ELI5: Why is it when oil prices were $110/barrel I paid $4/gallon at the pump, but now that they are $60/barrel I pay $3/gallon at the pump? : explainlikeimfive. World News America - Why do Finland's schools get the best results? Finland's schools score consistently at the top of world rankings, yet the pupils have the fewest number of class hours in the developed world. Last year more than 100 foreign delegations and governments visited Helsinki, hoping to learn the secret of their schools' success. In 2006, Finland's pupils scored the highest average results in science and reading in the whole of the developed world. In the OECD's exams for 15 year-olds, known as PISA, they also came second in maths, beaten only by teenagers in South Korea. This isn't a one-off: in previous PISA tests Finland also came out top.
The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind. A tactic used in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject. The BBC's Tom Burridge talks to Henna Virkkunen, the Minister of Education and Science in Finland. Late learners. How I Learned to Give Up Luxuries So I Could Thrive in an Expensive City.
THE SCIENCE OF CRAVING. At the meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC, there are 30,000 delegates. And one of them has changed the way the others look at desire. Amy Fleming meets Dr Kent Berridge From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, May/Jue 2015 THE STATELY STRETCH of New York Avenue, in Washington, DC, that runs between the White House and Mount Vernon Square is bookended by Starbucks. The air is heady with cocoa powder and steamed milk, and the counter is overloaded with treats: cheesecake brownies, devil’s food doughnuts, salted-caramel squares.
One block along the avenue, in an incongruously squat building, is a branch of McDonald’s. Past the second Starbucks, at Mount Vernon Square, stands the Walter E. For almost three decades, he has swum against the tide of established thinking, to map the brain mechanics of the reward system—the part of the brain that lights up on scans when people enjoy something, whether it’s cake, snogging, heroin or Facebook. Cast old and new unite at 'Mad Max: Fury Road' premiere. My friend at work wrote this on the whiteboard. A Sticky Situation. Mussel foot proteins contain similar amounts of lysine and the catechol dopa. Catechols are chemical compounds used in such biological functions as neurotransmission. However, certain proteins have adopted dopa for adhesive purposes. From discussions with Waite, Butler realized that CTC contained not only lysine but also a compound similar to dopa. Further, CTC paired its catechol with lysine, just like mussel foot proteins do.
“We developed a better, more stable molecule than the actual CTC,” Butler explained. “Then we modified it to tease out the importance of the contributions from either lysine or the catechol.” Co-lead author Greg Maier, a graduate student in the Butler Lab, created six different compounds with varying amounts of lysine and catechol. Only the two compounds containing a cationic amine, such as lysine, and catechol exhibited adhesive strength and a reduced intervening film thickness, which measures the amount two surfaces can be squeezed together. The biggest mistakes people make when choosing a life partner. To a frustrated single person, life can often feel like this: And at first glance, research seems to back this up, suggesting that married people are on average happier than single people and much happier than divorced people.1 But a closer analysis reveals that if you split up “married people” into two groups based on marriage quality, “people in self-assessed poor marriages are fairly miserable, and much less happy than unmarried people, and people in self-assessed good marriages are even more happy than the literature reports”.2 In other words, here’s what’s happening in reality: Dissatisfied single people should actually consider themselves in a neutral, fairly hopeful position, compared to what their situation could be.
A single person who would like to find a great relationship is one step away from it, with their to-do list reading, “1) Find a great relationship.” All the research on how vastly happiness varies between happy and unhappy marriages makes perfect sense, of course. Five Basic Hand Stitches You Should Know for Repairing Your Own Clothes. Startups Vie to Build an Uber for Health Care. Darren Gold had a stomach virus the first time he used an app called Heal to summon a doctor to his Beverly Hills home. He liked the Stanford-trained doctor who showed up so much that he called Heal again when his 2-year-old son had a fever, and again when the whole family had colds.
The charges—$99 each for the first two visits; $200 for the family—weren’t covered by insurance, but Mr. Gold, who owns a corrugated-box company, says that was still a bargain compared with taking time off work to go to the doctor. “Now, whenever my son bumps himself, he says, ‘Daddy, we need to get the doctor here,’ ” Mr. Gold says. Heal is one of several startups putting a high-tech spin on old-fashioned house calls—or “in-person visits,” since they can take place anywhere.
