That’s what a study done at MIT says. East Asians and Americans were asked to make both absolute and relative judgments about shapes and length of lines in a drawing. The Americans used more of their brain for relative judgments, and the East Asians used more of their brains for absolute judgments. Reported in PsyCentral online magazine.
Kevin putting it out there
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Spellify Spell Checker for your website
I use Firefox as my browser, much better than Internet Explorer. One of the add-ons I use is a spell checker. But many people don’t have a spell checker in their browser.
What if I could put a nice spell checker on my web site? Well, I can. Spellify is an Ajax based web 2.0 software application that you can add to your domain hosting site so that everyone can have their form input checked for spelling. I have to try this out and see if it works with other programs like Moodle.
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Love on Campus
William Deresiewicz writes a stupendous article, Love on Campus, for the American Scholar in the style of a literary critic about how English professors are portrayed in the movies these days; weak, philandering, selfish, pompous, self-pitying. He goes on to stipulate how wrong this is, and that in reality, intellectual intercourse is a goal of the university, and since WW2 a number of social and cultural trends have made this kind of “brain sex” more and more illusory or taboo.
The article borders on the absurd at times, with thick prose (I had to look up the word demotic), and used the words luftmensch and parvenu in the same sentence. But his logic is impressive and he reaches a surprising conclusion; that lust, or eros, has its place on campus. Between your ears, and not your legs.
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I want one! Asus eee
I just heard about the Asus eee, a micro laptop at a great price. Out of Taiwan, this company has been making video and sound cards, and motherboards, for years. They often have solid products.
Running Linux OS, it is small(about B5 size), light (less than a kiogram) and cheap (initially set at $200 but is now selling at New Egg for $400). See the video review on YouTube.
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Distance Learning and Daylight Saving Time
Daylight Saving Time changes this year in the US on the first Sunday in November (the 4th) at 2 AM. This is a week later than usual. Bush changed it to save energy. I still find daylight saving time an annoyance, and am happy to miss it here in Japan. Unfortunately, I am involved in a Japanese course in the US (Distance Learning). We meet 9-11 AM Eastern time, which is 10-12 PM here in Tokyo. In November that changes to 9-11 PM. Too complicated.
Couple of interesting facts from the web site for Daylight Saving:
The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight SavingS Time.
Saving is used here as a verbal adjective (a participle). It modifies time and tells us more about its nature; namely, that it is characterized by the activity of saving daylight. It is a saving daylight kind of time. Because of this, it would be more accurate to refer to DST as daylight-saving time. Similar examples would be a mind-expanding book or a man-eating tiger. Saving is used in the same way as saving a ball game, rather than as a savings account. …
Adding to the confusion is that the phrase Daylight Saving Time is inaccurate, since no daylight is actually saved. Daylight Shifting Time would be better, but it is not as politically desirable.and
Many fire departments encourage people to change the batteries in their smoke detectors when they change their clocks because Daylight Saving Time provides a convenient reminder. “A working smoke detector more than doubles a person’s chances of surviving a home fire,” says William McNabb of the Troy Fire Department in Michigan. More than 90 percent of homes in the United States have smoke detectors, but one-third are estimated to have dead or missing batteries.
Can you imagine? One Third?