‘Mademoiselle’ Exits Official France 02/23/2012
 With nary a kiss to the hand nor tears of parting, the French government this week bids adieu to “mademoiselle.”
In a memo addressed to state administrators across France, Prime Minister François Fillon ordered the honorific — akin to “damsel” and the equivalent of “miss” — banished from official forms and registries. The use of “mademoiselle,” he wrote, made reference “without justification nor necessity” to a woman’s “matrimonial situation,” whereas “monsieur” has long signified simply “sir.” Add Comment  Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin was one of two Western reporters killed in Homs, Syria on Wednesday. Just hours earlier, she had given one of her final interviews to CNN's Anderson Cooper. In it she spoke of her anger and fear when faced with the shelling of civilians in the city, and her heartbreak at watching a baby hit by shrapnel die in a poorly-equipped makeshift medical center.
Critical Thinking 02/21/2012
 Australian outfit Bridge 8, who have the admirable mission of devising “creative strategies for science and society,” and animator James Hutson have created six fantastic two-minute animations on various aspects of critical thinking, aimed at kids ages 8 to 10 but also designed to resonate with grown-ups. Inspired by the animation style of the 1950s, most recognizably Saul Bass, the films are designed to promote a set of educational resources on critical thinking by TechNYou, an emerging technologies public information project funded by the Australian government.The animations — which are part Minute Physics, part The Dot and the Line, part 60-Second Adventures in Thought — are released under a Creative Commons license and cover the basics of logic and the scientific method, as well as specific psychological pitfalls like confirmation bias and Gambler’s Fallacy.
The 100 'Greatest Books for Kids' 02/21/2012
 The 100 "Greatest Books for Kids," ranked by Scholastic Parent & Child magazine:
1. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White 2. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown 3. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle  Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.
Are Your Sleep Types Compatible? 02/20/2012
 Insomniacs, cover hogs and night owls, oh my!
While most love stories end with the 'happily ever after' of blissful cohabitation, the reality is that compatible sleeping is often an impossible dream: many otherwise made-for-each-other lovers have basic incompatibilities when it comes to sleep styles. In fact, according to one survey, more than a quarter of cohabitating adults in the U.S. report that their partner's sleep problems -- everything from sleep talking to late night TV watching -- negatively affect the quality of their shut-eye. What On Earth Is Google Doing With Orkut? 02/20/2012
 Just spotted in Orkut, Google’s also-ran social networking site: a new Google+ badge, one of the first integrations between the two services. Orkut members who also have a Google+ account are now being rewarded in the form of a badge reading “Google+ user,” which they can choose to make visible on their Orkut profile. No, it’s not a big deal in terms of the feature itself (oooh, a badge), but it’s an indication of Orkut’s current status in Google’s eyes. Orkut and Google+ are different products, and both sites will continue to exist, the company tells us today by way of explanation.
 Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.
The group of physicists, based at the University of New South Wales and Purdue University, said they had laid the groundwork for a futuristic quantum computer that might one day function in a nanoscale world and would be orders of magnitude smaller and quicker than today’s silicon-based machines. The Pirate Bay could be blocked in UK 02/20/2012
 The filesharing website The Pirate Bay has come a step closer to being blocked in the UK after the high court ruled that the site breaches copyright laws on a large scale.
Major music groups want British internet service providers (ISPs), such as BT and BSkyB, to prevent their millions of customers from accessing The Pirate Bay in the UK. In a judgment handed down at the high court in London on Monday, Mr Justice Arnold ruled that The Pirate Bay and its users unlawfully share copyrighted music.  But 55- to 64-year olds who make more than $100,000 a year are big buyers too.
"Whether or not you have a smartphone is closely related to both how old you are and how much money you make," finds a Nielsen survey of 20,000 Americans with mobile phones conducted in January. I quote: While overall smartphone penetration stood at 48 percent in January, those in the 24-34 age group showed the greatest proportion of smartphone ownership, with 66 percent saying they had a smartphone. In the same age group, 8 of 10 of those that had gotten a new device in the last three months chose a smartphone. Among those who chose a device in the last three months, more than half of those under 65 had chosen a smartphone. |
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