Scientific papers aren't written for you, the layman. They are written specifically for scientists in that particular field. I'm a PhD student, and never have I read a paper with wording that I would describe as "convoluted."
This is actually pretty cool. Over here in Europe every (most) websites end in a country specific TLD so we know where the website is based. We can see instantly a .fr domain means the website/store is based in France, or .de for Germany, etc and so on. It's not common at all to have a .com for your website.
I suspect in America it's going to be really confusing for people though because as far as I can tell everything is a .com. People probably won't be so keen on adopting a .nyc domain for their NYC based business because everything else is a .com so it might seem lesser or cheap or "not the real thing."
I tutored in uni for extra beer money and I've tutored children, teenagers, fellow university students, grad students, and adults. What I learned from this was that there was no one single best way to teach someone things. The phrase sucks, but it really depends on the person. Some people you can teach better by not giving them the answer and trying to get them to think and that's great. On the other hand, some people actually do excel if they are simply given the answer (of course one doesn't just stop after giving the answer, you would then explain the answer, how we got there, etc, and then knowing this, solve another similar problem to see how much of it they understood). Figuring out your student's learning style is unfortunately the hard part, and it looks like this guy in the link has not figured out his sister's learning style. Even just reading that conversation he posted---he sounds extremely condescending.
Just picking something out, he wrote:
"The circumference of the glass divided by the diameter gave me pi, what does that mean?"
OK, first of all, he goes to say that she JUST now learned what a circumference and diameter is and still doesn't know what a "pi" is. Why in the world would you ask a question like this with unfamiliar words to someone who just learned these words? He was making it unnecessarily difficult to understand. Of course she said she didn't know and then he goes on and says "WELL what if I divide 10 by 2?" Which is like comparing apples to oranges.
It isn't since in the fahrenheit scale temperatures drop below zero as well. It's just that we rate a lot of stuff on a scale of 0 to 100, so with the fahrenheit system it just makes sense to know that 0 is really cold and 100 is really hot.
A friend of mine sent me a link to Copy and told me to sign up for it and that "it's like Dropbox." I just clicked his link to check it out and the first thing your website did was ask for permission to use desktop notifications (Safari/OS X). Of course, not even knowing what the website is I promptly rejected the prompt and then closed the tab.
My complaint with this is that why in the world would I blindly let a random website have extended permissions, before I even know what the website is?
Afte I got over it some hours later, I went back to copy.com to check it out and I found nothing in your website that would make me want to switch from Dropbox (for ease of use) or Spideroak (for encryption and security). One of the comments here said exactly what I'm thinking: I have no idea who you guys are, why I should trust you with my data, and that you'll even be around after a year.
From reading some comments here, apparently you're part of Barracuda Networks (no idea who this is, so it doesn't help) and some other snarky comments like "check out humans.txt" or "look at the html code and you'll see Facebook IDs…" No, no I'm not going to waste my time doing this.