Category: ideas

America’s obsession with superheroes and their comic book adventures is seen by some as a reliable reflection of the country’s social history. From Captain America battling Hitler to Spider Man battling his own demons, superheroes represent our national hopes and fears, and their profiles have evolved to encompass decades of changing societal mores.

A new museum in Hamburg, Germany, is devoted to memorializing the journeys of the millions of emigrating Europeans who left for America from the city’s port. “The exhibits cover every stage of immigrants’ journeys — from the conditions that led them to flee their homelands to arrival on Ellis Island and beyond. Though Mr. Birkner said the museum was not aimed at any particular audience, the colorful and unorthodox presentation styles, which sometimes border on kitsch, should appeal to younger museumgoers.”

“For most Europeans, Europe has become an abstract, alien entity. They are no longer sure whether they should identify with it or dissociate themselves from it, whether they feel represented or repressed. As such, the image of Europe is a contradictory one.” Wim Wenders writes: “If Europe is to prove itself in the eyes of the Europeans themselves, it must now define itself through its innermost quality: the wonderful, chaotic, unique diversity of its culture.”

“We’re only a few years away from the cost of data storage dropping so far that we can record “everything” that happens to us: our location at any given time, what we are hearing, what we are seeing, and what we are saying or doing. With your phone converting all the speech it hears to text (and storing that, too, and indexing it by time and location it becomes possible to search it all – like having Google for your memory. You don’t ever need to forget a conversation again, even if all you can recall about it is that it was with a stranger you met in a given pub about two months ago and someone mentioned the word ‘fishhooks’.”

“Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?”

The idea that women use nearly three times as many words a day as men has taken on the status of an urban legend. An urban legend that isn’t true, say researchers. “The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day. The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669. The difference: 546 words: Not statistically significant.”

“For the last decade or so, economists have been increasingly poking their fingers into other disciplines, including epidemiology, psychology, sociology, oenology and even football strategy. These economists usually justify their expansionism on two grounds: They say they’re better with numbers than most other researchers and have a richer understanding of how people respond to incentives. Arrogant as this sounds, there is some truth to it. Besides, the public seems hungry for the kind of real-world social science economists are practicing.”

“With over 7 million registered users, Second Life–an online virtual world complete with land, residents and a growing ­economy–is developing one of the largest art communities on the internet. The site’s money-making and marketing potential to reach a new, younger audience is already being tapped by major corporations.”

A team of Italian consultants are advising executives to stop reading so many books and watch movies instead. They say that “executives learn little from books. High-quality films, though, can offer lessons about problem-solving and teamwork as well as focusing on issues such as globalisation and diversity.”

The Vatican Library is preparing to close for a three-year overhaul, which has set off a scramble among scholars to access texts that will shortly go into storage. “Petitions addressed to Pope Benedict XVI, the ultimate authority on Vatican matters, are circulating among scholars. Some ask that the manuscript division at least remain accessible to the public during the three-year renovation. Others request that the closing be delayed until 2008 so that scholars will have time to wrap up research and meet publishing or teaching deadlines.”