Amazon has recently declared that tomorrow is
Price Check day. If you go into a brick and mortar retail store with Amazon’s new
Price Check App on your smart phone, and scan a barcode with the location settings active, and then report back to Amazon on the price of that product, Amazon will deduct $5 from your online purchase of that product. Amazon claims it’s trying to keep prices low for consumers, but others attribute the move to
a less innocuous agenda.
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posted by Toekneesan
on Dec 9, 2011 -
143 comments
Serum hemoglobin is related to endurance running performance. Smoking is known to enhance serum hemoglobin levels ... alcohol may further enhance this beneficial adaptation.
A
recent paper by Kenneth Myers in the
Canadian Medical Association Journal reviews the potential benefits of smoking for endurance atheletes.
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posted by nangar
on Nov 26, 2011 -
35 comments
Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness is a global organisation that matches people in need of distant genealogical research with remote volunteer researchers. Volunteer services range from help with searching physical records and obtaining documents to the discovery and photography of graves.
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posted by Ahab
on Aug 8, 2011 -
13 comments
NASA May Have Discovered Flowing Water on Mars Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere.
posted by modernnomad
on Aug 4, 2011 -
65 comments
The Triumph of New-Age Medicine "Medicine has long decried acupuncture, homeopathy, and the like as dangerous nonsense that preys on the gullible. Again and again, carefully controlled studies have shown alternative medicine to work no better than a placebo. But now many doctors admit that alternative medicine often seems to do a better job of making patients well, and at a much lower cost, than mainstream care—and they’re trying to learn from it." [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 15, 2011 -
278 comments
"Over the past few decades, 160 million women have vanished from East and South Asia — or, to be more accurate, they were never born at all. Throughout the region, the practice of sex selection — prenatal sex screening followed by selective termination of pregnancies — has yielded a generation packed with boys. From a normal level of 105 boys to 100 girls, the ratio has shifted to 120, 150, and, in some cases, nearly 200 boys born for every 100 girls. In some countries, like South Korea, ratios spiked and are now returning to normal. But sex selection is on the rise in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East." American journalist Mara Hvistendahl's new book: "
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men," examines and tries to predict the actual and potential effects of unequal sex ratios on men, women and the social economies of the affected regions, including the recent spike in sex trafficking and bride-buying across Asia.
More.
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posted by zarq
on Jun 10, 2011 -
65 comments
Mind Reading: The Researchers Who Analyzed All the Porn on the Internet. "Searching all the porn on the Internet might not seem like the most scientifically productive activity, but computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam did it anyway. For their new book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire, Ogas and Gaddam analyzed the results of 400 million online searches for porn and uncovered some startling insights into what men and women may really want from each other — at least sexually."
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posted by bwg
on Jun 2, 2011 -
85 comments
As a part of their new open access policy, Yale is releasing their vast digital images collection for
free. Although it will take years to upload everything, the online collection is starting with 250,000 images.
A sampling includes original Mozart manuscripts, maps from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and John Trumbull's iconic Declaration of Independence.
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posted by thebestsophist
on May 16, 2011 -
15 comments
Recent research on children. (1) Brothers and sisters who argue a lot can improve their language, social skills and outcomes:
Guardian article;
paper on part of the research (pdf). (2) First findings from
Understanding Society. Conclusions include: the unhappiness of children’s mothers with their partners affect children’s happiness, but this is not the case if children’s fathers are unhappy in their relationships; having older brothers or sisters doesn’t appear to affect children’s happiness, but having younger brothers or sisters is associated with less happiness; not living with both natural parents has a greater negative impact on a young person’s life satisfaction than their material situation. (3) A longitudinal study on people now in their forties has found that for these people reading is linked to career success, though not necessarily to better pay, whilst playing computer games and doing no other activities was associated with less likelihood of going to university. In particular, those who owned a ZX Spectrum or Commodore C64 were less likely to go to university.
thinq interview with researcher.
Guardian article.
Telegraph article. (4) Poll about children’s attitudes to losing in sport.
Press release.
Data from children’s survey.
Data from parents’ survey. (All three are PDFs.)
posted by paduasoy
on Apr 9, 2011 -
30 comments
The Empathy Deficit: "A recent study finds a decline in empathy among young people in the U.S." In fact, the report concludes "empathy levels have been declining over the past 30 years." Podcast on this topic
here.
posted by saulgoodman
on Dec 29, 2010 -
110 comments
Time Magazine (with commentary from
Jezebel) look at the question - why would people get married in 2010? These are reports based on a Pew Research
survey that complements results with findings from census data.
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posted by k8t
on Nov 18, 2010 -
104 comments
