Category: ideas

“One theory of why people laugh — the superiority theory — says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men.”

America’s patent system is broken, impeding the orderly processing of ideas. “Lawyers, companies, inventors and politicians all agree that the nation’s patent system is in desperate need of reform. They cite concerns about proliferating litigation, questionable licenses and a potential decline in American competitiveness. The question is how to reform: For all the complaints, little consensus has emerged on how to fix the system.”

How to keep sharp mentally? You have to exercise. “Among people who work with older adults, the concept of “cognitive fitness” has become a buzzword to describe activities that stimulate underutilized areas of the brain and improve memory. Proponents of brain-fitness exercises say such mental conditioning can help prevent or delay memory loss and the onset of other age-related cognitive disorders.”

The brain processes male and female voices differently, says a new study. “The research explains why most of us hear female voices more clearly, as well as that we form mental images of people based only on the sound of their voices. The findings, published in the current journal NeuroImage, also might give insight into why many men tire of hearing women speak: the “complexity” of female voices requires a lot of brain activity.”

“The traditional benefits of entertainment were the pleasures of the experience. For that, you had to see the movie, read the book or hear the CD. These were — and are — powerful pleasures, powerful enough to make entertainment a multibillion-dollar industry. But as society has grown more complex and the information we can know has grown exponentially, knowingness — the idea of being in the know and of having the expertise to navigate through the haystacks of available information to find the needles — has come to provide an arguably more satisfying form of gratification. That’s why the knowingness industry, including the Internet, seems more vital than the entertainment industry. Google is the new metaphor for fulfillment.”

“The World Future Society–an organization of academics, consultants and planners–is gearing up for its annual conference Friday to Sunday, drawing forward thinkers from as far away as South Korea and Venezuela. Mainstream futurists are not crystal ball gazers or mere science fiction aficionados (though a session is scheduled on “Science Fiction as the Mythology of the Future”). The future may seem unknowable to most mortals, but humans continually plan for what lies beyond the chronological horizon, futurists say. Everything from an environmental impact study to Pentagon war games are forms of future study.”

There are thousands of copyrighted works whose copyright holders cannot be found. “Orphan works have led to complications not only in publishing but also in digitizing projects, preservation efforts, and the creation of works like film and video documentaries. This week, at the urging of prominent legal scholars, academic-library organizations, technology companies such as Google and Microsoft, and many other interested parties, the U.S. Copyright Office is holding a series of hearings to determine whether copyright law should change to allow for more liberal use of orphan works.”

Using the arts to revitalize urban areas is an old trick, of course, but seldom is it really done well, for the simple reason that doing it well isn’t all that easy. “A single arts building or initiative can’t redirect the tidal forces of urban activity. Instead, it requires the synergistic efforts of government, for-profits, nonprofits, and citizens — whether working collaboratively, or accidentally, toward a common goal.” A new paper from the Brookings Institute aims to break down exactly how successful turnarounds have been achieved, and what the essential steps are for getting there.

Following the 9/11 attacks, commentators and prognosticators swore up and down that this would mark the end of the global quest to have the tallest building dominating a city skyline. It hasn’t worked out that way. “Architecture buffs revel in the lore of such competition, recalling how the Chrysler Building beat out the Bank of Manhattan tower in 1929 with the last-minute hoisting of a secretly planned stainless steel top. In 1931, of course, the Chrysler was bested by the Empire State Building, which yielded the title to the World Trade Center four decades later… For all the talk about jitters deterring potential tenants of a future Freedom Tower, the 9/11 terrorist attack has done little or nothing to diminish a global appetite to touch the sky.”

“Almost everything comes to us through some media prism, which, in turn, colours not just our view of this life, but our own self-definition. We are products of immense, often inchoate, media indoctrination. Moreover, the very pattern of life we take for granted, our normality, is hectic, digital and new, quite different in kind from that of even recent generations. You know where you were when Kennedy or Di died or the Twin Towers came toppling down. But does anybody, except those few who were there, on the spot, remember Pearl Harbor? Our lives, as recently as the first half of the 20th century, were different in kind: isolated, unchanging, experiencing great events at a sluggardly distance.”