Category: ideas

Schools are using virtual reality games to teach classes. “For instance, classes in archaeology take place on a recreation of Hadrian’s Wall. Physics students, who are mentored by staff at the National Physical Science Laboratory, have been conducting experiments to calculate the value of gravity within Second Life.”

“It’s a phenomenon academics have feared for some time, and it challenges one of the most utopian claims made about the internet: that a greater abundance of information leads to greater wisdom. Two economists studying the net found the opposite to be true.”

With several area banks having committed to funding a credit line, construction will begin shortly on Pittsburgh’s new $36 million August Wilson Center for African American Culture. The center is projected to open in late 2008 in the heart of the city’s downtown Cultural District.

“Several social scientists are helping to make sense of the emerging landscape of race and politics in the contemporary American city, where the old social divisions have been reconfigured. Their work reveals that gentrification is still contested and economic development does not end up benefiting everyone, but predicting the winners and losers is getting harder. Minorities may be on the winning side more often than not.”

George Orwell foresaw a world where everyone was spied upon. “According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2million CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people in the country. Use of spy cameras in modern-day Britain is now a chilling mirror image of Orwell’s fictional world. On the wall outside his former residence – flat number 27B – where Orwell lived until his death in 1950, an historical plaque commemorates the anti-authoritarian author. And within 200 yards of the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move.”

“With French long engaged in a losing battle against English around the world, a new way of fighting back has been proposed by a multinational group of authors who write in French: uncouple the language from France and turn French literature into ‘world literature’ written in French. For guardians of the language of Molière, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, this is tantamount to subversion.”

“New research shows it takes one part of the brain to start concentrating and another to be distracted. This discovery could help scientists develop better treatments for attention deficit disorder. This ability to willfully focus your attention is physically separate in the brain from distracting things grabbing your attention.”

“San Francisco is in the midst of another of its periodic building booms. In the past few years, a spate of ugly office/residential towers have sprouted south of the main drag, Market Street, and further aesthetic atrocities are in the pipeline.” But what’s the point, with technology fast making it unnecessary for workers to congregate in urban centers as they once did? “Americans have never liked big cities very much and have devoted enormous energy over the years trying to escape them. With today’s technology, escape is closer at hand than it’s ever been.”

The Caravan Project is “a fledgling experiment that is designed to help university presses and other small publishers learn to distribute their material in multiple formats quickly and cost-effectively. Good books need to be available where, when, and how the reader chooses. We’ve come to expect music, news, movies, and television to be available in a variety of formats at the time we choose. The same thing needs to be true for serious nonfiction.”