Category: ideas

It “found that women who were actively involved in both English and Spanish speaking cultures interpreted the same events differently, depending on which language they were using at the time.”

“At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later.”

“Scientists at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg have been examining how concerts by the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and others in the adjacent Winter Square have affected their collections over the past three years. The unpublished findings, they say, could affect the future of rock concerts staged at stately homes. The preliminary results of the three-year study, being examined by the Grabar Art Restoration Institute in Moscow, show that every 10 concerts above 82 decibels add an extra year to the age of a work.”

The first computer to be built using the same fundamental plans that underpin modern PCs has reached its 60th anniversary. The Small Scale Experimental Machine, better known as “Baby”, ran its first program at 11 am, 21 June 1948, at Manchester University in the UK.

“One large study suggests that REM (rapid eye movement) sleep – during which the brain is highly active – may play a key role in intelligence. The REM phase – can improve people’s ability to remember what they have learned in the day by about 15%. In other species, the evidence is less clear cut…”

“Thinking of ourselves as types can help draw out facets of our personalities that we might otherwise miss or ignore. Where it often goes wrong is that people take on the types under which they are categorised as though they were deep, immutable facets of their identities.”

“Just because students walk in the door as “digital natives,” the common observation goes, doesn’t mean they’re equipped to handle the heavy lifting of digital databases and proprietary search engines that comprise the bulk of modern, online research techniques. Yet the gap between students’ research competence and what’s required of a modern college graduate can’t easily be solved without a framework that encompasses faculty members, librarians, technicians and those who study teaching methods.”

Plenty of Americans will turn to names like Stewart and Colbert over the next few months and enjoy watching our politicians get skewered. But most of us wouldn’t admit to actually being influenced in our political thinking by simple bits of satire. Still, “a chorus of comic monologues can move the political needle with viewers, voters and a not-so-infallible media.”

“Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.” But “the larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can’t.”

“A new headset system picks up electrical activity from the brain, as well as from facial muscles and other spots, and translates it into on-screen commands. This lets players vanquish villains not with a click, but with a thought.”