“The to-do list for the decade between ages 10 and 20 includes separating from your parents, finding your place among your peers at school, beginning to make decisions about your own future, and—oh yes—figuring out how to relate to the world, and yourself, as a suddenly and mystifyingly sexual being.”
Category: ideas
You Think You Can See Other People’s Pain? A Computer Can Do It Better
“Researchers led by the University of California-San Diego’s Marian Bartlett pitted humans against computers in a battle to see who could best distinguish between genuine and faked facial expressions of pain. We lost, by a lot.”
Now Magazines, Books, And Everything Else Want To Follow The Netflix Model
“The Netflix model is spreading like a spider virus, with companies bundling masses of content for a low monthly fee in an all-you-can-eat format, and packaging them with sifting tools and algorithms to help customers find what strikes their fancy.”
Here’s How Intuitive People Work In The World
“There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence, combined with solid research efforts, that suggests intuition is a critical aspect of how we humans interact with our environment and how, ultimately, we make many of our decisions.”
New “Smart” Cities Reimagine How We Interact
New “smart cities”, built from scratch, are sprouting across the planet and traditional actors like governments, urban planners and real estate developers, are, for the first time, working alongside large IT firms — the likes of IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. The resulting cities are based on the idea of becoming “living labs” for new technologies at the urban scale, blurring the boundary between bits and atoms, habitation and telemetry.
25 Years After Fukuyama’s “End Of History” Argument
“In the post-historical period,” Fukuyama continues, “there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.” Doesn’t this vision seem exactly right?
Will Non-Profits Take Over The World? (It Increasingly Looks That Way)
“In the United States, the number of nonprofit organizations grew by approximately 25 percent between 2001 and 2011, from 1.3 million to 1.6 million, compared with profit-making enterprises, which grew by a mere one-half of 1 percent. In the United States, Canada and Britain, employment in the nonprofit sector currently exceeds 10 percent of the work force.”
New Study: All-Nighters May Cause Permanent Brain Damage
Concern about brain changes from lack of sleep has mounted in recent months with the publication of several other key studies. In January, sleep researchers at the University of Surrey linked sleep loss with disruptions in gene function that could affect metabolism, inflammation, and longterm disease risk to body and brain.
Barack Obama, Patent Troll Slayer?
“Even now, a perfect storm of patent reform is brewing in all three branches of government. Over time, it could reshape intellectual property law to turn the sue-and-settle troll mentality into a thing of the past.”
Why the Unplugging Movement Doesn’t Really Make Sense
“But how quickly the digital age turned into the age of technological anxiety, with our beloved devices becoming something to fear, not enjoy. What sex was for the Puritans, technology has become for us. We’ve focussed our collective anxiety on digital excess, and reconnecting with the ‘real’ world around us represents one effort to control it. … [Yet] is it any less real when we fall in love and break up over Gchat than when we get fired over e-mail and then find a new job on LinkedIn?”