Sales people and business-side executes tend to believe as a matter of faith that if people can get something for free, they won’t pay for it. But all they need to do is look at their own behavior to see how that isn’t true: when they go to a restaurant in a distant town that they’ll never visit again, they still leave a 20% tip. The fact is that no one subscribes to the WSJ or the FT because of their exclusivity. As a result, the smart thing for both papers to do is to maximize their paying readership by maximizing their overall readership. Instead, both have taken a scared and defensive approach to digital subscriptions, fearing that if their readers can get their content for free, then they won’t pay.
Not all of Adolph Hitler's family were homicidal megalomaniacs - his sister Paula was quite nice, for example. So the precursor to the CIA thought they might like to make him more like her.British spies at one point hatched a plan to feminize Hitler a little by doping up his food with estrogen. Professor Brian Ford of Cardiff University discovered that, and other ingenious plans in old unclassified documents, and outlines them in Secret Weapons: Technology, Science And The Race To Win World War II.
By now you'll be familiar with publication bias: the phenomenon where studies with boring, negative results are less likely to get written up or published. You can estimate this using a tool such as, say, a funnel plot. The principle is simple: expensive landmark studies are harder to brush under the carpet, but small ones can disappear more easily. So split your studies into "big ones" and "small ones": if the small studies, averaged out together, give a more positive result than the big studies, then maybe some small negative studies have gone missing in action.
Fingerprints? We don't need no stinking fingerprints.Police have used dentures to nab Milton Cesar de Jesus for a purse snatching in Severini, Brazil. A hobo found them after the robbery and turned them over to cops, along with a description of the assailant so police picked up de Jesus based on that. de Jesus denied the crime but the cops put the dentures in his partially toothed mouth and they were a perfect fit. A risky move but it worked. As Johnny Cochran famously said, "if the gloves don't fit, you must acquit." Don't you miss the 1990s, when rhyming tort was still cool?
They've won the final battle but stand a chance of losing the peace if they're not careful. Harry Potter and his friends did their part but, like Sam Adams after the American Revolution was over, need to step aside now and let foreign policy experts take over.
If you've read Science 2.0 for any length of time, you've seen Bayes' Theorem - mostly in sports. We use it to predict who will win the baseball playoffs, for example. Bayes’s theorem, named after 18th-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, has become an invaluable tool for scientists.
As I said in our earlier piece outlining how perhaps SETI had outlived its usefulness given modern knowledge, the success metric was that a civilization more than 400 years away - because we know there are none closer - would have to have sent low-tech radio signals to a planet that lacked the technology to receive radio signals when they sent them. The aliens basically would have needed to know the future, which means they didn't need radio waves.
Tired of protein folding, bored with looking for big objects in space? Now you can go tiny. As in a fundamental particle.The Large Hadron Collider team wants to tap into the collective computing power of the public with a project LHC@home 2.0, an updated version of a 2004 effort to enlist the public's computers to simulate beams of protons.The Worldwide Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid is a 100m-euro network designed to handle the flood of data created by the LHC and distribute it to scientists worldwide. The LHC@home project will complement this network by splitting up the gargantuan task of simulating the collisions, feeding those computer simulations back to the scientists for comparison.
A team of Italian archaeologists believe they have discovered the tomb of Philip, one of Jesus' 12 apostles, at the ancient Asia Minor city of Hierapolis in the Aegean province of Denizli, known today as Pamukkale in Turkey, and are planning to excavate the unopened grave soon.The discovery of the grave of the New Testament saint, who it is said came to Hierapolis nearly 2,000 years ago to spread the Gospel and was crucified upside down by the Romans, will attract immense attention around the world, said excavator Francesco D'Andria, director of the Institute of Archaeological Heritage, Monuments and Sites at Italy's National Research Council in Lecce.
If you have a million dollars to spend, you want something distinct - the 700 horsepower, twin-turbocharged 12-cylinder carbon-titanium Huayra supercar by Pagani is certainly that. Take that, you Bugatti Veyron and Lamborghini Reventon commoners!But don't get out your checkbook just yet, the U.S. is blocking its sale because it doesn't have child-safe airbags.
