Rotundus.com

The Myth of Chinese Super Schools

"Chinese students regularly win any competition that depends on test performance. Where they fall short is creativity, originality, divergence from authority. The admirers of Chinese test scores never point out that what makes it the 'best' education system is also what makes it the worst education system. It is very effective in 'eliminating individual differences, suppressing intrinsic motivation, and imposing conformity.'" Reminds me of How Schools Kill Creativity, though far predating the industrial-revolution-created environment that Ken Robinson talks about there.

Father gets custody of child despite rape

"In his ruling, McCurtain County Associate District Judge Michael DeBerry found that Melonie Hamm Knutson had indeed been the victim of second-degree rape by John Keith Tucker, who was about 40 years old when Knutson conceived their first child at age 14. ... However, the judge ruled that the father, despite his "reprehensible" actions, could provide the most stable lifestyle for the 5-year-old boy."

The idea that milk prevents broken bones is an udder sham

"no correlation between stronger bones and milk consumption" and "higher milk consumption correlated with higher rates of death."

Media Companies (and Executives) on the Hot Seat in 2015

"Certain new realities are beyond argument: Clutter is up — more ads, more channels, more content — advertising rates continue to drop, and audiences are programming their own universe in text, video and audio. Consumers don’t want to watch commercials, are fleeing networks, hate reruns, are increasingly bored by reality programming, shun print products and, oh, by the way, don’t want to pay much for content either."

Guessing Christian readers wouldn't be too surprised to here that they've targetted Christians too but there are other interesting angles:

1. 'Piss Christ' is back in the news:
   

   The Associated Press is among the numerous news outlets that have been self-censoring images of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that may have provoked Wednesday's deadly Paris attack. In a statement, the news organization said that such censorship is standard policy ... The conservative Washington Examiner publication then pointed out that the AP nonetheless continued to carry an image of Andres Serrano's 1987 "Piss Christ" photograph ... Some time after the Examiner's post, the AP appears to have taken the "Piss Christ" image off its website.

2. Dan Savage on this subject (while calling AP's explanation for dropping the Piss Christ photos bogus):
   

   Here's what the AP should've said to Christian conservatives screaming about Piss Christ and double standards: "Yeah, we blurred out those Charlie Hebdo cartoons because we're afraid of them. We didn't do the same to Piss Christ because we're not afraid of you." The fact that cartoonists, publishers, editors, photographers, artists, comedians, and satirists aren't afraid of "you"—the fact that they're not afraid to mock Christ, Christians, Christianity—is something that Christians, conservative and otherwise, should be proud of.

3. Also on the subject of double standards:
   

   The last lawsuit to be filed against Charlie Hebdo in 2014 was declared ineligible only because Islam doesn’t qualify for the special legal regime that criminalizes blasphemy against Christianity and Judaism in the Alsace region. And the British Muslims in 1989 wanted authorities to invoke British blaspehemy laws, not the shar’ia, to sanction Salman Rushdie’s novel – but there too Islam did not qualify for protection.

4. Charlie Hebdo ran a campaign to try to get the National Front party banned which is seems a bit odd for a magazine supposedly devoted to absolutely no limits on free speech.
5. #JeSuisAhmed: The Muslim Victim in the Paris Massacre is another interesting angle, but again one you're more likely already familiar with. The Atlantic picked a good example:
   

   I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so. #JesuisAhmed"

(HT: The Dish for pointing out at least a couple of these originally).

The Paradox of the Free-Market Liberal

"Over all, having a conservative personality made people lean to the left economically — with an important exception. Among people who were both highly attentive to politics and from countries in which left-right ideological conflict was prominent, like the United States, having a conservative personality was associated with holding right-wing economic views."

De-Dynamization

A quote from their cited paper: "… nearly every country that experienced a large democratic transition after a period of above-average growth (more than the cross-country average of 2 percent) experienced a sharp deceleration in growth in the 10 years following the democratizing transition." Is this regression to the mean or something else? Also interesting is this on the relationship between economic growth and the transition from a dictatorship to democracy.

Cadbury Dairy Milk: why rounded chunks of chocolate taste sweeter

"'The generalisation that has now been documented across a range of food and beverage products ... is that sweet is round while bitter is angular.' ... it should have been possible for Cadbury to reduce the sugar content in the rounder Dairy Milk a little, while consumers’ perception of the taste remained unchanged.”"

Miscalibrations in judgements of attractiveness with cosmetics.

"We found that men and women agree on the amount of cosmetics they find attractive, but overestimate the preferences of women and, when considering the preferences of men, overestimate even more. We also find that models' self-applied cosmetics are far in excess of individual preferences. These findings suggest that attractiveness perceptions with cosmetics are a form of pluralistic ignorance, whereby women tailor their cosmetics use to an inaccurate perception of others' preferences."

People don't think about it a lot, but some of the more interesting developments I've come across the last while have been in the area of drinking water. Most recently, this has come in the form of improvements in wastewater reclamation, as described in an article from Bill Gate's website entitled This Ingenious Machine Turns Feces Into Drinking Water

Why would anyone want to turn waste into drinking water and electricity? Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren’t properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically. If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy. Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries.

Water reclamation isn't exactly new and, when done, has generally been used to address a water shortage which is a purpose it might also serve here. What interested me here is that this particular method of treatment produces power rather than consuming it (and there also some byproducts which may be used as fertilizer - biosolids is the current EPA euphemism for that sort of thing). Digging a bit more I found a 2012 article talking about the energy required for wastewater treatment and a similar device (though I suspect that the end result there probably wouldn't meet drinking water standards):

The device produced 0.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram of organic waste. In contrast, sewage treatment usually consumes 1.2kWh per kilogram.

I'm not sure quite how the device Gates is promoting compares to this competitor - they do at least appear to be separate products - and, of course, there's also that problem Gates himself noted:

The history of philanthropy is littered with well-intentioned inventions that never deliver on their promise.

I suppose we'll have to wait and see how this turns out.