links for 2008-11-26

"As part of the forthcoming major economic stimulus package, I propose that the Obama administration fully fund the America Competes initiative immediately."

"Many experts say that the United States can only truly see gains in the percentages of adults who have a college degree if colleges and universities get better at teaching students who arrived on campus unprepared for college-level work. But many professors find themselves frustrated by teaching such students -- and many of the students drop out."

"Davide Galli and Luciano Reatto from the Universita degli Studi di Milano in Italy review the field, doing a sterling job of drawing together the disparate ideas and the puzzling experimental evidence."

"A concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now. Maybe. "

"Feynman pointed this out (somewhere in vol. III of his lectures on physics) - if you fire a stream of spin-polarized electrons into a brick hanging on the end of a thread, you are really applying a torque to the brick since you are supplying a flow of angular momentum into it, and the thread will twist to apply a balancing torque. Well, Zolfagharkhani et al. have actually gone and done this experiment."