Long and the short of it

Delegates at a recent conference hosted by Scotland's Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning have solved one of those tricky questions that has troubled thinkers for years: how long is a piece of string?

The academics, from the Waterford Institute of Technology and Bangor University, were issued with a yo-yo and an instruction leaflet in the spirit of the conference theme, "Researching learning outside the academy". Their solution? Twice the length from the middle to the end.