Category: ideas

“It’s been the refrain of behavioral economists … for years: Spend your money on experiences, not things. A vacation or a meal with friends will enrich your life; new shoes will quickly lose their charm. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story, argue psychologists Darwin A. Guevarra and Ryan T. Howell in a new paper … Not all goods, they say, should be lumped together.”

“Unlike modern libraries, the Accumulibrary doesn’t segment or segregate media types. It fails to differentiate documents from things, books from periodicals from pamphlets, devices from objects, the new from the used from the old, the rare from the common. The sole laws that it holds sacred are the law of number and the law of stuff.”

“Names work hard: They can affect who gets into elite schools, what jobs we apply for, and who gets hired. Our names can even influence what cities we live in, who we befriend, and what products we buy since, we’re attracted to things and places that share similarities to our names.”

“To track happiness they had to figure out what signaled the feeling and then decide how best to measure that. That ability to track emotion, which is part of a broader field called sentiment analysis, is a nut that everyone from Facebook to the National Security Agency (NSA) is trying to crack, and Dodds and Danforth believe they have found a granular way to do it.”

“It’s impossible to deduce personality traits from a quick glance at a duckface iPhone photo. But a new study finds that, when it comes to first impressions, certain facial features do tend to convey specific personality characteristics to others with shocking consistency. You may not be an approachable-yet-dominant sexpot, but you sure look like one in your Facebook photo.”

“In 11 experiments involving more than 700 people, the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes. Moreover, in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think.”

“Though they owe their spread largely to the Internet, Little Free Libraries often serve as an antidote to a world of Kindle downloads and data-driven algorithms. The little wooden boxes are refreshingly physical—and human.”

“You may want your supportive activities to make her happy, but for some artists happiness doesn’t lead to creativity; they do their best work in times of turmoil or struggle – and they know it.”

“We think of the First World War as a four-year affair. We forget, though, that Austria-Hungary lost half of its men within the first two weeks of the war — 400,000 men, including 100,000 who were taken prisoner by the Russians.”

“When the errors crop up–and they always do, in spectacularly catastrophic ways–it sort of feels like a rebellion because I am telling it to do this thing, and it doesn’t follow my instructions. And then it becomes this question of management. Can I convince this entity to do for me what I want it to do and what the entire company is telling it it should be doing?”