I love IRC, particularly #freenode. I really detest having to first search out then go through the whole process of signing up for yet another Slack group.
Oh nice. A company that does nothing but collect personal information. I’m already in their identity protection program, so I'm a little nonplussed at this.
Literally teams of interns manually re-typing old articles from microfilm. OCR isn't quite there yet, not for dealing with the ways newspapers and newspaper design has changed over the years. You'd get the text, but there would be no guarantees that it that story bylines, headlines, factboxes, and photos match. Our own digital archives go back to 1994, anything before that is manual input.
One of the biggest issues is that a lot of newsrooms have zero control over their CMS, because they're owned by a corporate entity that dictates IT decisions from afar, slowly and with much gnashing of teeth.
Family-owned papers like the one I work at (The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, WA) are the one of the few news orgs that could actually put something like this into production within this century, but even we still have to deal with manpower issues.
Probably compressing the living daylights out of it. By squashing it down, they flatten the amplitude in the music and things with a lot of transients (by definition, drums) suffer. It results in a lot of fatigue, because the higher the compression the more it turns into white noise, essentially.
Sirius XM might be one of the last to standardize on a reasonable LUFS setting of 12 to 16.
The (controversial) economist Steven D. Levitt pointed out that there was no correlation between parents reading to children and reading test scores.[1]
I don't know which studies are accurate. I just remember that story because the findings were counter-intuitive.
The editorial you site is from 2005, while the other paper is from 2014. The latter looks like a large and well designed study. Here is a quote from the conclusion:
"What are the implications of our findings? Our main finding is that it is important that young children are being read to. This is an early-life intervention that seems to be beneficial for the rest of their lives. We show that there is an important role for parents in the educational performance of their children. The evidence strongly suggests that parental reading to children gives them a head-start in life."
I haven't studied either enough to say for sure, but it appears the the 2014 paper is trying to measure the marginal benefit of reading, while the Levitt study was looking at larger correlations. The Levitt study suggests that smart parents end up with smart kids, reading or not. What is more interesting to me at least, is what can I do to help my kids succeed? The 2014 paper comes closer to answering this question, and suggests reading to them helps.
>The Levitt study suggests that smart parents end up with smart kids, reading or not.
To clarify, it wasn't a "Levitt study" per se. It was government study. The government had questionnaires asking parents "how often do you read to your children?" and it had the children's reading test scores. Levitt found no correlation in those 2 datapoints.
The only thing I find to be less valuable than popular media news stories about scientific research results is popular media editorials interpreting research results.
Worse yet is such an editorial reporting conclusions from public data, without details of the analytical methodology.
>The only thing I find to be less valuable [...] is popular media editorials interpreting research results
In this case, the medium is not the message here. That page wasn't an "editorial" in the sense that a dilettante newspaper editor put his own spin on research he didn't know.
Instead, Levitt himself was writing an article that was short enough for the editorial space alloted. His longer text is chapter 5 in his Freakonomics book. (In other words, the so-called "editorial" was advertising hype for his book.)
I just linked the USA Today page because I thought it was more convenient than trying to deep-link a copyrighted book.[1][2]
I find it odd that it's Levitt and Dubner saying that, because their most famous papers are the ones that use instrumental variable regressions to squeeze causal relationships out of the data. Now they're saying that a correlation from a longitudinal study can be taken at face value?
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it is very strange.
I can easily do half an hour or more for my six year old at night. Have always been reading for him, but it's more enjoyable now that he understands more interesting works.
Revisiting my child hood classics such as Hardy Boys, mixing in Harry Potter (books are so much better than the first and only movie that I saw) and so on: Feels like quality time, and a great way to connect. I can easily get into those books too, even in my mid 40s. ;)
I have noticed that enjoyment increases with my reading engagement level - creating different voices for the different characters and such. He has attention issues, and it's a pleasure to have him focusing on something other than a screen. I will stop every few minutes and ask questions to check if he is really listening to the story and not just the sound of my voice. Previously, it might have been more of the latter.
Did the same with my first son with all Harry Potter books, which came out as he grew up. When my second son was born he caught up with the early books by watching the movies then participating to our reading sessions. I acted all voices when reading, and we sometimes would re-enact a complete scene all together, improvising lines to fit with the story and acting with any kind of props we could put our hands on.
My sons are grown-ups now, how I miss these times.
