Category: ideas

“There are two ways to interpret ‘Green Eggs and Ham.’ The first–to which I do not subscribe–was suggested to me by a colleague with small children. It is as a terrifying torture-and-kidnap story… The second way to interpret the book is as a celebration, albeit a mischievous one, of two particularly American traits: salesmanship and open-mindedness.”

A new study suggests that you and your snappy new website have something on the order of 1/20th of a second to impress the consumers who click on your particular URL. “Researchers discovered that people could rate the visual appeal of sites after seeing them for just one-twentieth of a second… But the results did not show how to win a positive reaction from users.”

Technology is a great thing for education, right? But teachers are increasingly finding that students who can get lecture notes and course materials online are giving up going to classes. This is good for learning?

In just a few years we’ll be reading on thin flexible paper-like screens. “The display, which currently has the resolution of a normal computer screen — 100 pixels per square inch — and four levels of gray scale, could help usher in durable, paper-like screens that can be attached to small electronic devices such as mobile phones and then rolled up and tucked away when not in use.”

For centuries, scientists held that the brain was a fixed entity, that it was hard-wired for each individual function, and incapable of reorganizing after injury. In the last half-century, however, new technology and cutting-edge experiments have exploded that dogma, revealing not only that the brain does in fact reorganize and adapt, it does so all the time. ‘A large part of our brains is devoted to vision-some estimate more than half. A question we are asking is what happens to that part of the brain when there is no input from the eyes’?”

“The existence of a universal aesthetic psychology has been suggested, not only experimentally, but by the fact that the arts travel outside their local contexts so easily. Displays of virtuosity make audiences’ hair stand on end, regardless of their specific cultural context. It’s no surprise this is a universal aspect of human nature: over thousands of generations, hunter-gatherer bands that exercised dexterity, and encouraged it by admiring it, would have survived better than their less skilful cousins against predators and the rigours of a hostile environment.”

Speech recognition programs aren’t just for recognizing words anymore. They work behind the scenes to analyze the emotional tone of a caller, assist operators, and sort through audio files…

“We trust it. Should we? John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist, recently concluded that most articles published by biomedical journals are flat-out wrong. The sources of error, he found, are numerous: the small size of many studies, for instance, often leads to mistakes, as does the fact that emerging disciplines, which lately abound, may employ standards and methods that are still evolving. Finally, there is bias, which Ioannidis says he believes to be ubiquitous.”

“At some schools, online courses — originally intended for nontraditional students living far from campus — have proved surprisingly popular with on-campus students. At least 2.3 million people took some kind of online course in 2004, and two-thirds of colleges offering ‘face-to-face’ courses also offer online ones. But what were once two distinct types of classes are looking more and more alike — and often dipping into the same pool of students.”

Literary controversies rarely generate much national debate these days, but the dust-up over James Frey’s alleged fibbing in his memoir exploded into something larger this week when Oprah Winfrey, who had selected Frey’s tome for her famed on-air book club, weighed in with the opinion that Frey’s manufactured truth just isn’t that big a deal. The controversy is bigger than Frey, of course, and even bigger than Oprah. The issue is that major lies seem to have lost their power to outrage us as a nation. “Are we so used to being duped that over time, our outrage muscles have gone all slack and gooey? … Softened up by relentless hyperbole and the hot air of advertising, it’s easier for us to roll over and play dead when confronted with an actual lie.”