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This is an interesting nugget of information from BBC News. According to an international poll of more than ten thousand respondents in ten countries, 61% of respondents said they trust the media compared to only 52% who stated they trust their government‘s account on things.

Also worth noting is the finding that traditional media (newspapers, TV and radio news) is still overwhelmingly preferred over online news sources.

Interestingly, the report also mentioned that internationally 48% of respondents said they trusted the BBC, while 44% backed CNN.

Personally, I feel that Iraq now is worse than under Saddam’s rule. Democracy is not for everyone. Some people just need a good, solid dictator behind their back to actually function… and deep inside anybody’s mind, they know this is true. Even those so-called “champions of democracy”.

But don’t bother about my point of view… Read what average Iraqi citizens have to say. I’m so fsckin’ bored of hearing from the politicians, and I’m thankful to the BBC for arranging this.

The TIOBE index might be a useful tool to see the popularity of your pet programming languages. Mind you, this index shouldn’t be accepted as the definitive guide to programming language popularity. This is mainly due to the overly simplified method used by TIOBE; searching major search engines with the following query: +"<language> programming" -tv -channel. Click on the link at the end of the second paragraph for more information (I’d link it here, but the page is in a direct-link busting frame, bargh!).

The first place is occupied by Java. I know Java is definitely popular, but I never thought that it would rank first. Java never was a language I meddled a lot with, however, my favourite text editor is built using Java.

On the mostly web based programming languages, the two “P” languages had contrasting fates. PHP increased its position by one step to fourth, while Perl dropped three places to sixth. Is this a sign that Perl is now approaching the “has been” status?

It is also extremely suprising to see how Visual Foxpro leapt 30 places to end up on 13th place. I never liked Foxpro, and although I’ve seen a few job vacancies ads requiring proficiency in it. Strange… with the availability of numerous industrial strength databases (both free and commercial) in the market, I’m suprised that Foxpro hasn’t been pushed into mediocrity by now.

According to the findings of research conducted by Laura E. Schulz, assistant professor of cognitive science from MIT, the way children play and explore suggests that they believe cause-and-effect relationships in the world are governed by fundamental laws rather than by mysterious forces.

To be honest, I’m suprised that they’ve only discovered the connection now. Spending quite a bit of my life around toddlers, I’ve always been amused by how quickly they implement a systematic decision making process based on experience. Children seem to be born scientists. They look for patterns of similarities and structure their actions based on what seems (to them) would be the most favourable outcome… Not that I can confirm from my interviews with them, the toddlers seem to have a higher level language compared to us adults which is, sad to say, unintelligible to me.

Sad to see this skill seem to deteriorate as they get older. Even sadder to see are those who end up being politicians. Everybody knows that a requirement of being a politician is to defy logic and scientific approaches to overcome a problem and just choose what seems to be the most popular choice, regardless of how stupid it is.

Boffins from University College Dublin have discovered a bacteria that can consume polystyrene foam and in turn converts it into polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA).

This is significant because styrofoam is not biodegradable, and is one of the most destructive forms of chemicals which kills thousands of wildlife, especially sea creatures. PHA on the other hand, is biodegradable.

LiveScience.com has more information on this discovery.