The companies use slightly different models. Atlanta-based MedZed sends a nurse to a patient’s home to do a preliminary exam. True North is one of the few services that is reducing ER use. Write to Melinda Beck at HealthJournal@wsj.com. Peeling Back the Layers of Personal Finance Success. The Covert World of People Trying to Edit Wikipedia for Pay. On January 11, 2013, James Heilman, an emergency-room physician and one of Wikipedia’s most prolific medical editors, was standing watch over the online encyclopedia’s entry for a back procedure called a kyphoplasty.
The page originally suggested that the procedure’s effectiveness was “controversial,” and an unidentified Wikipedia user had proposed changing the text to “well documented and studied”—a characterization that Heilman thought wasn’t supported by existing research. He rejected the change. Kyphoplasty, along with vertebroplasty, the procedure it shares a Wikipedia page with, is a common treatment when someone’s spine breaks—a frequent occurrence in people with osteoporosis, which makes bones brittle—and then doesn’t heal naturally. The procedure grew popular in the ‘90s, despite the fact that its effectiveness wasn’t backed up by definitively convincing research. Some are concerned about the money being spent on a procedure that’s controversial and sometimes risky. Oath Keepers: The heavily armed white vigilantes in Ferguson, explained. Police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, now appear to agree on at least one thing: A new group of heavily armed white men in the St.
Louis suburb is doing more harm than good. "Their presence was both unnecessary and inflammatory," St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said, according to Reuters. Belmar was referring to the Oath Keepers, a group of armed men who showed up to Ferguson to purportedly protect reporters with a conservative media outlet. But the presence of armed white men in a predominantly black community has stoked further tensions in Ferguson, which is marking the one-year anniversary of the police shooting of Michael Brown with new demonstrations against police brutality — leading both police and demonstrators to ask what can be done about the group. But this is typical for the Oath Keepers, a conservative group whose members often put themselves in these types of confrontations, seemingly to show that they can. Who are the Oath Keepers? Scott Olson/Getty Images. Quora. El Capitan file hints at faster iPad mini 4 with full split-view apps support.
One of iOS 9’s marquee additions is support for split-screen applications on the iPad. This allows users to operate two iPad applications simultaneously, side-by-side. However, due to processor limitations of older iPad models, the full 50/50 split-view functionality is currently only present on the iPad Air 2 thanks to the device’s A8X processor. However, with the help of developer Hamza Sood, we have discovered that the feature may soon be expanding to the iPad mini… The resource file shown above from the upcoming OS X El Capitan’s Safari 9 browser shows support for a split-screen view of Safari on the iPad mini. While last year’s iPad mini upgrade was minimal, solely bringing over the gold color option, Touch ID sensor, and in-app Apple Pay from the larger iPad Air 2, we believe that this fall’s tablet refresh will be more substantial.
Apple is holding its next media event on Wednesday, September 9th, and it possible that it could debut the new iPad mini alongside the new iPhones. - Album on Imgur. ELI5: What do Tibetan Buddhist monks actually do day-to-day and why are they more well known than other Buddhist monk groups? : explainlikeimfive. DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception. KEN WAMSLEY SOMETIMES DREAMS that he’s playing softball again.
He’ll be at center field, just like when he played slow pitch back in his teens, or pounding the ball over the fence as the crowd goes wild. Other times, he’s somehow inexplicably back at work in the lab. Wamsley calls them nightmares, these stories that play out in his sleep, but really the only scary part is the end, when “I wake up and I have no rectum anymore.” Wamsley is 73. After developing rectal cancer and having surgery to treat it in 2002, he walks slowly and gets up from the bench in his small backyard slowly. He enjoyed the work, particularly the precision and care it required.
At the time, Wamsley and his coworkers weren’t particularly concerned about the strange stuff. Today Wamsley suffers from ulcerative colitis, a bowel condition that causes him sudden bouts of diarrhea. “Who knew?” The Washington Works DuPont plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, on Wednesday, August 5, 2015. “I said, ‘I was in Teflon. Why Can’t Our Cities Be More Like Video Games? — Backchannel. Smart mayors will enrich the next version of 311 by augmented reality In the 2007 best-seller “Spook Country,” William Gibson foresaw “the locative”: virtual fantasies layered over the real-world grid, visible to anyone with the right geo-aware gear.
