Being able to compare and contrast a similar loop exercise in different languages can help foster deeper understanding of general principles, and also highlight the syntactic similarities and differences. Most of the very poly-lingual programmers I know have said that the more languages you know, the easier it becomes to grasp new ones (yes, syntax gets garbled, but that's what O'Reilly books are for, eh?). That said, I wonder how many CS1 classes do present samples in multiple languages...

Take one down, pass it around. 99 Bottles of Beer: One program in 435 languages....

They also have an unattributed UserTalk example, which spawns a WPtext window to display the results!

11:19:30 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via Backup Brain ]

David Carter-Tod comes through with another winner.

The meta-analysis of research findings. Quote: "This page is intended to help you learn more about meta-analysis by providing you with an overview; links to relevant documents and resources; and free, high-quality software."

Hey David, I thought you were working on a site redesign, not research stuff. Stealing a little time here and there? ;-)

9:06:04 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via Serious Instructional Technology ]

If you ever took a college psych class, this one was probably mentioned at some point. The details of this one and the parallels drawn to notorious prior acts are fascinating, and horrible in their implications.

Notes from infamous Guards/Prisoners experiment. Alena sez: "Details of the infamous 1971 Prison Experiment at Stanford University (these types of experiments are today banned due to the psychological harm inflicted on the subjects). In the study, ordinary college students, who responded to an ad for paid subjects of an experiment, were randomly assigned to one of two groups, prisoners or guards, in a simulated prison environment. The ensuing startlingly rapid transformation of ordinary young people (and of Psychology professors!) into sadistic prison guards and fearful, hopeless, and identity-stripped prisoners is astounding."

Prisoner #8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage. In spite of all of this, we had already come to think so much like prison authorities that we thought he was trying to "con" us -- to fool us into releasing him...

[A] colleague had heard we were doing an experiment, and he came to see what was going on. I briefly described what we were up to, and Gordon asked: "Say, what's the independent variable in this study?" I got really angry at him. Here I had a prison break on my hands. The security of my men and the stability of my prison was at stake, and now, I had to deal with this bleeding-heart, liberal, academic, effete dingdong who was concerned about the independent variable!

Link

On one hand, it is hard to believe that it only took six days for all of this to happen. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that it did take six days.

8:25:20 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via Boing Boing Blog ]