Leaked “Left 4 Dead 2” Trailer:
a wired.com Join over 320,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert
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Dying Languages:
R OF WORDS -6% of the world's languages are spoken by 94% of the world's population -The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population -The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers). -133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people via news.bbc.co.uk Join over 320,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That…
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A Writing Revolution:
arly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential. To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we…
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Veteran Critics More Persuasive When Uncertain:
perts are more persuasive when they seem tentative about their conclusions, a study soon to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests. But the opposite is true of novices, who grow more persuasive with increasing certainty. In one experiment, college students were randomly assigned one of four variations of a restaurant review, praising a local Italian spot. In some versions, the reviewer was described as a famous food critic; in others, he was a technology worker at a…
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Is copyright law in China any different from in the United States? – Slate Magazine:
t substantially so. China has signed onto both major international copyright treaties—the century-old Berne Convention and the decade-old Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS Agreement—which set minimum standards for copyright regulation. Under these agreements, writers, musicians, visual artists, and filmmakers are granted "automatic" rights to any work they produce—i.e., they don't have to formally register a trademark. Signatories must also extend copyright at least 50 years after the author's death and treat computer programs as…
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Is there any difference in quality between name-brand drugs and generics?
t’s put it this way: the differences are small. That doesn’t mean they aren’t important. It also doesn’t mean they are. When the patents on a name-brand drug expire and competitors flood the market with knockoffs, prices can drop to astounding depths. In a quick survey of ten common drugs, my assistant Una found generics offered savings of 15 to 94 percent off name-brand prices, with the average around 60 percent. (The most dramatic difference, for you anxious types: Valium…
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Ambulances start charging extra for the obese – msnbc.com:
ansporting extremely heavy people costs about 2 1/2 times as much as normal-weight patients. It takes more time to move them and requires three to four times more crew members, who often must use expensive specialty equipment, Buell said. Keller, now an operations manager for the American Medical Response unit in Topeka, successfully petitioned the Shawnee County Commission last summer to raise ambulance fees from $629 to $1,172 for critical-care patients and people who are 500 pounds or heavier. In…
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Differences in Gender Ratios Create Varying Mating Strategies
few years back, evolutionary psychologist Daniel Kruger was wandering around Manhattan when a Time Out New York cover grabbed his eye — a Godzilla-sized woman in a red dress rampaging through the city streets next to the headline: "Attack of the Single Women!" Inside: an article about the plight of the unmarried women in a metro region where they outnumber potential male mates by three-quarters of a million (about a 10-to-9 ratio) Kruger, a research professor at the University…
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