The Daily Dozen

1. Secret CIA Manual Shows Magic Tricks Used by Spies:  “During the Cold War, the CIA hired a master magician to teach them deceptive maneuvers. Here are a handful of tricks, recovered from a super secret manual the government thought it had destroyed over 30 years ago.” 
2. In Hospice, Care and Comfort as Life Wanes: “[S]tudies have shown that, all other things being equal, patients receiving the comfort care provided by hospice tend to live longer and die more peacefully than those who continue to get intensive care for their disease when treatment has ceased to help.”
3. John Brown – Freedom’s Martyr or the 9/11 of 1859?
4. With an eye to the future, try RAW photos today.  “[A]lthough taking up about three times the storage space as a JPEG and requiring manual processing, offer higher quality and more flexibility. But what I've come to understand since then is a second advantage of raw: because processing software improves over time, raw photos in effect can get better with age.”
5. Cool!  iPhone app turns business cards into contacts.
6. Underappreciated economist:  Jack Hirshleifer.
7. Dubai fact of the day: “Dubai now has the tallest building in the world, and 11 skyscrapers that are taller than any European building.”
8. New York has 250 times the rate of abortions per thousand births than Wyoming?  Maybe, but this gap seems huge to me.  (I think Wyoming’s reported data is too low.)  NY City has the highest rate with 756 abortions per 1,000 births – and a higher absolute number of abortions than any state other than New York (which includes NYC) and Florida.
9. Is your Facebook personality genuine?  “When researchers began studying Facebook friends, they expected that users would exaggerate accomplishments. To their surprise, they discovered that Facebook profiles typically give an accurate and realistic impression of the user's real-life personality.”
10. Writing to impress rather than inform.  “Here’s an interesting essay about the incomprehensibility of some academic writing.”  Sad, but true.
11. How law schools adapt to U.S. News rankings.  “One general effect of the USN rankings on law schools is that it has created pressure on law school administrators to redistribute resources in ways that maximize their scores on the criteria used by USN to create the rankings, even if they are skeptical that this is a productive use of these resources. “  Also sad, but true.  More on this here.
12. Sometimes it’s just not worth keeping up with the Joneses: