Random links
- Update: Kuwait leader rejects death sentence
- Why democracy isn't necessarily always a good thing... "Kuwait's ruler has refused to pass a bill previously voted through by parliament that would allow Muslims who insult Islam to be put to death and would harshly penalize Christians and other non-Muslims." (there'd be a minimum 10-year jail sentence for these other cases). It does seem as though the Kuwaiti parliament can overturn this ruling though with a sufficiently large majority.
- ESL Vocabulary Acquisition: Target and Approach
- "Goulden, Nation, and Read's (1990) intervention indicates that the receptive vocabulary size range of college-educated native English speakers is 13,200 - 20,700 base words (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990), with an average of 17,200 base words. ... A recent study (Cervatiuc, 2007) suggests that the average receptive vocabulary size of highly proficient university-educated non-native English speakers ranges between 13,500 and 20,000 base words, being comparable to that of university-educated English native speakers"
- Guardsman impaled by own bayonet in Parliament Hill mishap
- From the Canadian capital: "A member of the Governor General's Foot Guards was seriously injured during the Changing of the Guards ceremony on Parliament Hill Wednesday morning." Oops!
- Eurozone's banking union will not be credible; FDIC-type fund seems out of reach
- "Nobody questions the credibility of the US government as a rescuer of last resort of the US banks. And that is because the US banks’ total liabilities only represent 1x the GDP of the US. ... The largest US bank – JP Morgan – has liabilities equal to 13% of US GDP. By contrast 20 European banks have liabilities of more than 50% of their home country's GDP." Apparently Irish bank liabilities are worst, totalling over 700% of the region's GDP if I'm interpreting a figure on the page correctly.
- Lipstick, the Recession and Evolutionary Psychology
- "Dating back to the Great Depression, times of recession have consistently yielded anomalous gains for the beauty products industry, even while consumers reign in spending on household goods and recreational products. Journalists have dubbed this curiosity the 'lipstick effect.'" The writer reports on studies they conducted and published which "confirmed that the lipstick effect is not only real, but deeply rooted in women’s mating psychology."