Category: ideas

“Everything has expanded by a factor of a million since we turned it on in 1973. The number of machines on the network, the speeds of the network, the kind of memory capacity that’s available, it’s all 10 to the sixth. I would say that there aren’t too many systems that have been designed that can handle a millionfold scaling without completely collapsing. But that doesn’t mean that it will continue to work that way.”

As Oscar Wilde wrote, “Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil.” Research psychologists have found that he had a point.

From anger to surprise to happiness to depression to disgust, “across cultures, people feel increased activity in different parts of the body as their mental state changes.”

“We’re talking all the time, in person as well as in texts, in e-mails, over the phone, on Facebook and Twitter. The world is more talkative now, in many ways, than it’s ever been. The problem, Sherry Turkle argues, is that all of this talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other.”

“Battered between competing allegiances to the idealized homeland and the reality of home, culture was often the life vest. Books, movies, clothing, and ritual — they bridged the chasm between the old world and the new by taking you to the place you could no longer go.”

“The internet behemoth boasts 30 million articles written in more than 285 languages, tweaked by 70,000 active editors and viewed by 530 million visitors worldwide each month. As mountains of information go, it’s Everest. Teasing out trends from the open source encyclopedia’s archives is a task few would even attempt.”

Social psychologist Chris Cocking looks at the impressively orderly response of the people in the Apollo Theatre when the ceiling collapsed – and sees more evidence of what his profession calls “social attachment theory”.

“In a fast-paced digital age, an MIT psychologist tries to slow us down” – with the help of the age-old technique of eavesdropping.

“An Acxiom presentation to the Consumer Marketing Organization in 2013 placed customers into “customer value segments” and noted that while the top 30 percent of customers add 500 percent of value, the bottom 20 percent actually cost 400 percent of value. In other words, it behooves companies to shower their top customers with attention, while ignoring the bottom 20 percent, who may spend “too much” time on customer service calls, and may cost companies in returns or coupons, or otherwise cost more than they provide.”

Say it ain’t so! Well, they’re far from dumb, mind you, but we may have been inferring more than the evidence we have really warrants.