Category: ideas

There are plenty of things we understand about how the universe works. Indeed, it seems like every month there’s something wonderfully impossible that we’ve managed to figure out. And yet, the number of things that make absolutely no sense whatsoever is long. Here’s a list of 13 things about the world that defy explanation (so far)

Don’t like real life around you? Increasingly, we can remix it to our own liking. “We’re remixing our TV behavior as TiVo-style video recorders let us ‘make every night Thursday night.’ We’re remixing our media by grabbing online articles from dozens of different sources—and then broadcasting our own opinions with blogs. When you get down to it, the remixing metaphor applies to almost any area you can think of. Some of the sessions at ETech bannered the remixing of radio, DNA, politics and culture.”

Are crime shows influencing real-life juries? US prosecutors are seeing “an increasing desire on the part of juries for the kind of certainty shown on television programs such as “Crime Scene Investigation,” in which crimes are solved conclusively in less than an hour. Across the country, prosecutors say, juries are demanding more from them.”

Why do people often make decisions that seem to go directly against their interests? “Neuroeconomics, while still regarded skeptically by mainstream economists, could be the next big thing in the field. It promises to put economics on a firmer footing by describing people as they really are, not as some oversimplified mathematical model would have them be. Eventually it could help economists design incentives that gently guide people toward making decisions that are in their long-term best interests in everything from labor negotiations to diets to 401(k) plans.”

“In one of the largest studies on suicide ever conducted, researchers found that men with especially low scores on intelligence tests are two to three times more likely than others to kill themselves. Men with low IQ scores and only a primary education were no more likely to kill themselves than men with high IQ scores and a higher level of education. But men with low IQ scores and higher education were at a greater risk of suicide. And men with low IQ scores and highly educated parents were at the highest risk of all.”

Who needs critics anymore? They’re unreliable. The latest web services will do your cultural sorting for you. “These web-based applications seek to recommend music not through descriptive reviews, but through affinities calculated by a computer algorithm. Websites like Movielens.org and Filmaffinity.com endeavour to tell you what you will like by having you tell them what you already like. This form of definition-by-association is supplanting the good old-fashioned review as the primary way for consumers to discover new music, movies and literature. Using a recommender application is like consulting your friends for music or movie advice, except on a grander scale.”

US Representative Bernie Sanders writes that the recently passed Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005 is a threat to free expression and Americans’ First Amendment rights. “I am increasingly alarmed by the culture of censorship that is developing in this country. This censorship is being conducted by the corporations that own our increasingly consolidated, less diverse media. And it is being done by the government. The result is an insidious chill on free expression on our airwaves.”

“The top 20 global languages – defined in terms of their use as a first or second language – provide an interesting reflection on the fortunes of those languages that have spread by organic growth and those that have expanded by means of mergers and acquisitions. At the top of the league table is Mandarin Chinese, which has 1,052 million speakers, more than twice as many as the next highest, English, with 508 million. Third is Hindi with 487 million and fourth Spanish, with 417 million. Of course, English is a far more global language – though primarily as a second language – than Chinese, the vast majority of whose speakers live in China. But with the present rise of China – and indeed India – it would not be difficult to imagine Mandarin and Hindi becoming far more widely spoken by 2100.”

Has America’s obsession with wealth and material possession become a mania that distracts us from recognizing the truly important things in life? A new scholarly book argues that, “in the age of globalization, Americans are addictively driven by the brain’s pleasure centers to live turbocharged lives in pursuit of status and possessions at the expense of the only things that can truly make us happy: relationships with other people.” If the author is right, the country has crested the manic wave created by the 1990s stock market boom, and is headed for a very big emotional fall.

“How does innovation happen? The familiar story involves boffins in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Or that Electronic Arts (EA), a maker of computer games, ships programming tools to its customers, posts their modifications online and works their creations into new games. And so on. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.”