Category: ideas

European universities and the governments that fund them are being warned that they will be overtaken by rapidly improving Asian schools if they don’t move swiftly to modernize and improve. The consequences of a dip in prestige could be dire, not only for the schools but for European businesses as well.

With the internet making it ever easier to showcase yourself to a waiting public, culture and art are undeniably undergoing a transformation. “Years of paying your dues and trusting in the system are so yesterday… Everything seems to be a lot more democratic these days, and that’s good, right?” Well, no, not necessarily. Pricking the “expert” balloon might feel good, but the fact is that audiences aren’t qualified to pick Broadway leads, most self-produced rock songs are crap, and many performing arts just can’t even be attempted without years of training.

“New research suggests some of the brain’s basic building blocks for learning are nearing adult levels by age 11 or 12.”

“Look at video responses to YouTube videos; these are signs that people want to create. Perhaps a more nuanced point is that most of us are not creative because the world doesn’t make it easy for us to be creative. In this next phase of the web we are going to use technology to make creativity easier and I think we are going to see everybody wanting to be creative. This means that people better rethink the nature of media.”

How can we get along without plagiarism? Jonathan Lethem makes an argument that culture is a mash of influences and borrowings from other culture. As he demonstrates in an essay in Harper’s. “After 10 pages of carefully constructed argument against ‘those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other,’ Lethem reveals that just about every line in his piece is something he ‘stole, warped, and cobbled together’ from the work of others. He then annotates his borrowings.”

Most of us look at maps to find our way around. But maybe we could also locate where we are with our ears. A new interactive computer program tries it. “It paints a picture of a city, not with images, but with sounds. Not only could the technology aide the visually impaired by giving them a sense of place before they explore the unknown, it could also offer sighted people audio cues when in ‘blind’ situations.”

“A personality test for narcissism given to college students every year shows an inexorable rise, with today’s students being on average 30 percent more narcissistic than the students of 1982. Substitute ‘self-esteem’ for ‘narcissism’ and the results suddenly look rosy, but you simply can’t, because all the $10 trophies and the lavish praise of mediocrity, or even failure, doesn’t really bolster kids’ self-worth. They drink the Kool-Aid, but they also know it.”

“A new study finds a strong correlation between high levels of television watching and learning problems in teenagers. The survey, which followed 700 families for 19 years, is being seen as a major revelation in what has often been a contentious debate.”

It’s how technology gets used that drives innovation, not the design/idea people. “Knowing about technology is not the same thing as understanding the scientific theories involved. Just as innovators commonly understand the fundamentals of a technology better than subsequent users, so users can acquire knowledge that would never have occurred to the innovators.”

“It’s no secret that both Degas and Monet had failing vision. What’s never been clear is what did that mean for them.” Now “an ophthalmologist has used the Gaussian filter and other Photoshop wonders to replicate how the artists saw the world later in life. The verdict: The painters couldn’t paint the same way anymore because they couldn’t see the same way.”