Popular Elsewhere
15:03 UK time, Wednesday, 10 August 2011
A look at the stories ranking highly on various news sites.
A fourth day of rioting has spread from the most-popular lists of British news sites to international sites.
There are still some other stories that are keeping up the readers distracted, mainly of the four-legged variety.
Rosie the golden Labrador stands in front of a court house on the New York Times' most emailed article, holding his own lead. While that, and a few other pictures may be enough for an article to spread and spread in other papers, there are more high-minded concerns in the New York Times. according to the paper. For she is a therapy dog, used to accompany people, especially children, in the witness box and give them comfort. Rosie is "adorable", the paper explains, but that is also the problem. "Defense lawyers argue that the dogs may unfairly sway jurors with their cuteness and the natural empathy they attract, whether a witness is telling the truth or not".
Dogs dominate Time magazine as well. Their readers are more likely to click on an article promising than their second biggest hitter, an explanation why the riots have spread across England. Duke Canine Cognition Center is opening in autumn to research the inner workings of the dog. One such centre already exists at Harvard. The article promises "at a deeper level, it may even tell us something about ourselves." It leaves the reader to come up with some possibilities to what those revelations may be. It does however, reveal that in Siberia 40 generations of foxes have been tamed and now act remarkably like dogs.
A popular Slate article conjures up an experiment we can all have a go at to shame our Facebook friends. On a hunch that , David Plotz decided to see what would happen if he adjusted his profile to make him have three birthdays in one month. On his second fake birthday, the popular man still got 105 birthday messages. "Of the 105 birthday wishes, 45 of them - nearly half came from people who had wished me a Facebook happy birthday two weeks earlier". Oh dear, it turns out his friends may not have meant it. He blames it partly on bad memory.
Just in case you're worried that readers are gravitating towards the easy to understand, New Scientist's most-read story undertakes to explain . This isn't going to unite the theories of what your dog thinks and why people post on your Facebook page but instead hopes to bring together the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Yep. Physicists are developing a term 'phase space' which is an "eight-dimensional world that merges our familiar four dimensions of space and time and a four-dimensional world called momentum space", including energy and momentum.
