That's Interesting
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The death of VET FEE HELP
24th July, 2017It was the student subsidy that was too good to be true. Students were the losers when billions were rorted by cowboys who spotted a government scheme that was just too easy to rip-off.
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The History Of Light
24th July, 2017For thousands of years, getting light was a huge hassle. You had to make candles from scratch. This is not as romantic as it sounds. You had to get a cow, raise the cow, have food to feed the cow, kill the cow, get the fat out of the cow, cook the fat, dip wicks into the fat. All that—for not very much light. Now, if we want to light a whole room, we just flip a switch. The history of light explains why the world today is the way it is. It explains why we aren’t all subsistence farmers, and why we can afford to have artists and massage therapists and plumbers. (And, yes, people who do radio stories about the history of light.) The history of light is the history of economic growth—of things getting faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
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Big data meets modern medicine in a life-saving equation
24th July, 2017There are so many ways to spend money on health care, but which offer the most bang for the buck? Dr. Chris Murray is trying to answer that question with an equation that measures the impact of different interventions. Countries that rely on big data have made big strides in health care, but some say the system ignores the human side of medicine.
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Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Internet
24th July, 2017Tim Berners-Lee, father of the world wide web, discusses the future of the internet, as Justin Rowlatt reports from the Science Museum’s newly-opened Information Age gallery. Justin gets a sneak pre-opening tour from curator Tilly Blythe. Among the exhibits – including the server on which Tim first coded the web – he speaks to internet pioneer Martha Lane Fox, and to the founder of Acorn Computers and chip-maker ARM, Hermann Hauser.
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Peanuts and Cracker Jack
24th July, 2017NPR Planet Money #700: Beer. Water. Pretzels. It takes effort, strategy, and some serious lungs to sell expensive junk food at a baseball game. Meet the hot dog vending legend of Fenway P
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The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spook
24th July, 2017Along with toppling democratically elected governments, funneling money illegally to dubious political groups and producing pornographic movies about heads of state, the Central Intelligence Agency has also been fiendishly good at manipulating language. After all, this is the organization that made “waterboarding” seem much more acceptable, at least to the Washington elite, by rebranding it as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Another CIA turn of phrase, “extraordinary rendition,” sounds so much better to the ear than “illegal kidnapping and torture.” Not too long ago, the CIA’s style guide, called the Style Manual and Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, was posted online. “Good intelligence depends in large measure on clear, concise writing,” writes Fran Moore, Director of Intelligence in the foreword. And considering the agency’s deftness with the written word, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s remarkably good.
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Is the US a force for good in the world?
24th July, 2017Mehdi Hasan goes head to head with Thomas Friedman on the morality of America’s global role. The US appears to have taken a back seat role in international relations. Is the US in decline? Or is it just taking stock as it accommodates to the new emerging world order? In this episode of Head to Head at the Oxford Union, Mehdi Hasan challenges one of the world’s most influential columnists and authors, Thomas L Friedman. Advisor to presidents and kings, Tom Friedman of the New York Times has won the Pulitzer Prize not once or twice, but three times. He is the best-selling author, among many others, of “The World is Flat” and he argues in his latest book, “That Used to Be US”, that the US must rebuild itself to remain a global power.
Critics say American self-interest has trumped democracy and human rights time and again, and that Obama’s America is no different. So is the US foreign policy counter-productive? Or is America a force for good in the world? The US “is not an NGO”, admits Friedman, explaining that America “is a country like any country with its interests, it pursues them, and sometimes pursues them very narrowly.” Friedman also talks about the powerful influence of the Israeli lobby and his recent experience in Yemen. “America is in a slow decline”, he tells Mehdi Hasan and goes on to describe his “unique formula of success” that will place America once again ahead of the Brazils, the Chinas and the Japans.
Joining this discussion are: Seumas Milne, an associate editor and columnist at The Guardian, as well as author of the “The Enemy Within”, “Beyond the Casino Economy”, and “The Revenge of History”; Davis Lewin, the political director at the Henry Jackson Society, and the former Middle East director at the Next Century Foundation; and Dr Miriyam Aouragh, a lecturer of Cyber Politics in the Middle East, an associate member of the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford who is currently conducting research on the political implications of the Internet for the Arab revolutions. She is also the author of Palestine Online: Transnationalism, the Internet and the Construction of Identity.
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Obama Spent 10 Times as Much on Social Media as Romney
24th July, 2017This PBS NewsHour program from 16 November 2012 Ray Suarez talks to Daily Download’s Howard Kurtz and Lauren Ashburn about a 10-to-1 spending gap on social media between the Obama and Romney campaigns, as well as the shifting role Facebook and Twitter played in how voters expressed their political leanings in their communities.
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