.

The most frequent victims are women, who already suffer severe restrictions on daily life in Saudi Arabia: They cannot drive, appear before a judge without a male representative, or travel abroad without a male guardian's permission.

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Saudi lawyer Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, who used to represent the couple, said local interpretations of Islamic law hold that relatives of a married couple have the right to seek an annulment if they feel the marriage lowers the extended family's status.

Now this is completely fucked up.

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Should AT&T police the Internet?

A decade after the government said that AT&T and other service providers don't have to police their networks for pirated content, the telecommunications giant is voluntarily looking for ways to play traffic cop.

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Anti-war group says war crimes are "encouraged"

Iraq war veteran Jon Turner said it was almost expected of him to pull the trigger on people who didn't need to die. So he did.

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"The killing of innocent civilians is policy," veteran Mike Blake said. "It's unit policy and it's Army policy. It's not official policy, but it's what's happens on the ground everyday. It's what unit commanders individually encourage."

And we let them get away with this shit.

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Bacteria race ahead of drugs

Yet the problem goes far beyond one bug and a handful of drugs. Entire classes of mainstay antibiotics are being threatened with obsolescence, and bugs far more dangerous than staph are evolving in ominous ways.

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World not running out of oil, say experts

A landmark study of more than 800 oilfields by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera) has concluded that rates of decline are only 4.5 per cent a year, almost half the rate previously believed, leading the consultancy to conclude that oil output will continue to rise over the next decade.

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The optimistic view of the world's oil resource was also given support by BP's chief economist, Peter Davies, who dismissed theories of “Peak Oil” as fallacious. Instead, he gave warning that world oil production would peak as demand weakened, because of political constraints, including taxation and government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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