Rotundus.com

Cheating for Charity

”New research indicates that people may be more likely to lie when a charity benefits from their dishonesty.“

Spanish Is Faster Than English, But Mandarin Is Slow

”Some languages sound faster than others, but most convey information at the same rate”

Are our street names sexist?

”A tiny proportion of streets in Rome are named after women, while nearly half are named after men - and it is a similar story in other major cities around the world. Outrageous sexism, a simple fact of history, or both?” Somehow I’m not feeling particularly outraged at this - besides most of those names are probably technically family names anyways.

Thai student's money-making effort at centre of US Supreme Court copyright case

Apparently at least in the US it may be illegal to resell foreign purchased works in the country if those works say “for sale only in countries A, B, and C” even if the work was originally legally purchased there. International editions can be quite a bit cheaper - albeit generally with lower print quality.

Surprisingly that's the title of what currently shows up on the New York Times homepage as most emailed, and second most viewed:

Researchers originally attributed the cohabitation effect to selection, or the idea that cohabitors were less conventional about marriage and thus more open to divorce. As cohabitation has become a norm, however, studies have shown that the effect is not entirely explained by individual characteristics like religion, education or politics. Research suggests that at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.

Study: Economic Recovery Kind of Sucks for Old Ladies

”when employment goes up, mortality increases disproportionately among the elderly and among older women in particular.”

Many hybrid-car owners buy once -- but not again, Polk study says

”Only 35% of hybrid vehicle owners chose to purchase a hybrid again when they returned to the market in 2011, according to auto information company R.L. Polk & Co.
If you factor out the super-loyal Toyota Prius buyers, the repurchase rate drops to under 25%.“ Hmn... I’m wondering if they’ve been around in the market long enough to make this a reasonable comparison. 35% is a lot higher than the fraction of hybrids currently on the roads though.

Google saves energy money by cooling its buildings with ice

I fixed the title for you. "Google’s new $700 million data centers in Taiwan will make ice at night, when electricity is significantly cheaper, and use it to cool the buildings during the day, reports Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge. It’s called thermal storage, and it’s basically a battery, but for air conditioning."

In cancer science, many 'discoveries' don't hold up

Seems to be part of the problem with the publish-or-perish model of academia. "as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. ... Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. ... Scientists at Bayer did not have much more success. Of 47 cancer projects at Bayer during 2011, less than one-quarter could reproduce previously reported findings, despite the efforts of three or four scientists working full time for up to a year. ... Bayer and Amgen found that the prestige of a journal was no guarantee a paper would be solid. ... The problem goes beyond cancer. On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent."

In the wake of the US government launching antitrust action against book publishers and Apple, cutting prices is what Amazon appears to be doing. What are the publishers and booksellers claiming?

But publishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards.

I wonder how much of this is the booksellers shooting themselves in the foot via the platform locking that they generally insist upon. Most ereaders will support quite a few ebooks formers, but for buying most mainstream books you're stuck with encrypted options that tie the book to a particular type of ereader. Interestingly, with Harry Potter finally becoming available in ebook form, will publishers learn anything?

Among the other innovations Rowling offers is the ability to download up to eight digital copies of each book, either for use on another device or for lending. Again, this seems like an obvious feature that e-book publishers could provide — since digital copies effectively have no cost — but very few do. And at a time when publishers either don’t allow their books to be loaned through libraries at all (as most of the Big Six do not) or have jacked up the prices they charge libraries (as Random House recently did), the Potter books can be loaned an unlimited number of times, and the lending license lasts for five years.

I imagine that for a lot of people the process of getting access to media probably looks a fair bit like the following comic. Of course this doesn't even really get into the whole additional issue of region restrictions (primarily affecting those outside of the US).