In the book, the charismatic Bobby Chombo is the only guy around with the technical chops needed to make the locative work. So when an artist wants to, say, digitally re-create the death of River Phoenix on Sunset Strip, he or she needs Chombo’s help. Cities are real-world grids: you can see that instantly on a Google map. But it’s not so easy to see the city as a civic entity.
The stuff that counts — the interaction between people and city services — is hidden in plain view, invisible to almost everyone. If you’re already sold on the idea of civic technology, 311 is pretty nifty. Los Angeles’s version of 311 is at the top of every website across the city (check out lapl.org, lacity.org, lafd.org, etc.). I celebrate this civic activity. Uk.businessinsider. Flickr / Harold NavarroNew York City. City life is expensive, but just how expensive? Using the Economic Policy Institute's family budget calculator, which accounts for two parents and two kids, research engine FindTheHome created a cost of living index to compare over 600 US metros. They then analyzed the data in 15 major cities to determine a suggested take-home household income to live comfortably in each area using the "50-30-20 rule" of personal finance, meaning 50% of after-tax, take-home pay goes to necessities (such as housing, food, childcare, healthcare, and transportation), 30% towards discretionary spending, and 20% towards saving.
Note that these numbers are suggestions based on the available data. They are meant for a four-person family and suggest a generous amount of annual savings, which may not be preferred or possible for some families. Quora. ELI5: Why does smelling something like wasabi or horseradish immediately clear your sinuses? : explainlikeimfive. Quora. Just got this lovely anniversary note from my lovely girlfriend.. Coming to America. On becoming African-American While my father was still around, he and my mother revered all things “African.” Kente cloth covered and protected our bodies like saran wrap. My parents didn’t like Dove, Irish Spring and Lever 2000’s suggestion that soap should be white or light-pastel.
Cleanliness was next to godliness and since God was Black, our soap was black too. Glade plugins, Lysol air-fresheners, perfumes, colognes and lotions were for white people and those who wanted to be like them; we freshened our air with incense, scented our bodies with oils, and moisturized our skin with shea butter. We would have been Amish had we been white instead of black, and lived in Lancaster County instead of Bed-Stuy. Although all-things “African” had been exalted in my house, this was not the case for project kids at P.S. 40, nor the “best of the brightest” at P.S/I.S. 308. “Ugh, why are you dressed like that?” “Because I’m black.” “An African booty-scratcher?” “Yeah, an African booty-scratcher. I watched all 12 hours of the unedited Planned Parenthood videos. Here’s what I learned. "A lot of people want intact hearts these days," she says.
"Always as many intact livers as possible. Some people want lower extremities too, which, that's simple. That's easy. I don't know what they're doing with it. " The woman in the video is Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood's medical director. She thinks she's talking to a biologics firm that provides fetal tissue to researchers. She isn't. In recent weeks, the Center for Medical Progress has released five 10-minute segments that purport to show that Planned Parenthood profits from procuring fetal tissue for researchers. But behind those excerpts are just over 12 hours of uncut video. I've covered the Planned Parenthood scandal for the past month, and increasingly this seems to be the core of the debate: Are the edited videos fair?
The videos are edited to make Planned Parenthood look bad. The videos are sting videos that are designed to smear Planned Parenthood. "I've had patients ask me before, 'Can I donate this? ' Quora. 3 New Bill Cosby Accusers Reveal Explicit Details of Alleged Assaults. “I was bordering between vomiting and passing out,” woman claims in shocking blow-by-blow account The sexual assault scandal surrounding besieged comedian Bill Cosby spread even further on Wednesday, as three new accusers, including an actress who said she appeared on “The Cosby Show,” came forward to accuse the TV legend of wrongdoing. At a press conference in attorney Gloria Allred’s Los Angeles office, the women — identified as Linda Ridgeway Whitedeer, Colleen Hughes and Eden Tirl — detailed at length how they were allegedly victimized by Cosby.
Hughes, who said that she was an American Airlines flight attendant when she met Cosby in the early ’70s on a flight to L.A., explained that the comedian “flirted with me the entire flight” and invited her to lunch in Beverly Hills when they landed. Also Read: Bill Cosby Mocks College Sexual-Consent Rules in Newly Unearthed Book Passage Photo: Pamela Chelin Hughes claimed that, approximately a year later, she encountered Cosby on another flight.
