Three elderly women have fought off a would-be robber at Malvern in Melbourne’s east after the man threatened one of them with a knife — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that [PayPal co-founder and one of the first investors in Facebook, Peter] Thiel thinks ideas can develop in a start-up environment much faster than at a university. And the project is also intended to question the idea of higher education. Thiel told TechCrunch in April that the United Sates was in a higher education bubble.
“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he told Techcrunch. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education adds Thiel is doing just that:
Students today are taking on more debt, and recently tightened bankruptcy laws make it more difficult to shake that debt, he argues, and those factors make higher education a risky investment. If you get this wrong, it’s actually a mistake that’s hard to undo for the rest of your life,
he said.
Critics contend that even so, Thiel’s advice to leave school and develop a business is applicable only to a tiny fraction of students and that Thiel’s own success, aided by business relationships forged during his days at Stanford, argues against leaving school.
But Thiel is convinced that the social pressure for students to pursue lower-risk trajectories
in their career choices will lead to less innovation in the future — via carloz.newsvine.com
As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.
Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for illegally petitioning
the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do — via redwolf.newsvine.com
New Macbook sleeve from BoutiqueID
Append selected text to the URL of your favourite site enabling you to submit a query to any website. For example — highlight a placename/postcode and open using Google maps… — via Add-ons for Firefox
The world’s second aircraft storage facility will be set up on a site adjacent to the terminal at Alice Springs Airport — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Red Cross and the Vatican both helped thousands of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to escape after the second world war, according to a new book that pulls together evidence from previously unpublished documents.
The Red Cross has previously acknowledged that its efforts to help refugees were used by Nazi war criminals to escape because administrators were overwhelmed, but the new research suggests that the numbers escaping were much higher than previously thought — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hi-tech face recognition technology and a gun identification parade
have led to the arrest of two men over a brazen heist on a Camberwell travel agency eight years ago that netted the alleged robbers $250,000.
Three staff and an American Express employee were confronted by a masked man with a silver handgun and silencer who had earlier hid in the business’ roof on February 25, 2003 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Foxtel has finally declared its formal bid for smaller pay TV rival Austar United Communications, offering almost $2 billion in a move that would leave the industry a virtual monopoly if it wins approval from shareholders and regulators — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.
More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.
Initial excavations have already confirmed some of the findings including of two suspected pyramids.
To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist,
says Dr Sarah Parcak — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The personal data of millions of passengers who fly between the US and Europe, including credit card details, phone numbers and home addresses, may be stored by the US department of homeland security for 15 years, according to a draft agreement between Washington and Brussels leaked to the Guardian — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The United Nations’s top human rights watchdog has attacked Australia’s tough refugee policies and the treatment of outback Aborigines, saying there was a strong undercurrent of racism in the country.
Long-standing policies of locking up asylum seekers had cast a shadow over Australia’s human rights record
, and appeared to be completely arbitrary, UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Whybin\TBWA\Tequila Sydney has created a new campaign for RaboDirect based on the insight that Australians lose $4 billion every year in interest by leaving their money in low-interest savings accounts. The ad attacks rival banks through a sinister bank manager, played by actor Simon Westaway from gangland series Underbelly, who steals people’s dreams by giving them low-interest accounts — via Mumbrella
The popular blog publishing tool WordPress has joined the growing cadre of sites dropping support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 web browser. The recently upgraded WordPress.com brings a handful of new features and a revamped, cleaner design in the admin pages, but perhaps the biggest news in the release is that the admin pages no longer support IE 6 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In a pregnancy that defied the odds, a Phoenix woman gave birth Monday to a baby she had carried just outside her uterus, a feat so rare that doctors couldn’t say for sure whether such a birth had ever occurred before — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Twitter is poised to acquire London-based startup TweetDeck in a $40m (£25m) deal that will make 36-year-old founder Iain Dodsworth a multimillionaire — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A prominent Brazilian conservationist and his wife have been killed in the Amazon region, police have said.
They said Joao Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and Maria do Espirito Santo were ambushed in Para state, near the city of Maraba.
The environmentalist had repeatedly warned of death threats against him by loggers and cattle ranchers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Police are trying to trace the owner of a life-sized tiger toy which sparked a major police alert in Hampshire over fears a real animal was on the loose — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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