Category: ideas

This year’s edition of the Edinburgh International Festival will be chock full of international flavor, as “a drive to reflect both the changing face of Europe and the redrawing of borders across the globe have acted as… inspirations” for director Jonathan Mills, in his second year at the massive fest’s helm.

“The English version of Wikipedia has over 2 million articles, and it has been translated into over 250 languages. It has become so massive that you can type virtually any noun into a search engine and the first link will be to a Wikipedia page. A generation of students was warned away from this information siren, but we know as professors that it is the first place they go to start a research project…”

“Moral superiority, we like to think, belongs to the person who stands alone. Until recently, social science went along with this idea. Lab-based research supposedly furnished slam-dunk evidence. Lately, however, some researchers have been dissenting from the textbook version…”

“It’s a vision of the future where people would want to dig deeper in the world of an artist and where artists would be willing to be more experimental because the payment systems would be more transparent and different than they are today. It’s about artists linking together and being collaborative.”

It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens.

“From Connecticut to California, digital billboards are becoming an increasingly hot issue as outdoor advertising companies seek to convert existing billboards to digital and erect new ones. State and local governments are struggling with how to regulate this bold new breed.”

Arthur C. Clarke’s passing “poses a challenge to the current generation of science-fiction writers: in a world where technology evolves so rapidly that the present already feels like the future, will a modern-day author ever inherit Mr. Clarke’s aura of prescience? Do any of his successors share his apparent talent for envisioning technological breakthroughs before they are realized?”

A slowing economy, some economists suggest, can actually help you live longer – just one of a few payoffs that might surprise those of us who see recessions as unmitigated disasters.

“Money can buy happiness, but only if we spend it on others, say researchers behind a three-part psychology experiment. The study is interesting because it suggests that the way money is spent may be more important than total income, which people often focus on as a source of happiness.”