Category: ideas

The study found that women were not attracted to smiling, happy men, preferring those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed. ‘To the extent that men think that smiling is a good thing to do if they want to be found sexually attractive our findings suggest that’s not the case’.”

“People who go to museums and concerts or create art or play an instrument are more satisfied with their lives, regardless of how educated or rich they are, according to a study. But the link between culture and feeling good about oneself is not quite the same in both sexes, according to the study, published in the British Medical Association’s Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.”

“Australian researchers are teaching a pair of robots to communicate linguistically like humans by inventing new spoken words, a lexicon that the roboticists can teach to other robots to generate an entirely new language.”

“New research shows that musicians’ brains are highly developed in a way that makes the musicians alert, interested in learning, disposed to see the whole picture, calm, and playful. The same traits have previously been found among world-class athletes, top-level managers, and individuals who practice transcendental meditation.”

What if, as counterintuitive as it seems, certain kinds of fighting are good for us?

“A small group of thinkers is suggesting an entirely new way of understanding our relationship with the data we generate. Instead of arguing about ownership and the right to privacy, they say, we should be imagining data as a public resource: a bountiful trove of information about our society which, if properly managed and cared for, can help us set better policy, more effectively run our institutions, promote public health, and generally give us a more accurate understanding of who we are.”

“With DNA-based computing, you can do more than have ones and zeroes. DNA is made up of A, G, C, T, which gives it more range. DNA-based computing has the potential to deal with fuzzy data, going beyond digital data.”

“For the past 150 years, MIT has been leading us into the future. The discoveries of its teachers and students have become the warp and weft of modernity, the stuff of daily life that we now all take for granted. The telephone, electromagnets, radars, high-speed photography, office photocopiers, cancer treatments, pocket calculators, computers, the internet, the decoding of the human genome, lasers, space travel . . . the list of innovations that involved essential contributions from MIT and its faculty goes on and on.”

“Media historians have long recognized the astounding versatility, portability, and durability of paper, which is in many respects the ideal material support. As a corollary, the paperless office has been dismissed as a “myth” by social scientists, information engineers, and corporate consultants alike, who predict that paper’s many affordances will continue to make it indispensable.”

“People find it particularly easy to see the faces of individuals about whom they’ve heard nasty or unpleasant gossip.”