venerdì 19 settembre 2014

A 9-Year-Old at a Shooting Range, a Spraying Uzi and Outrage (NYT)

The four-hour tours offered by one of the big gun ranges here are a popular tourist attraction. Starting at $200 a person, a bus will pick up visitors at their hotel in Las Vegas, 25 miles to the north, show them Hoover Dam and bring them to a recreational shooting range called Last Stop, where they can fire the weapons of their dreams: automatic machine guns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers. A hamburger lunch is included; a helicopter tour of the nearby Grand Canyon is optional.
But on Monday, one family’s adventure went horribly wrong.

mercoledì 17 settembre 2014

Why Did Crowd Flee Shanghai Subway After Foreigner Fainted? (NPR)

"The prevailing ethical system in traditional China is based on close-knit community ties, kinship ties." Yan says in traditional, agrarian society, Chinese sharply divided people into two categories: those they knew and those they didn't. "A person might treat other people in the person's social group very, very nicely," he says. "But turn around, when facing to a stranger, and [a person might] tend to be very suspicious. And whenever possible, might take advantage of that stranger."

lunedì 15 settembre 2014

Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist? (NYT)

"Research in the last couple of decades suggests that the problem is not so much overt racists. Rather, the larger problem is a broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior".

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html?referrer=&_r=0

martedì 2 settembre 2014

How much has the Ice Bucket Challenge achieved? (Bbc)

From 29 July to 28 August this year ALS received $98.2m - compared with $2.7m donated during the same period last year.

From 1 August to 27 August this year, the ALS Wikipedia page had 2,717,754 views. This compared with the 1,662,842 people who had visited the page during the whole of the preceding 12 months, according to data company Dataviz.
Average daily visits to the ALS association website were about 17,500 before the ice bucket challenge, compared with the peak of 4.5 million visits on 20 August (of which 83% were new to the site). During the past month there have been about 30 million visitors in total.