Category: ideas

“The idea behind SocialSTREAM, and other experiments like it, is to collect reams of live text being published to the internet, and to run it through dictionaries designed to test language for signs of mood. For an individual tweet – “Good morning!” – this might be meaningless. But taken across millions of postings, from the personal to political, a rough indicator of popular sentiment does emerge.”

Would crime rates plummet if cash were banned?

“In the latest example of the study of ’embodied cognition’ – the notion that metaphors don’t just help us express abstract ideas but can also shape basic perception – researchers had 40 students recall and describe either an ethical or unethical deed from their past. … [P]articipants in the unethical condition judged the room to be darker than did participants in the ethical condition.”

Can you crowdsource the news? “If open journalism is a religion, we’re going to need to have a bit of faith.”

John of Patmos’s fevered prophecy “wasn’t unique. At the time, countless others – Jews, pagans and Christians – produced a flood of ‘books of revelation,’ claiming to reveal divine secrets. Some have been known for centuries; about 20 others were found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. So what do the other revelations tell us, and how did John’s come to trump the others?”

“The new technology is shaking up all old industries, changing their products, revolutionizing work processes and transforming companies. Digitization isn’t just changing work; it is also profoundly altering the way people think, act and live in their daily lives.”

U.S. worker productivity has increased 400 percent since 1950. “The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours a week,” according to a MIT study.

“A consensus is emerging that humans have an impressive capacity for open-ended change, much as culturalists have claimed, but that this is a result of genetic evolution – and is itself an evolutionary process.”

“Not as far as we know. Homosexual behavior has been documented in hundreds of animal species, but the same does not hold for gay-bashing.”

“They immediately assume you are in the business of offering sage advice, usually in the form of unargued aphorisms and proverbs. You struggle to explain that you don’t do that kind of philosophy, at which point you may well be accused of abandoning your historical calling.” Prof. Colin McGinn suggests a new name for his field – a name that sounds more like a science.