Category: ideas

“Given the growing power and influence of consumers, and given that we have welcomed them in and charged them money and promoted the importance of their presence and opinions, is it any wonder that they now want (or feel entitled or even encouraged) to blog about their experiences?”

“For generations, biographers have used the same methods to conduct research: they waded through the paper trail left by their subject, piecing together a life from epistolary fragments. Based on what they found, they might troll through newspapers from specific dates in the hope of finding coverage of their subject. There were no new-fangled technologies that promised to transform their research, no way of harnessing machines to reveal new layers of historical truth. That’s all starting to change.”

“Although it may have been a simple grain or cargo vessel making trades up and down the Hudson River and between the Caribbean, perhaps it also peacefully helped ferry British soldiers out of New York City after the war, or maybe more notoriously the ship had a run-in with the Marsh Pirates of New Jersey.”

“There’s a long tradition among academics of embedding in an occupation to study it. … Sudhir Venkatesh spent seven years with a gang in the Chicago projects. One academic worked as a cotton picker, another entered prison as an inmate. Ashley Mears embedded as a model.”

“Flashbulb memories, as they are known, are tricky to study as people are seldom keen to talk to researchers just after hearing or seeing emotionally charged news. It can also be difficult to know how accurate a person’s memory of the event is, since there is usually no way to be sure what actually happened.”

“The world itself is nothing but a source of activation of the brain’s chemical keyboard. So the addict — in a way — has the right idea: to hell with the world, I’ll turn my gaze inward and use drugs or other behaviors to play the keyboard of my brain myself!”

“Human thinking, as many of us know, often fails to respect the principles of classical logic.” One researcher “has shown that these errors actually make sense within a wider logic based on quantum mathematics. The same logic also seems to fit naturally with how people link concepts together, often on the basis of loose associations and blurred boundaries.”

Author Bob Berman gives the list, and some of them are pretty crazy.

What happens when a ‘bot talks to a ‘bot? Weird things. For example: “I’m not a robot. I’m a unicorn.”