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Showing posts from March, 2012

'How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. The boy crawled between legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man  to a wooden pole. Shin In Geun was four years old, too young to understand the speech that came before that killing. At dozens of executions in years to come, he would listen to a guard telling the crowd that the prisoner about to die had been offered "redemption" through hard labour, but had rejected the generosity of the North Korean government. Guards stuffed pebbles into the prisoner's mouth, covered his head with a hood and shot him. In Camp 14, a prison for the political enemies of North Korea, assemblies of more than two inmates were forbidden, except for executions. Everyone had to attend them. The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Kore

Home schooling

Some studies on home schooling suggest some of the common criticisms aren't borne out by the facts: "A significant difference was found between GPAs, TASP reading, and TASP math scores of home schooled students and non-home schooled students. Home schooled student performed significantly better than non-home schooled students regardless of part-time or full-time status or age at the time of admissions" [1] "In 1997, a study of 5,402 homeschool students from 1,657 families ... demonstrated that homeschoolers, on the average, out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects. A significant finding when analyzing the data for 8th graders was the evidence that homeschoolers who are homeschooled two or more years score substantially higher than students who have been homeschooled one year or less. The new homeschoolers were scoring on the average in the 59th percentile compared to students homeschooled the last two

Red meat and bad science

Why the latest study purporting a causal link between red meat and increased mortality is Bad Science (TM) ... http://garytaubes.com/2012/03/science-pseudoscience-nutritional-epidemiology-and-meat/ and http://www.zoeharcombe.com/2012/03/red-meat-mortality-the-usual-bad-science/ Bottom line, eating meat is still good for you.