Popular Elsewhere
14:26 UK time, Monday, 22 August 2011
A look at the stories ranking highly on various news sites.
A popular Daily Mail article says a research team at Cornell University have set up a . They tested their algorithm on the site Trip Advisor which is meant to give travellers advice from other travellers but has been victim of businesses posing as customers. The article says the key to spotting a fake review is one with lots of adverbs like "really" and "very" along with exclamation marks which denote false enthusiasm, excessive use of superlatives and a lack of detail and description.
And here's a superlative for you - . That's who a popular Daily Beast article claims to have found. Irving Kahn is 105-years-old. Two of his sons in their 70s have retired but he carries on working. He started his career on Wall Street in the Great Depression which, the Daily Beast supposes, makes him a perfect person to lend a reassuring tone to anxious investors right now. And that reassurance comes in two forms - one that he managed to make money in the depression and the other, his prediction that technology will be sure to get the economy out of a similar depression far quicker than before.
Charlie Brooker gives some dubious advice in a well read Guardian article. He suggests to people who haven't got the A-Level grades they were after: "". He also reveals a little about his own university life - not getting the grades he needed but let into the course anyway before failing to graduate from a media studies degree. He divulges his secret is being "lucky enough to work in a field in which a lack of certificates (and talent) hasn't been a hindrance".
If lying your way to success and riches isn't your thing, a popular New Scientist story suggests manipulating the lottery might not be as hard as previously thought. "" the article promises. Claims by one consultant statistician Mohan Srivastava are that lots of lotteries are not actually random as those running them want to ensure a profit. What is astonishing about this article is when Srivastava found a way of predicting winning Ontario scratch cards he didn't profit but instead informed the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation.
Finally, a popular Wired story starts by saying . It then says something extraordinary. "Since then physicists have been trying to find a way to get around it and stop making rings. Now a group of University of Pennsylvania physicists have done it." The first reaction is surely to scroll to the top of the page and check the date stamp. But no, this isn't an old article experiencing resurgence in popularity. This article is from is August 2011. Which all means these physicists have spent 14 years on this. Have they not heard of a coaster?
