Word: mattress
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Orthopedic physicians often recommend that patients sleep on firm mattresses to alleviate low-back pain, but a study in last week's issue of the Lancet suggests that such advice is based on little more than folklore. In a randomized trial, researchers at the Kovacs Foundation in Spain assigned 313 subjects with chronic low-back pain to either a firm or a medium-firm mattress to sleep on for three months. Good news for those of us who like a little give in our cribs: patients who slept on the medium-firm mattresses were twice as likely as those sleeping...
...three years, Sternberg has been working on a new test to augment the SAT, one that asks students to write captions for New Yorker cartoons, dictate stories into tape recorders and persuade friends to help haul a bulky mattress up a flight of stairs. These unorthodox tasks are designed to measure the creative and practical skills that Sternberg says are crucial to success in college and in life but are ignored by the typical pencil-and-paper exam. If Sternberg succeeds in quantifying these types of intelligence--and linking them to concrete accomplishments--his efforts may change forever...
Another impetus for the board to explore alternative tests is the persistence of gaps in SAT scores between racial and ethnic groups. Here, too, the Rainbow Project shows some promise. On the practical-intelligence portions of the test (the part in which students persuade friends to haul the mattress), there were no differences in scores between groups. On the creative portions, the differences were considerably smaller than they are on the SAT. And in some sections, groups that traditionally fare poorly on standardized tests thrived. Native Americans did especially well on the oral part...
...Earl is adding a new mother ship: a Las Vegas resort with 2,567 hotel rooms and a 7,000-seat theater. Much of his $30 million movie-memorabilia collection will be used in the Starwood-run hotel, where guests can opt to sleep on Austin Powers' shagadelic revolving mattress or Sharon Stone's bed from Basic Instinct. ("With ice pick available on request," Earl says...
When Ashima visits their apartment once, to take care of Amber and Clover, and winds up sitting on Alan and Judy’s mattress, she “[cries] out, falling clumsily backward, startled to discover that it was filled with water...