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Comment Re:Rock-star scientists (Score 1) 91

Perhaps not.

Last year, many accredited the success to cultural influences, such as the “Brian Cox effect”.

New data, however, suggest a network designed to help science teachers inspire students with the wonder of physics, called the Stimulating Physics Network (SPN), has played a major part in translating this nascent inspiration into A-level entries.

Comment Re:Mathematics is a tool (Score 1) 1010

It's the unintuitive ways in which it's taught

You could just as easily blame lack of intellectual curiosity among children/society.

I've just finished reading Made to Stick in which they tell the story of a teacher successfully winning students over to algebra being useful to them by describing it as mental weight training. "you do math exercises so that you can improve your ability to think logically" (ch.5, p.194) .

Comment Re:nobody ain't got no money anymore (Score 1) 313

Both true and relevent

Advertising is not optional. Every business requires it. It's cheaper than employing sales reps, or telesales staff, and if you have a good product, like Avis, it pays off. If you do not have a good product then telling people about it is pointless.

No, I'm not a salesman.

Comment Re:nobody ain't got no money anymore (Score 1) 313

I've often thought that advertising, all advertising is hugely overvalued,

Advertising brings in new customers, the alternative is hiring salespeople to cold-call.

In 1962, just before the first 'We try harder' ads launched, Avis was an unprofitable company with 11% of the car rental business in the USA. Within a year of launching the campaign Avis was making a profit, and by 1966 Avis had tripled its market share to 35%.

http://www.grabinerhall.com/press-detail.php?a=17

http://www.avis.co.uk/blog/we-try-harder-the-legacy-of-robert-townsend/

Comment Re:No shit (Score 1) 395

the semantic HTML tags are less than useless, because they're based on a now obsolete statistical analysis of common ids/classes.

Schema.org does much the same thing, labelling headers, footers, navigation etc.

I believe Mr Hickson used to work for Google, perhaps the HTML5 semantic tags were just a search engine wishlist, that they've now decided to push via schema.org?

Comment Re:Smart but not nice (Score 1) 227

They could be doing it not just for practical purposes but possibly for setting up a DeBeers of rare earth metals.

Maybe they've just produced more than they can use?

the People's Bank of China cut rates in the world's second largest economy for the second time this year. This was quite unexpected and shows that Chinese policymakers have become seriously rattled by the evident slowdown in their economy.

...once buoyant Western export markets are in ragged retreat, and just how much more investment can the Chinese economy take before knocking up against already manifest levels of industrial overcapacity?

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