29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus

 Martin Cooney's Invention of the Incubator

In 1896, inventor Martin Cooney designed the incubator, a device veloped to aid premature babies. Cooney was the first to advocate separation of infants from their mothers as a medical procedure for the health of the child. In a bizarre combination of medicine and sideshow. Cooney gathered hundreds of premature babies (they were easy to obtain because doctors assumed premature infants would die), put them into incubators, and exhibited them at various expositions and fairs in Amer¬ ica and E...
  1  notes

He displayed the premature babies in a sideshow to prove its effectiveness in keeping them alive, but also kicked off the practice of separating Mothers from babies at birth.

01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus

 Education Provides Hooks to Hang New Knowledge

Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: the most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.
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This is a great metaphor for MemexPlex.