Uk.businessinsider. I Shouldn't Have Waited So Long to Travel Overseas. Not Everybody Likes Kissing : Shots - Health News : NPR. What is in that kiss, anyway, beyond the 80 million bacteria? GraphicaArtis/Corbis hide caption toggle caption GraphicaArtis/Corbis What is in that kiss, anyway, beyond the 80 million bacteria? GraphicaArtis/Corbis The music swells. Such on-screen behavior seems romantic if you were raised in a culture that practices romantic kissing. Scientists have at least a couple of ideas about why we kiss people we are attracted to. For a long time it was assumed that, whatever the reason, kissing was something people everywhere did. Jankowiak and his colleagues looked at data compiled from decades of ethnographic studies of all sorts in more than 168 cultures.
"It does seem to be a human universal that adults kiss babies or small children," Jankowiak says. The team's analysis also showed that simpler, foraging societies were least likely to practice romantic kissing. "Some of these people never go to the dentist," Jankowiak says. Jankowiak says he sees Dunbar's point, but doesn't agree. What Will Happen If I Don’t Take My Phone Out Right Now. Endless Bi-directional Model Train Spiral. ELI5: Why when I'm trying to fall asleep do I begin reliving cringe-worthy moments in my past? : explainlikeimfive. How The Brain 'Sees' Dreams. Quora. Uk.businessinsider. 5 Big Ideas That Don't Work In Education : NPR Ed. The Rise of Phone Reading. Quora. Quora. It’s time for PC companies to copy one of Apple’s best features. U5tdA1e.
Quora. ELI5 Why did Isaac Newton need to invent calculus to understand how objects move in space? : explainlikeimfive. Keeping the World’s Eyes on Iran’s Nuclear Menace | TIME. Evolution Simulator Reveals the Secret to Mating Without Social Skills. Quora. Egypt to ‘Rebuild’ the Lighthouse of Alexandria, One of the Seven Ancient World Wonders.
Where Will WeWork? Quora. Quora. Six Tips for Learning New Skills (and Retaining Them) How To Be The Best At Any Game In The Universe — Life Tips. Regulation Run Amok—And How to Fight Back. Home Economics: The Link Between Work-Life Balance and Income Equality - Stephen Marche. Quora. Are computers making our lives too easy? The Mechanics of Preventing Procrastination. Tweak These Common Exercises to Better Suit Your Body Type. This Chart Shows When You Should Use Ibuprofen vs. Acetaminophen. The War Nerd: Escape from East Timor (Part Two) With BioDirect, Monsanto Hopes RNA Sprays Can Someday Deliver Drought Tolerance and Other Traits to Plants on Demand. Quora. How History's Greatest Chess Players Reveal the Secret Formula Behind Fame.
How to Stay Focused at Work While You're Going Through a Breakup. Don’t Be Afraid to Do Things Alone, You’ll Have Just as Much Fun. Long-Term Depression May Boost Stroke Risk Long After Mood Improves. Whole Foods’ Misguided Play for Millennials. Quora. The Best Bike Lock (and How to Use It), According to Bike Thieves. Do You Cry Easily? You May Be a ‘Highly Sensitive Person’ Quora. Why would anyone quit their jobs at dream companies like Facebook or Google?
Healthy Eaters, Strong Minds: What School Gardens Teach Kids. Quora. How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus. Featured Philosop-her: Elizabeth Barnes « Philosop-her. This is the flag we'll plant when we conquer an alien planet | The Verge. How to Avoid Being "Catfished" While Online Dating. Performance reviews are a trap. Here’s how to really advance your career. Texas Prohibits Local Fracking Bans. Potential new vaccine blocks every strain of HIV. Univalent Foundations Redefines Mathematics. This wind turbine generates power without blades. Why I Started Using a Gaming Mouse and Keyboard to Get Real Work Done. Where there is oil and gas there is Schlumberger | Environment. Why It Pays to Be a Jerk. Money Fears That Held Me Back (and How I Got Over Them) Find Out If Short Hair Will Look Good on You with This Simple Test. Monkey day care | The Verge. “Mad Max: Fury Road” Review. The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.
How to Support Someone When They Decide to Quit Smoking. Java's key to success is simplicity. A Common Logic To Seeing Cats And Cosmos. The 14 Worst Kinds of Late People | TIME. What Makes the "Lion Whisperer" Roar? Nope, nope, nope: Why Australia won’t help the Rohingya.