Category: ideas

“If at a mass level, people don’t hear about ideas that are challenging or only hear about ideas that are likeable – as in, you can easily click the “like” button on them – that has fairly significant consequences.”

“A device now under development can take control of your hand and teach you how to play a tune. No spirits of dead musicians are involved.”

“[Current] machine translation techniques rely on analysing the statistical properties of the same text written in two different languages.” But a pair of researchers in California “treat translation as a cryptographic problem, as if the foreign text were simply English written in an advanced cipher.”

“The basic premise is simple. Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction.”

“Australian researchers have shown that along with the sense of touch and vision, signalling receptors in the muscles and joints also play a critical role. … Previous research shows people can be deluded into claiming ownership of an artificial hand. This is done by simultaneously stroking the subject’s hidden hand and a visible artificial rubber hand.”

“The work, published June 3 in PLoS ONE, suggests self-assessed Internet addiction, primarily through online multiplayer games, rewires structures deep in the brain. What’s more, surface-level brain matter appears to shrink in step with the duration of online addiction.”

“[The] private sexual activities of public figures ‘down to the intimate details’ do not need ‘other relevance’ to be inherently relevant. The private sex lives of public figures are inherently relevant because it is fascinating to observe human beings acting strangely, or acting as we’ve always suspected that they are acting, or doing things counter to their own interests, or messing up, or ruining themselves. Consult Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky for more.”

The Arabian answer to Big Ben proposes to set, at least for Muslims, a worldwide standard based on sun time in Mecca (about 21 minutes off Greenwich-based time zones). “[In] fact, consensus on world standard time isn’t much more than a century old – and was the subject of protest right from the beginning.”

“For Father’s Day, here’s research on how dads are faring, how they’re portrayed in pop culture and how the increasing frequency of stay-at-home fathers is changing gender roles in society.”

Researchers have published “a pilot study in which a simple prompt – making people aware that if they don’t sign up as an organ donor, they will eventually regret their inaction – significantly increased the percentage of participants who signed up (or at least said they did).”