Items to Share: 19 August

Education Focus

• The Professor’s Lecture Notes Go Straight to the Students’ Lecture Notes | Quote Investigator Tracing the origins of the saying.

• Eye-Tracking Study Reveals What Earns Student Attention in Classroom | Faculty Focus ...and supports the previous item

• Don't Confuse Technology With Teaching - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Other Business

• Apocalypse Not: Here's Why You Shouldn't Worry About End Times: Wired.com Matt Ridley--a taster for his "The Rational Optimist"

• Spiked review of books: Something good to chew on, for a change In a similar vein to the previous item.

• Separated by a common language: saying 'please' in restaurants

• 'Beam Us Up, Mr. Scott!': Why Misquotations Catch On - Maria Konnikova - The Atlantic

• Pallets: The single most important object in the global economy. - Slate Magazine

• Freakonomics: Is "statistically significant" really significant? On the arbitrary tyranny of p<.05.

• The Power of Negative Thinking A taster for a counterargument to the positive psychology movement; but Ehrenreich's Smile or Die is still the classic.

• Swimming Australia's incentive model was a failure: fact Incentives are not necessarily good motivators: see Dan Pink's RSA talk, too.

• Al Jazeera Travel Show Explores World Cities Through Their Street Food | Open Culture