Category: ideas

“A new study by researchers at Pew Research Center and Rutgers University found the opposite: Frequent Internet and social media users do not have higher stress levels than those who use technology less often. And for women, using certain digital tools decreases stress.”

“Which is a better magic trick: turning a dove into a glass of milk, or a glass of milk into a dove? Turning a rose into a vase, or a vase into a rose? For most people, … in each case, they find the transformation from a nonliving object to a living thing more interesting – but why? Is it just more exciting to see a living thing appear than to have it vanish? Or is there something deeper at work?”

“Our faces are organs of emotional communication; by some estimates, we transmit more data with our expressions than with what we say … But since the nineteen-nineties a small number of researchers have been working to give computers the capacity to read our feelings and react, in ways that have come to seem startlingly human.” One of the most successful is an Egyptian woman running a startup near Boston.

“New advances in technology, and of course the Internet, have led to a new kind of art machine that poses conceptual challenges even more interesting than their technical ones.”

“Eating canned peaches in the winter, buying a chocolate bar at the corner newsstand, hearing an opera in your living room, and immortalizing baby’s first steps in a snapshot all marked a radical shift in human experience. Replacing scarcity with abundance and capturing the previously ephemeral—these mundane pleasures defied nature as surely as did horseless carriages.”

“It is still very early days for VR, though, and every week new applications for the technology are popping up from developers around the world. The latest might be one of the most worthwhile yet: helping children with physical disabilities to play the piano.”

“The concepts and ideas we celebrate — like our spiritual beliefs and daily habits — are a choice, though sometimes it feels like we “have” to celebrate them, even if we don’t feel like it. Culture is ours to do with as we choose, and that means that we can add, subtract, or edit celebrations or holidays as we see fit — because you and me and everyone reading this makes up our culture, and it is defined by us, for us, after all.”

The “urban Renaissance” we are living through is a terrific example of solving a problem by not solving it, or rather, by turning it inside-out. We’ve imported suburbia to the city, recreating its bucolic aura via bike lanes and urban gardening, and its gated community vibe via “broken windows” policing. Soon it will have all those stereotypical negative characteristics of suburbia too: lack of human diversity, and commercial life crushed under chain stores. Meanwhile, we are exporting poverty to places where you need a car to survive.

“For thousands of years, we’ve known intuitively that stories alter our thinking and, in turn, the way we engage with the world. But only recently has research begun to shed light on how this transformation takes place from inside. Using modern technology like functional MRI scanning, scientists are tackling age-old questions: What kind of effect do powerful narratives really have on our brains? And how might a story-inspired perspective translate into behavioural change?”