Twenty-seven philosophers offer their answers (oh, about thirty of them).
Category: ideas
Were Mean SOBs Born That Way? (Probably)
After collecting and analyzing both survey answers and saliva from their test subjects, researchers “found that some people have receptors that are especially sensitive to the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, and that those people did nice things even when their survey answers revealed that they generally feared others in society.”
What’s The Fastest Language? Well, In Sounds, Or In Content?
In a study of seven major tongues, Spanish and Japanese were found to have the greatest number of syllables per second, with Mandarin the slowest and English in the middle. But most of the languages conveyed information at about the same rate. (You want fast? Try Malayalam.)
#EconoHipsters (Hey, Who Showed These Geeks How To Use Twitter?)
Sample tweets: “I saw mortgage backed securities at a loft in Brooklyn in 2004. I thought they were overrated.” “#EconoHipsters seasonally adjusted for the winter quarter before it was cool.” “The economics & happiness literature used to be awesome, before Bhutan went corporate with it.”
Is Public Sentiment Making Our Culture More Shallow?
“Changes in culture tend to change our ‘modal type’ of character like this. In other words, a culture finds (in fact creates) its ideal person. What, then, is ours going to be? What modal type matches our culture as it has shifted in the early years of this century?”
Re-Thinking What Makes Art ‘Authentic,’ As A New York Critic Visits Mali
Holland Cotter: “In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works, socially and spiritually: for example, the way each Dogon tourist dance keeps a larger dance, and Dogon identity, alive.”
Scientists Develop Software To Spot Spam Reviews
“Signature giveaways often included timing: spamming groups often file their ‘reviews’ in quick bursts, the researchers say. And as the spammers are often briefed by a contracting agency working for a rival (for bad reviews) or the product maker/hotel/restaurant (for good reviews) each cod reviewer falls into the trap of using very similar language.”
Want To Create A Start-Up? Learn From The Not-So-Humble Food Truck
Get partners, develop a team, do your research – and be ready for a ton of hard work. So says the woman who founded the first nationally branded gourmet food truck.
Is The Lecture Dead – And If Not, Should We Kill It?
“Is the transfer of information mediated by a teacher the same thing as learning? Learning is about the long-lasting acquisition of information, it is about remembering the information and being able to retrieve it and apply it at the appropriate time in the appropriate circumstances. Lectures can ensure the short-term memorization of information, as teachers who give quizzes at the end of their presentations have certainly proven. However, it is highly questionable if lectures can deliver this kind of long-lasting knowledge.”
Let’s Not Put On These Google Glasses
“Today, social media are hailed for empowering dissidents and undercutting tyrannies around the world. Yet it’s hard not to watch the Google video and agree with Forbes’s Kashmir Hill when she suggests that such a technology could ultimately ‘accelerate the arrival of the persistent and pervasive citizen surveillance state,’ in which everything you see and do can be recorded, reported, subpoenaed … you name it.”