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Comment Re:interesting (Score 0) 111

by hutkey (#39683093) Attached to: Baboons Learn To Identify Words

I wonder if this would work with other writing systems. Could they learn to tell real Chinese characters from random fake ones, for example?

IMO they will be able to recognize the real words(pictures/shape?) from the fake ones.

Even for humans for whom English is not their first language, the roman script itself is like pictorial representation of the real world words. I can say that since English is not my first language (or the second), so whatever English I have learned is by recognizing the basic 26 pictures and correlating them with others to form words.

In a sense, all the scripts are pictorial until you start to recognize them, then they are just "letters" that gives you feel of the language.
Crime

Girls Bugged Teachers' Staff Room 227

Posted by samzenpus from the making-the-grade dept.
A pair of enterprising Swedish schoolgirls ended up in court after they were caught bugging their teachers break room. The duo hoped they would hear discussions about upcoming tests and school work, allowing them to get better grades. It worked until one of them decided to brag about it on Facebook, and the authorities were called in. The girls were charged with trespassing and fined 2,000 kronor ($270) each in Stockholm District Court.
Science

Fossil of Ant-Eating Dinosaur Discovered In China 64

Posted by samzenpus from the ancient-picnic-defender dept.
thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"

Comment Re:First call center in space scheduled for 2021 (Score 1, Informative) 242

by praSAD2407 (#30927792) Attached to: India Moves To Put Its First Man In Space By 2016

That said, I'd like to point out that the ONLY reason China and India have anything like a real economy at this point is that US (and to some degree EU) consumers went into heavy debt to buy all those US-branded, Indian/Chinese-made toys, electronics, textiles, etc. Should the US and/or Europe decide that unfettered globalization is not in its best interest after all (already happening), both China and India would be cut off from by far the largest market in the world (US=14 trillion, China=4 trillion)

What you say might be true for China, but Indian economy is mainly driven by internal consumption. It is not an export driven economy.(India is a net importer).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India#External_trade_and_investment
India's economy is mostly dependent on its large internal market with external trade accounting for just 20% of the country's GDP. In 2008, India accounted for 1.45% of global merchandise trade and 2.8% of global commercial services export

So US/EU stopping trade with India wouldn't be catastrophic for the Indian economy.

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