Weekly Web Harvest for 2016-11-06

  • Episodes – Do Not Track
  • Young Adolescents as Likely to Die From Suicide as From Traffic Accidents – The New York Times

    It is now just as likely for middle school students to die from suicide as from traffic accidents.

    That grim fact was published on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They found that in 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 had caught up to their death rate for traffic accidents.
    —————
    The immediate lunge into blaming social media seems like it needs more factual/research support.

  • Spanish parents urged to put children on weekend homework strike | World news | The Guardian

    Parents in Spain are being urged to go on a weekend homework strike this month in protest against the “unacceptable” amount of after-school tasks their children are given.

    The homework load of Spanish children has long been a sore point with some parents, who argue that the burden is too great, places too much pressure on pupils and eats into family time.

    According to a 2012 study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Spanish 15-year-olds have 6.5 hours of homework a week compared with an average of 4.9 across the 38 OECD countries.

  • Nothing To Do With Arbroath: Mystery monkey on the loose in Florida thought to be heading south

    Humans find them interesting and think they’re cute so humans try to make friends with them. They end up inevitably getting bit and then people want to kill the monkey.”

  • no, Microsoft Word really is that bad – Text Patterns – The New Atlantis

    Word is a nightmare, because in such matters its consistent practice is to do what it thinks you probably want to do, or what it thinks you should do. Contrast that to a program that genuinely cares about formatting, LaTeX, which always does precisely what you tell it to do. Now, this mode of doing business can generate problems of its own, as every user of LaTeX knows, since from time to time you will manage to tell it to do something that you don’t really want it to do. But those problems are always fixable, and over time you learn to avoid them, whereas in Word anything can happen at any time and you will often be completely unable either to figure out what happened or set it right.

    —-
    Feels a bit like other systems/programs/people who pretend to know what you want to do . . .