Category: ideas

“If our projected costs and occupancy rates were correct (and if the jackhammering would let up), each partner would work 10 to 15 hours a week at the co-op to cover our rent, utilities and shared groceries, freeing up time to pursue the low-to-zero-pay projects we all had in music, art, education and writing.”

“‘Are you satisfied with your life?’ ‘How are you feeling?’ Does either question tell us what we really want to know?”

“Participants’ brain scans revealed that artists had increased neural matter in areas relating to fine motor movements and visual imagery.”

“If you’re looking for workers who are unusually innovative and/or team players who enjoy helping their colleagues, check out those who spend their free time painting, playing music, or engaging in some other form of creativity.”

“For many years, the United States has benefited from a kind of reverse brain drain, which is that the best and brightest from all other countries would come to the United States to do research because we had for a very long time the most generous support for basic science. But I have seen, especially recently, the trend is starting to reverse a little bit.”

“Why? Because there’s money in it; money and faith. I don’t just mean the few millions to be made from book sales; nor do I mean the simple geek belief in gadgetry. And I certainly don’t mean the pallid, undefined, pop-song promises of politicians trying to turn our eyes from the present – Bill Clinton’s “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” and Tony Blair’s “Things can only get better”. No, I mean the billions involved in corporate destinies and the yearning for salvation from our human condition.”

“Using a piecewise regression analysis, we find that age-related slowing of within-game, self-initiated response times begins at 24 years of age,” the authors write. In other words, older players took longer to respond to new visual playing conditions before taking action. And, according to the study, it was “a significant performance deficit,” which likely has consequences even outside abstruse digital space wars.

“The potential is vast. But the pitfalls are significant too. Not only could it change the way history is told but there are wider questions about who has the rights to guard the web’s past and, inevitably in these post-Snowden leak times, what the availability of this data means for individual privacy. So what is the best way to make history from the internet?”

Andrew O’Hehir: “We already had this debate, which occupied a great deal of the intellectual life of Western civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was a whole lot less stupid the first time around.”

“We know as well as anything we know in psychology that IQ predicts many different measures of success.”