Category: ideas

“The south side worked, stored, processed, brewed. The north was another sort of bank, a money magnet. A collided necklace of palaces and privilege.”

New ideas abound for small solar cells. “Being so tiny, the cells don’t have to be mounted on a stiff, block-like substrate. They could be mounted on flexible surfaces or even clothing. Imagine plugging into a jacket to extend the battery life of a smart phone.”

“Neuroscientists, despite 15 years of brain-imaging studies, are unable to define the circuitry involved in creative thinking. They don’t know what is different about the brains of creative geniuses like Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Inc. who died on Wednesday.”

“The Urban OS will run PlaceApps, the equivalent of apps on a smart phone. These apps, however, would control vital systems in buildings. The OS would also be open to independent developers, and the whole system could even connect to individual smart phones to monitor household appliances, for example.”

Lots of practice. “Speech-recognition software is designed to understand multiple pronunciations of each phoneme. Programmers ‘train’ the system by playing many hours of speech into the microphone, and then typing in what can be heard on the tapes.”

“Mothers and fathers know well that their youngsters would rather pay attention to one another than to the blackboard. But parents may not realize that the reasons children struggle with education lie deep in our evolutionary past.”

“Today, the Führer is universally recognized as the embodiment of evil and the most convenient example of a truly terrible human being. Before World War II, who was the rhetorical worst person in history?” (Hint: go way back in history.)

Editor and essayist Michael Kinsley maintains that “appearance of a conflict of interest” controversies are pointless, because only an actual conflict matters. Harvard professor Dennis Thompson contends that “[the[ purpose of conflict-of-interest rules is precisely to avoid an inquiry into the motives of individual reporters (and other professionals).”

“Observers viewed others who acted embarrassed as more generous and trustworthy than people that acted unscathed by a potentially embarrassing event. Researchers also found participants to trust others who show signs of embarrassment in an economic simulation, too.”

“A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in ‘magic mushrooms,’ was enough to bring about a measureable and lasting personality change – “openness’ – lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, say Johns Hopkins researchers.”