Category: ideas

Should the internet be reconfigured to allow internet companies to provide premium access for some content? It’s a very bad idea. “After all, once we get away from the idea that the pipes just move bits around without really caring what data is being transmitted, it’s a small step to discriminating against some forms of content and then targeting specific sites, services or users. Instead of an “end-to-end” network, we would end up with something more like the phone network, along with a complicated array of charging schemes for “0800”, “0845” and “0871” sites.”

Tests show thinking about difficult decisions too much causes bad choices. “The problem with thinking about things consciously is that you can only focus on a few things at once. In the face of a complex decision this can lead to giving certain factors undue importance. Thinking about something several times is also likely to produce slightly different evaluations, highlighting inconsistencies. Participants who chose their favourite poster among a set of five after thorough contemplation showed less post-choice satisfaction than participants who only looked at them briefly.”

Researchers say that unattractive people have a tendency to commit more crime than attractive people. “We find that unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and very attractive individuals commit less crime in comparison to those who are average-looking.”

Disturbing new photos have emerged of the violence committed by U.S. troops against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and some of the most shocking images don’t have a single human being in the frame. Instead, spattered blood serves as a metaphor for the horrors we have yet to hear about. “Comparing blood to paint, violence to art, is dangerous, even repellent. But in one sense, the blood on this floor is exactly like the paint drippings of Jackson Pollock, who captured the visible traces of action, the visual memory of gestures.”

Is our reliance on new technologies weakening our grip on the English language? With e-mail, text messaging, and countless other ways to do whatever it is you do faster, “dumbing down the language is not only seen as acceptable, but is tacitly encouraged as the status quo. Any number of my acquaintances excuse the bad writing and atrocious punctuation that proliferates in e-mail by saying, in essence, ‘Well, at least people are writing again.’ Horse droppings. People have never stopped writing, although it’s reaching a point where you wish a lot of them would.”

Trying to pass on the sweets? Recent studies show why that might be hard. “The study strongly suggests that attraction to sweets and aversion to bitters is hard wired into the brain and is therefore programmed into our genes.”

If the global argument over the Danish cartoons that so offended Muslims tells us anything, it is that we can no longer afford to be quite so surprised by the global reach of information, and further, that censoring the flow of content is not a solution to the worldwide culture clash. “The truth is, the internet cannot be both globally acceptable and a force for democracy… Spraying the world with a fire hose of information may not be the answer, but it’s closer to the right result than filtering the internet down to a trickle.”

There’s a debate going on about the mainstream of design. “The key point at issue is whether design should retain its traditional industrial focus and concentrate on assisting in the creation of new devices that work better and more efficiently than old ones, or whether it should move with the times, align itself with the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ and offer a primarily aesthetic experience.

“Rather than sinuous penmanship, our identities are increasingly confirmed by numbered sequences that have been imposed on us. And, if signatures are becoming increasingly irrelevant, what then is the future for handwriting in a world when one in three children has a computer in the bedroom, many more are accustomed to writing on them at home and school and, if I had a penny for every time I have heard or read parents and teachers bemoaning the poor state of pupil’s handwriting, I would have enough for a £335 Mont Blanc Meisterstück fountain pen in precious resin with a gold-plated finish?”