Category: ideas

“With hindsight, we can always see through the dubious ‘authority’ of such historical sources. Few things look as unstable as the rock-solid certainties of previous ages. Since encyclopedias are supposed to be balanced and disinterested, the bias often seems even more naked.”

“We can never know for sure if [Agatha] Christie actually had Alzheimer’s. But a separate study out of the University of Minnesota lends support to the idea that there might be signs in our writing of Alzheimer’s disease. And those signs might be there very early on.”

The instant you hear a cellphone ring, your brain reacts in a unique way – if the ringtone matches that of your own phone. Scientists says this suggests that our brains store “templates” for our own ringtones, allowing it to distinguish quickly between familiar and unfamiliar tones.

“Staggering. Someone born in 1960 has watched something like 50,000 hours of television already. Fifty thousand hours–more than five and a half solid years. Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different.”

“True, for many English speakers, use in a Web comic and inclusion in a couple of online dictionaries are not enough to establish malamanteau as a “real” word. But whether you consider malamanteau to be a real word or an elaborate joke, it is a classic example of the kind of word that people argue about when they argue about what makes a word real.”

“The prevalence of major depression and sad mood showed seasonal variation, with peaks in the summer and fall. Weather conditions were not associated with mood, and did not explain the seasonal variation we found. We conclude that, contrary to popular belief, weather conditions and sad mood or depression do not seem to be associated.”

“In 15th-century China, in 17th-century Europe, name cards, visiting cards, and trade cards – the predecessors to today’s 2″ x 3.5″ business cards – gave people their first chances to construct virtual selves. … But they were always metaphorical entities, too, offering clues to their bearer’s temperament and taste, certifying a person’s value through aesthetics rather than more tangible credentials.”

“A new study suggests the answer involves superstar-specific happy memories stored in our cerebral cortex. Using brain-scan technology, researchers found those positive emotions get transferred from the personality to the product, producing a more positive impression of the item in question and, presumably, a greater probability of purchasing it.”

Researchers in Israel “wrote a sentiment-analysing program. They then trained this software to recognise sarcasm by feeding it sentences that had been flagged up by human reviewers as likely to contain sarcasm. … The algorithm agreed with the [human] volunteers 77 per cent of the time for Amazon.com product reviews and 83 per cent of the time for [randomly selected Twitter] tweets.”