1. Richard Morris, of the school of accounting at the University of NSW, which requires an entrance score in the top 5 per cent of students, says attendance has been a problem since the late 1990s.
'Sometimes in the lectures we've only got about one third of students attending,' he said. 'It definitely is a problem. If you don't turn up to class you're missing out on the whole of the experience: you don't think a whole lot, you don't engage in debates with other students - or with your teachers.'
It is not all, said Professor John Dearn, a Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of Canberra, who said the internet was the way students access and use information. 'It is strange that despite all the evidence as to their ineffectiveness, lectures seem to persist in our universities.'
2. According to the literature, the history of vaccination can be traced back to as early as the 7th century when the monks in India tried to themselves by drinking snake venom. The first vaccination was inoculation with human smallpox, a practice widely carried out in ancient India, Arabia, and China. This of vaccination collecting pus from a patient suffering from mild form of smallpox virus infection and inoculating the sample to a healthy human, which later led to a minor infection
This method was first introduced in England by a Greek named E. Timoni. However, this method had a risk of spreading smallpox in the community and even worsening the health of the person who received the inoculation.
While the use of human smallpox vaccine was controversial, E. Jenner came up with bovine smallpox vaccine in 1796; this new method also faced controversy, but continued to be universalized. Smallpox became a preventable disease by injecting pus extracted from a human infected with cowpox virus. Jenner named the substance 'vaccine' after the Latin word 'vacca' which means 'cow,' and thus the process of giving vaccine became 'vaccination'
3. The horned desert viper’s ability to hunt at night has always puzzled biologists. Though it lies with its head buried in the sand, it can with great as soon as prey appears. “Sometimes you even see the snake fly up and whirl round in the air to strike a mouse passing behind it,” says Bruce Young, a biologist at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas.
Now, Young and physicists Leo van Hemmen and Paul Friedel at the Technical University of Munich in Germany have a computer of the snake’s auditory system to explain how the snake “hears” its prey without really having the ears for it.
Although the vipers have ears that can hear between 200 and 1000 hertz, it is not the sound of the mouse scurrying about that they are detecting. “The snakes don’t have external eardrums,” says van Hemmen. “So unless the mouse wears boots and starts stamping, the snake won’t hear it.”
4. The Eiffel Tower was the tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1889. It was built for the World's Fair to that iron could be as strong as stone while being infinitely lighter. And in fact the wrought-iron tower is twice as tall as the masonry Washington Monument and yet it weighs 70,000 tons less! It is repainted every seven years with 50 tons of dark brown paint.
Called 'the father of the skyscraper,' the Home Insurance Building, in Chicago in1885 (and demolished in 1931), was 138 feet tall and 10 stories. It was the first building to effectively employ a supporting of steel beams and columns, allowing it to have many more windows than traditional masonry structures. But this new construction method made people worry that the building would fall down, leading the city to halt construction until they could the structure's safety.
In 1929, auto tycoon Walter Chrysler took part in an intense race with the Bank of Manhattan Trust Company to build the world's tallest skyscraper. Just when it looked like the bank had captured the title, workers at the Chrysler Building jacked a thin spire hidden inside the building through the top of the roof to win the contest.
5. If after years of Spanish classes, some people still find it impossible to understand some native speakers, they should not worry. This does not mean the lessons were wasted. Millions of Spanish speakers use neither standard Latin American Spanish nor Castilian, which predominate in U.S. schools. The confusion is partly political—the Spanish-speaking world is very diverse. Spanish is the language of 19 separate countries and Puerto Rico. This means that there is no one standard dialect. The most common Spanish dialect taught in the U.S. is standard Latin American. It is sometimes called 'Highland' Spanish since it is generally spoken in the areas of Latin America. While each country retains its own and has some unique vocabulary, residents of countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia generally speak Latin American Spanish, especially in urban centers. This dialect is noted for its of each letter and its strong 'r' sounds. This Spanish was spoken in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was brought to the Americas by the early colonists. However, the Spanish of Madrid and of northern Spain, called Castilian, developeds that never reached the New World. These include he pronunciation of 'ci' and 'ce' as 'th.' In Madrid, 'gracias' (thank you) becomes 'gratheas' (as opposed to 'gras-see-as' in Latin America.) Another difference is the use of the word 'vosotros' (you all, or you guys) as the informal form of 'ustedes' in Spain. Castilian sounds to Latin Americans much like British English sounds to U.S. residents.