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The office coffee machine has been showing the word Ready for four minutes, and I have decided to take it personally. |
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A 2024 meta-analysis found a small, uncertain learning styles effect |
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Learning styles are the neuromyth that annoys me most, and the usual summary, that there is no evidence at all, is slightly too tidy. A 2024 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology pooled 21 studies with 1,712 participants and found a small positive effect of matching teaching to a learner's preferred style, with an effect size of 0.31. The 95 per cent confidence interval ran from 0.05 to 0.57, so the true figure could be close to nothing or a decent boost, and the studies differed a lot from one another. Seen from a lab, 0.31 with an interval that wide is the sort of number that earns a replication request. The older bar still stands. In 2008 Harold Pashler and colleagues, writing in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, said a credible test sorts learners into categories, randomly assigns them to different teaching methods, and gives everyone the same test at the end. Very few studies had done that, and some of those contradicted the matching idea. The review also noted that 71 different models of learning styles had been proposed, and that the idea had created a thriving commercial market among researchers, educators and the public. Its authors, Clinton-Lisell and Litzinger, concluded that the benefit does not warrant widespread adoption. |
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A statute in 1593 gave the mile an extra 280 feet |
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The Roman mile was a thousand paces, which the Romans reckoned as 5,000 of their feet. Around 1500 the old London mile was eight furlongs, and with the larger northern foot of that era each furlong measured 625 feet, so the mile was again 5,000 feet. Then, in 1593, a statute under Elizabeth I confirmed the use of a shorter foot, which made the furlong 660 feet. Eight furlongs of 660 feet is 5,280, so the mile in feet went from 5,000 to 5,280. Each furlong had gained 35 feet, and eight lots of 35 is the extra 280, which also happens to be 1,760 yards. I memorised that number at school and never wondered why it was so awkward. The furlong stayed put and the foot moved. I would have settled for 5,000, and I suspect so would most runners. |
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Reaching Point Roberts from mainland Washington means crossing the border twice |
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Point Roberts is part of Washington state, and driving there from mainland Washington means crossing an international border twice. The town covers about five square miles at the bottom of the Tsawwassen Peninsula, with the Strait of Georgia on two sides and Boundary Bay on the third. The nearest mainland United States is about 25 miles away. In March 2020, when pandemic restrictions closed the border, residents lost their routine trips to school and medical care. The 2000 census counted 1,308 residents. The cause is a line. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 set the boundary at the 49th parallel, and the lower part of the peninsula dipped south of it, which put it in the United States. In September 1859 the United States made Point Roberts a military reserve, and no military personnel or equipment ever went there. The reserve stood until 1892. |
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GPS satellite clocks are set slightly slow before launch |
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Before a GPS satellite leaves the ground, its clock is set to 10.22999999543 megahertz, a hair below the 10.23 megahertz the system works to. Once in orbit it ticks at the same rate as a 10.23 megahertz standard at sea level. The gap is about 0.0046 hertz, or roughly 4.5 parts in ten billion. The reason is relativity. A satellite clock in medium Earth orbit gains about 45 microseconds a day over a clock at sea level because gravity is weaker up there, and loses about 7 because of its speed. The gravity part comes from general relativity and the speed part from special relativity. The net is a gain of about 38 microseconds a day. Light covers roughly 11 kilometres in that time, which gives a feel for why anyone bothered with a number so small. I find it oddly comforting that the navigation system in my phone starts every satellite's life by making it deliberately wrong. |
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A urinal photo gave the Streisand effect its name |
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Techdirt's Mike Masnick coined the Streisand effect in 2005, in a post about a photograph of a urinal. The urinal stood in the lobby of the Marco Beach Ocean Resort, and the resort's lawyers had gone after a website that showed it. He named the pattern for an older case. In 2003 Barbra Streisand sued the photographer Kenneth Adelman for $50 million over an aerial photo of her Malibu home, one of the coastline pictures in his California Coastal Records Project. Before the lawsuit the image had been downloaded six times, twice by her own lawyers. She lost, and the judge ordered her to pay Adelman's legal fees. Masnick observed that something most people would never, ever see ends up seen by many more once someone tries to repress it online. He suggested the name with the words: Let's call it the Streisand Effect. |
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The six-downloads story is the one worth retelling at dinner, if only because a third of the audience was her lawyers. |
