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LaTeX is a typesetting language that scientific papers and things like dissertations tend to get written in. It produces nice-looking documents but also can be kind of tedious to work with at times. The extra formatting-related commands tend to make things like spell-checking and grammar-checking more complicated. How to fix?

Spell-checking isn't too difficult - as command-line tools like aspell support this and the LaTeX editor I've been using also has spell-checking support, though it sometimes gets confused by commands.

So far TextLint is the only grammar-related tool I'm aware of which works directly with latex code. (False positives galore in error detection!) Everything else seems to require that something like detex be run - though latex2rtf might be a better way to get the documents into Microsoft Word or into OpenOffice (where I've installed LanguageTool). There are also some command-line tools that'll work directly on detex output. Still, it would be nice to have a grammar/style-checker working directly on the source code. Anything else out there that I might be missing?

(UPDATE: looks like I might also want to take a look at TeXstudio)

Interesting bit of an article in Harvard Magazine:

What if he simply told people they were taking placebos? The question ultimately inspired a pilot study, published by the peer-reviewed science and medicine journal PLOS ONE in 2010, that yielded his most famous findings to date. His team again compared two groups of IBS sufferers. One group received no treatment. The other patients were told they’d be taking fake, inert drugs (delivered in bottles labeled “placebo pills”) and told also that placebos often have healing effects.

The study’s results shocked the investigators themselves: even patients who knew they were taking placebos described real improvement, reporting twice as much symptom relief as the no-treatment group. That’s a difference so significant, says Kaptchuk, it’s comparable to the improvement seen in trials for the best real IBS drugs.

The article does note that "the study was small and has yet to be replicated" but I'm intrigued. This makes me thinking of a lot of an recent article I read on some rising skepticism over "priming" in psychology. Of course, this makes it all the more confusing - i.e. people are told that they're being given a placebo but that that placebos often having healing effects.

Pollution boosts clean air industry in China

"But for some, masks and filtration machines just don’t cut it. For around a quarter of a million dollars, you can buy a clean air dome to put over your backyard, giving it the look of a football stadium. Xiao Long sells those. ... An international school in Beijing has bought two of Xiao’s clean air domes, and orders are piling up from other cities, he says. Just months ago, Xiao managed 40 people. He’ll have a staff of 200 handling all this new business come springtime."

'High tolerance' cited in man's drunk driving win

Seems a bit strange but given that the cops, bartenders and doctors are basically incapable of guessing blood alcohol level based on behaviour (excepting at extremes) perhaps not as unreasonable as it might sound.

Curbing The Cost Of College: Coursera Wins Approval To Offer Online Courses For Credit For Under $200

Basically it seems that those involved need to pay for proctored exams and they have some sort of homework verification system based on a 'biometric profile of their unique typing patterns' - their partner for this: California State University.

Both Israeli and Palestinian textbooks demonize other side: study

"The study was jointly conducted by researchers in the United States, Israel and the Palestinian authority and funded by the U.S. State Department."

Here's Jaclyn Friedman quoted in a recent National Post article on whether or not gender quotas should be imposed on corporate boards (emphasis mine):

There’s also this assumption that when you have a quota system, all of these less talented and less qualified women are going to jump the line. But in reality, that’s an incredibly sexist assumption because it assumes that there is a much larger pool of qualified men than women, which is ridiculous.

One thing that she doesn't account for are differences in IQ which it seems can be messed around with through the educational system. Just last year it was announced that the average female IQ is now higher than the average male IQ whereas the reverse was previously the case. Another thing to note is that the standard deviation of male IQs was higher than amongst female IQs, though this too may be changing. Given those parameters it wouldn't seem too surprising that you'd currently find "a much larger pool of qualified men than women" at the high-IQ ranges though over time you might expect that to change as new generations come along.

There's of course also the issue of the amount of time devoted to working and the association of this with the development of expertise, with men still typically working longer and with fewer interruptions than women. One slightly interesting thing to note is that despite the university system now being majority female, the majors requiring the most study time are still majority male - the exception to this is actually the majors that I'd expect you'd be most likely to find on corporate boards. i.e. Business majors average the lowest amounts of study-time although business students seem to spend far more hours working for pay than other majors which I guess is another way to accumulate expertise.

And, of course, there are the studies both for and against such quotas. Personally I've got no objection to women on corporate boards, but I do object to quotas.