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The Panic Over Mammoth, Arizona – Neatorama
“What many readers didn’t catch was that the story was posted on the subreddit NoSleep, which is a forum for fictional scary stories. The subreddit rules state that authors must stay in character, commenters must play along with the stories, and in fact comments debunking them are deleted. Local TV station KGUN talked with the author, C.K. Walker, about how her work of fiction blew up and escaped the internet. “
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Google’s Philosopher: Tech and the Nature of Identity – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society
“Consider his take on what it means to be a person. For Floridi, you are your information, which comprises everything from data about the relations between particles in your body, to your life story, to your memories, beliefs, and genetic code. By itself, this is a novel answer to the perennial question of personal identity, which has preoccupied philosophers since at least Plato: What defines the self as a coherent entity over time and space? But Floridi’s view can also help us think precisely about the consequential questions that today preoccupy us at a very practical level.”
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The year in media errors and corrections 2014 | Poynter.
“An article about a conservation project to return mountain chicken frogs to Montserrat said that the endangered frog was the national dish of the island. Montserrat’s national dish is goat water, a stew; mountain chicken is the national dish of nearby Dominica.
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Wondermark » Archive » True Stuff: Socrates vs. the Written Word
“Socrates lays out an argument that the written word cannot defend itself in dialogue, and thus cannot effectively teach anything worth knowing. For only through banter, through back-and-forth discussion and rhetorical argument and the working out of problems, can true knowledge be conveyed. Reading mere words, in his mind, is akin to looking at a lake rather than swimming in it — or worse, looking at a lake and thinking that now you know how to swim.
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Instagram makes teens and celebrities angry by killing millions of spambots | The Verge
“The event, which began today after the photo-sharing service made good on its promise to start deleting millions of fake accounts, has been dubbed the “Instagram Rapture” after the follower counts of apparently popular Instagrammers were savaged. Rapper Tyga saw his followers drop from 5.5 million to 2.2 million, while Ma$e committed Instagram’s version of seppuku, deleting his account after freefalling from 1.6 million followers to around 100,000.”
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The Problem With School Testing | Creativity & Innovation
“The research against these tests is fairly damning. “MIT neuroscientists found that improving the math scores of a group of eight grade students in Boston has little influence on their…ability to apply reasoning,” the author writes. Most standardized tests aren’t objective, don’t measure a student’s ability to think, and don’t reliably predict how well a kid will do in the workplace. So what’s good about them? They’re relatively cheap to create, easy to administer, and they yield data.
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Distractify | It’s Time To Play “School Lunch, Or Prison Lunch?”
Not the only thing they have in common
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Poisoned with Parasites – Body Horrors
“It was later estimated that the men had been infected with hundreds of thousands of eggs, far exceeding the usual dosage of a few eggs that can naturally occur in regions endemic with the parasite. Two men were so heavily dosed that they were in critical condition caused by acute respiratory failure from parasitic pneumonia. Thankfully, all poisoned men made a full recovery.
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Bobby Shmurda spent Christmas in jail as new details in his case emerges | theGrio
“So far, the prosecutors in this case have listed two social media posts in an indictment against GS9 which names Pollard and 12 other defendants. Given how police have started relying on social media to prove young New Yorkers guilty of gang activity, some of the squads’ internet boasting may come back to haunt them.”
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POEM: POETRY BY MARIANNE MOORE
“for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’,”
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The man on the Clapham omnibus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
” “Public opinion … is the opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus,””