"The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that 3 of every 4 states that have enacted a ban on texting while driving have seen crashes actually go up rather than down. It's hard to pin down exactly why this is the case, but experts believe it is a result of people trying to avoid getting caught in states with stiff penalties. "
Abstract of the cited article: "In 2007, 22 Wake County, NC traditional-calendar schools were switched to year-round calendars, spreading the 180 instructional days evenly across the full year. This paper exploits this natural experiment to evaluate the impact of year-round schooling on student achievement. We estimate a multi-level fixed effects model to separate the impact of year-round schooling from the confounding impacts of other school, family, and individual characteristics. Results suggest year-round schooling has essentially no impact on academic achievement of the average student. Moreover, when the data is broken out by race, we find no evidence that any racial subgroup benefits from year-round schooling."
"University of Alberta researchers split a group of university students into two groups. One watched a clip of the Biggest Loser while the other watched a clip of American Idol. ... “We did find that the people who watched The Biggest Loser had worse attitudes about physical activity than those who watched the American Idol clip,” said lead author Tanya Berry, adding that the results were consistent no matter participants’ physical activity levels or weight."
These folks make the Tim Horton's obsessed seem like amateurs. Maybe they should add an espresso machine to their disaster survival kits? If lack of power is a concern you could either use your car's battery power, or use a stovetop espresso machine over a fire of some sort.
There's a history of dubious claims relating to the prevalence of domestic violence - one of the reasons that Snopes has a page stating that it's false that there are higher rates of domestic violence around the Superbowl - but this study at a glance seems at least somewhat credible (and also somewhat more cautious in its conclusions).
Umm. Wow. "The northern Chinese man, Jian Feng, married his wife and was reportedly absolutely in love with her. ... she became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl, which was when the problems arose for Feng. He thought the baby was incredibly ugly, to the point where it horrified him. ... his wife ... had spent $100,000 on intense plastic surgery to severely change how she looked before she met him. ... Feng ... divorced and sued her, claiming that she got him to marry her under false pretences ... that she was good looking ... he won $120,000 in the case."
