From TFA:

"Google-glass like computer eyepiece".

No, you're doing it wrong - it is the other way around :-/

Dear Anonymous Poster,

Last year I was responsible for a class on elementary statistics for physical therapy students.

The first thing you have to keep in mind is: your students will be asking themselves from the get go: "Why is this useful to me?". Many of them may have enrolled in "soft" sciences to get away from maths in the first place. You have to provide these answers to your students - if not directly, then indirectly, by providing plenty of examples on where the subject will be useful in their work - this is quite easy with statistics. Also, whenever possible, skip too elaborate proofs, and go instead for more intuitive or example based explanations of why these concepts work.

If you provide me with some sort of contact details, I can give you my lecture notes. Cheers!

It can be even worse.

Not exactly the same thing, but related, I have recently done the research to tell my Work's mailing list that a hoax someone had forwarded was a hoax. I was called "prepotent", because the person who spread the hoax was obviously a well meaning person, who sent the message because "he cares for us", and "it is not totally implausible, even if not true".

So people not only don't care about doing the research. They resent those who do.

If we only had developed statistical tests that calculate how likely it is that a given cluster appeared randomly based on previous data...

Still, all you need is one (or a couple) of alphas to make a good script, and a bunch of mindless drones to follow it.

Seriously. I have been following many reporters in Japan on Twitter, and some "serious" news outlet. The twitter feeds have been doing a much better job in posting up-to-date news and commentaries, and fighting the spread of rumors. I used not to take twitter seriously either, until it became my main source of info for this disaster.

It is all about who you follow.

Tsunami alert has been called off.

Actually, the story was repeated as true in some media outlets in Brazil. The original blog's admins even went around posting "Thanks for believing in us!" in some of these.

The linked article does not actually refers to the Scientific article (why not?), so I went and did some digging.

http://frontiersin.org/neuroscience/behavioralneuroscience/paper/10.3389/fnbeh.2010.00031/

Nothing like "monkeys like to watch TV". The experiment only measure the activity of the monkey's brain when it is watching the movie, but not when it is NOT watching the movie or when it is watching something else. Actually the paper is more about this new brain wave sensor that they are developing than about monkeys and TVs. Like a previous commenter said - if you have a monkey stuck into a chair, with a bunch of probes dug into its brain, in a dark room, it will get interested in a movie shown in front of him. Duh! (and, according to the article, at least 60% of the trials where thrown away because the monkey did not actually look at the movie).

Way to fail by not RTFA'ing.

http://attepicfail.tumblr.com/

Not really. Japan currently has a problem of more spaces than students (aging population and all that). It is not as bad for universities as it is for elementary/high school, but it is a serious problem.

This is more likely. I have TA'd for a course where the entire team's grade was determined by each member's assignments.

Anyway, I find this article highly irregular. My experience is that japanese universities will bend themselves backwards to prevent any undergrad student from not graduating. Also, all cellphones here
have GPS, not only iPhones. I think it is more likely, from RTFA, that the university is putting on a course for the students to hack with the iPhones, and the writer of the article decided to capitalize on the minor point of "trying to check attendance with the GPS".

Well, what did you expect? The story submitter was the guy who wrote the article himself. (Jeff Vogel owns spidweb games).