Category: ideas

Fox’s hit terrorism drama 24 has kept viewers around the world on the edge of their seats for years now. But recently, many voices have been raised regarding the irresponsibility of the large number of torture scenes in the show. Critics point out that torture, while rarely effective in real life, always seems to be the magic bullet for defeating the bad guys on the show. The larger effect on viewers is feared to be “‘normalisation’ — the process whereby unspeakable acts become acceptable routine.”

The Olympics are a global stage like no other, but too often, host cities find that the massive infrastructure required to present them hangs around for decades in the form of unpaid bills and underused facilities. So it shouldn’t be any big surprise that some cities bidding for future editions of the Games are floating scaled-back proposals that would allow for the easy dismantling and dispersal of new structures once the world leaves town.

“Ever since the gross mistreatment of poor black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to light three decades ago, the federal government has required ethics panels to protect people from being used as human lab rats in biomedical studies. Yet now, faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone.”

What if orchestras and theatre companies started behaving more like corporations, with the large, healthy groups snapping up and merging with smaller, struggling competitors? “Before the shout goes up about artistic integrity and creative independence, it wouldn’t have to mean a Starbucks-style homogenisation of the arts. There would be no need for a safe but dull culture house on every street corner. A better model to consider would be the major record label sheltering several niche labels under its wing.”

“A Canadian documentary filmmaker will reveal at a news conference Monday that he has strong evidence a group of burial boxes unearthed in Jerusalem belonged to Jesus Christ and his family. The discovery could have profound implications 2,000 years after the boxes were placed in the ground, shaking the foundations of modern faith and raising Da-Vinci-Code-like speculation that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene.”

Can a virtual community online create a utopia? Second Life tried. “In the last year, the number of people who had visited Second Life skyrocketed from 100,000 to 2 million. As the population grows, early denizens are learning the truth of Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation ‘Hell is other people.’ The website is facing the problem that many would-be utopias faced before it: When building the ideal world, it’s impossible to change while remaining perfect in everyone’s eyes.”

Researchers at King’s College, London, have discovered that email abuse reduces our cognitive powers more even than drugs, so now a method has been devised to cure us. Naturally, the American creators of the course talk in the argot of the alcoholics 12-step programme (‘involve others in conquering your addiction’). And much of the advice is fatuous: ‘Reduce the amount of email you receive’.”

In 2001, Drake University abandoned its language instruction programs, saying they didn’t work. “Six years later, Drake still doesn’t have language departments or language professors, but it does have a new approach to language instruction in place. And Drake — the institution language professors couldn’t say enough bad things about — is being hailed in some quarters as a model.”

So-called “interdisciplinary programs,” under which students at prestigious colleges and universities design their own majors and achieve a degree in something completely unique to their program of study, are becoming ever more common in the U.S. Moreover, designer degrees “can telegraph emerging fields of study and cultural interests. Gender studies and cognitive science departments got their starts as designer programs.”

A new study says that surgeons who play video games score better on tests. “Video game skills translated into higher scores on a day-and-half-long surgical skills test, and the correlation was much higher than the surgeon’s length of training or prior experience in laparoscopic surgery, the study said.”