Category: ideas

“Making a device that connects to the Internet of Things is getting increasingly easy, but creating products and services that use technology to transform us into better people is as hard as it’s ever been.”

“Dispositional mindfulness increased significantly over the course of the 12-week intervention in the exercise group,” the researchers report. It did not rise for members of the relaxation-training or wait-list groups.

Rupal Patel and Tim Bunnell have been “developing algorithms that build voices for those unable to speak – without computer assistance. The voices aren’t just natural-sounding; they’re also unique. … [The premise is] that technology now allows us to think about the voice ‘just like we think about fonts for written text’.”

Turns out, we can’t help it – it pushes buttons hard-wired in our brains.

“These results provide strong evidence for the idea that although humans cannot consciously discriminate liars from truth-tellers, they do have a sense, on some less-conscious level, of when someone is lying.”

What makes something funny? There’s Plato and Aristotle’s old “superiority theory”, there’s Freud’s “relief theory”, there’s the currently-favored “incongruity theory”. But the founder of the Humor Research Lab (HuRL) argues that each of those theories has a flaw – and offers one of his own.

As Mark Twain observed, “Humor is tragedy plus time.” But how much time? Researcher Peter McGraw of the Humor Research Lab (HuRL) tried some experiments (e.g., a Hurricane Sandy Twitter account) and thinks that “Too soon?” may not be the right question.

“So popular is the field that behavioural economics is now often misapplied as a catch-all term to refer to almost anything that’s cool in popular social science, from the storycraft of Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (2000), to the empirical investigations of Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics (2005).”

“We benefit from taxing our brains with the mental exercise of humor, much as we benefit from the physical exercise of a long run or a tough tennis match. Comedy extends our mental stamina and improves our mental flexibility.”

“These sort of things ostensibly make for great gifts because they communicate something beyond practicality. They communicate that the giver cares. But do the recipients care? Often, no.”