Rotundus.com

Students Receive Subsidized Studies in Hungary — for a Price

"When Mr. Szabo, 24, graduates soon from law school, he will be free to go wherever in the world he wants. But Mr. Birtalan, 18, was required to sign a contract at the beginning of his first year as a sociology major because of a new rule introduced in September. As a beneficiary of the state-funded university system, he will be obliged to work for two years in Hungary for every year of his subsidized studies." Doesn't sound too unreasonable to me - particularly since leaving the country to work elsewhere only seems to involve paying the non-subsidized tuition fees. That said, I'm glad I'm not subject to such a system.

Office Conflict: Women and the ‘Catty’ Trap

"both men and women perceived office disputes between women to be more disruptive to office life than fights between men or between a man and a woman."

Grammar Lesson of the Day: But

"'Never begin a sentence with but.' So my college freshmen tell me. ... There never was such a rule in English grammar. Nor was there ever such a rule in classical Greek, or in Latin. It is the quick and natural way to begin an adversative sentence, one that shifts direction from the previous, or contradicts it, or backs away. Unless you have a particular reason for preferring the slower comma, however, comma, not only may you begin a sentence with but: you really should do it."

NASA 3D prints rocket parts — with steel, not plastic

Currently-available home 3D printers only seem to do plastic - if something like this makes it to home markets it would seem to be the time in which controlling gun ownership becomes more or less impossible.

Why didn’t more people come to the aid of Calgary victim Wong Shuk Yee? asked Metro News. This is basically an instance of the Bystander Effect which has been observed for quite some time by psychologists:

The bystander effect or Genovese syndrome is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases where individuals do not offer any means of help in an emergency situation to the victim when other people are present. The probability of help has often appeared to be inversely related to the number of bystanders; in other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. The mere presence of other bystanders greatly decreases intervention. In general, this is believed to happen because as the number of bystanders increases, any given bystander is less likely to notice the situation, interpret the incident as a problem, and less likely to assume responsibility for taking action.

It's not too often that I post music videos, but here's a song I don't think I encountered before today. The original author is British and the singer here is Dutch so it may not yet have been heard much in North America. The full lyrics are here. Referencing not only the beauty in life but also the broken parts - "God of the pimp and paedophile" - is a change of pace from the typically happy/clappy vapid nature of a lot of modern Christian music.

I spend a while recently trying to find interesting quotes for my dissertation. Here's a few from one list of quotes that I found interesting but which didn't make it in:

"If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance" - G.K. Chesterton

"The trouble with simpli?cation is that things are complicated. The trouble with things being complicated is that we need to simplify them" - Charles Crawford

"Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn't far better. After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far worse" - Bryan Caplan

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" - Clay Shirky

At the moment my concluding chapter summing things up is the only one lacking an introductory quote. I was a little tempted to throw in the following quote from Kenneth Starr but decided doing so would be a bit too facetious:

After an extensive investigation, the office produced a report that addressed the many questions that confronted the difficult issues, it laid out new evidence, and it reached a definitive conclusion.