It's not just "Hitchhiker's Guide..." that makes for great radio. Check out "Dimension X", an NBC radio sci-fi show from the 1950s. "X minus 1" is another great 1950s radio sci-fi show. Many episodes can be found online and some of them are really great. It's pretty eerie to be listening to a 1950s radio show reference an outbreak of nuclear war in the 1970s when you're safely in the year 2013.

Actually, based on your comments and the findings of numerous other studies, it sounds like education has a lot to do with motivation, and relatively little to do with forms of education delivery. Look at the history of education, do you see enormous growth spurts tied to the printing press, movies, radio, home video, the internet? In as much as they make information more readily available they increase education. But it's not like there's some magic mode for learning. How many people would sit and watch a Disney film on Differential Equations, no matter what the production values were or how applied it was, etc.? So yes, whatever we can do to make information available is good, but we should stop thinking that we're going to come up with a magical sugar coating that will make everyone want to learn everything.

There were definitely a lot of stinkers in those days. But sadly, I think that for many of us the Vega was the worst of the worst.

Motor Trend named the Chevy Vega the car of the year in 1971. Car and Driver named the Renault Alliance as one of 1983's 10 best cars. In 1985 the Ford Merkur also made this list. You might enjoy this.

Actually, before Top Gun, FM and Heavy Metal were two other movies that featured extensive and problematic soundtrack licensing issues. Heavy Metal, for example, wasn't released to home video until 1995 (despite being released in 1981 to theaters) because they couldn't get the legal issues sorted. Even the original soundtrack LP left off songs that had appeared in the film.

"Dear Sirs, I never believed the stories in you magazine until one day..."

It's a lot worse than you think! FTFA:

"Celebrities had found Marfa too. The town's beloved food truck, the Food Shark, has nearly 1,700 'Likes' on its Facebook page -- including ones from luminaries such as Bob Dylan, Tammy Wynette, and Willie Nelson."

According to Wikipedia Tammy Wynette died in 1998. Facebook was launched in February 2004.

There's an app for that...

Some sort of redirection towards findings that can be verified by independent labs would seem to be an improvement on the current system. But that would require a focus non science as a system and less of the "great researcher" emphasis we see today.

I'd call that fair use. And by the way, I'm shocked, shocked to find that Wikipedia and Google would stoop so low.

Justice is blind. Whichever side puts the most gold on the scales of justice wins!

Great link to the table, and it explains some of the findings. As you point out, you can sort by any of the column headings. If we sort by unemployment percentage, we see the Law of Large numbers at work. Of the 10 majors with the lowest unemployment (0 - 2%, by the way), you can see that they are very unpopular majors. That means that very few of the people surveyed reported having majored in these things in college = small samples. When you reverse the sort for 10 highest unemployment rates, we see the same trend. With the exception of Architecture, these majors are very unpopular. Again, very small samples. Samples vary, but small samples vary more than big ones - that's the Law of Large Numbers.

Some of the majors don't make sense, either. The highest unemployment rate is for "Clinical Psychology." I can only imagine these majors are self-report data from the U.S. Census, but there is no college in the U.S. where you can major in "Clinical Psychology." You can major in Psychology, and you might get a concentration in Clinical, but you don't get a clinical psychology degree at the undergraduate level. No state in the U.S. will allow you to work as a clinical psychologist without graduate level training and many hours of supervised experience.

By the way, if you just look at people who responded "Psychology" you see an unemployment rate of 6.1% and it was the 5th most popular major (i.e., big sample, probably more accurate numbers). At a time (2010) when unemployment is arguably 10%, that sounds pretty good to me.

However, as other posters note, the data don't tell you if their jobs are mud wrestling, dog walking, or pimping, so it's rather difficult to use these numbers to judge how "useful" a particular major might be.

 

I had mononucleosis once, does that mean I am now qualified to diagnose it in others? A hallmark of the autism spectrum is difficulty communicating - Steve Jobs, seriously?

"Or have you diluted yourself into thinking that the reason we have say public education is because of the Dept. of Ed?"

Are you trying to suggest that homeopathy is the answer to our problems?

Or are you trying to say the Dept. of Ed. might need to focus more effort on helping people understand the difference between dilution and delusion?

Excellent question, and one way to examine this would be to look at bilingual speakers who have suffered brain damage. If both languages relied on a single speech center, you would expect impairment as a result of the damage to be about equal for both languages. If, on the other hand, one language was clearly impaired while the other was not, these results would suggest two independent processing centers in the brain.

Unfortunately, the results are not as clear. Sometimes the first language acquired recovers first, and in other patients the second language recovers first. In still other patients both languages appear to recover at about equal rates. Some researchers have concluded that age of acquisition, fluency in the language, and other factors can influence the results.

You might enjoy: Marrero et al.'s (2002) "Bilingualism, brain injury, and recover: Implications for understanding the bilingual and for therapy." in Clinical Psychology Review, 22(3), 465-480.

Lorenzen & Murray (2008) Bilingual aphasia: A theoretical and clinical review." in American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 17, 299-317.