Similarly, students whose parents frequently meet with teachers and principals don’t seem to improve faster than academically comparable peers whose parents are less present at school. Other essentially useless parenting interventions: observing a kid’s class; helping a teenager choose high-school courses; and, especially, disciplinary measures such as punishing kids for getting bad grades or instituting strict rules about when and how homework gets done.

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Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework – Dana Goldstein – The Atlantic
The Atlantic covers breaking news, analysis, opinion around politics, business, culture, international, science, technology, national profiles on the official site of the Atlantic Magazine.

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A deep belief network is an artificial intelligence technique for training computers to recognize patterns.

They're pretty astounding in how much they improve a computers ability to recognize what is in an image, and this company has a Javascript+WebGL implementation that runs in your browser.

I tried a bunch of my own photos by clicking the big buttons under the interface and was pretty impressed in how well it described the content of the photos.

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Deep Belief in Javascript
cityguide

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In a sentencing memo, prosecutors called Trudeau an "unrepentant, untiring, and uncontrollable huckster who has defrauded the unsuspecting for 30 years."

I gotta say, though…30 years and you're just now getting him to stop?  Pretty ineffectual job there, government.

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Television pitchman Kevin Trudeau is headed to prison
Television pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau gets 10 years in prison for criminal contempt in connection with his infomercials and books.

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There's a class of crackpots with theories that, on the surface, seem to describe reality.

These people are stunningly smart and subtly un-rigorous in their theories.  And the problem with that is that it's easy to see the smartness and difficult to suss out the un-rigorousness.

And the problem with that is that the next big idea will come from someone who is stunningly smart and stunningly rigorous (or lucky) with their idea.  Because it's difficult, relative to recognizing someones intelligence, to recognize a wrong idea from a right idea, it's difficult to sieve the good ideas from the bad.

This post inspired by a recent discussion about Terrence McKenna's novelty theory.

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What I find really cool is that it's part of a binary star system where:

"the second component so close that it is in contact with the main star"

!

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VLT Spots Largest Yellow Hypergiant Star – Mix of new and old observations reveals exotic binary system
ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer has revealed the largest yellow star — and one of the ten largest stars found so far. This hypergiant has been found to measure more than 1300 times the diameter of the Sun, and to be part of a double star system, with the second component so close that it is in contact with the main star. Observations spanning over sixty years, some from amateur observers, also indicate that this rare and remarkable obje…

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If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system
It would take about seven months to travel this distance in a spaceship. Better be some good in-flight entertainment. In case you’re wondering, you’d need about 2000 feature-length movies to occupy that many waking hours. Sit back and relax. Jupiter is more than 3 times as far as we just …

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I love/hate to watch someone search on their MSN.com home page for "Google", click on the google.com result, and then proceed to search with Google.

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Timelapse of spider web being built.

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HD video of the Earth's surface from 600 km up.

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