Category: ideas

The internet has revolutionized the way we get information. Now one researcher wants to push the revolution even further. The “idea is simple — he plans to move beyond the basic hypertext linking of the web, and change every word into a “hyperword.” Instead of one or two links in a document, every single word becomes a link. Further, every link can point to more than one place, pulling up all kinds of background context from the web as a whole.”

It’s long been a given that one of the keys to writing well is to drill good grammar. But a large new study refutes that idea. It was “the largest systematic review yet of research on this topic; and the conclusion the authors came to was that there was no evidence at all that the teaching of grammar had any beneficial effect on the quality of writing done by pupils.”

… helps keep you mentally sharp. At least, that’s what a new study suggests. Researchers found that women between the ages of 70 and 81 “who had the equivalent of one drink a day had a 23% lower risk of becoming mentally impaired during the two-year period, compared with non-drinkers. It made no significant difference whether they drank beer or wine.”

America seems to be all about religion and demonstrable faith these days, with even the most secular of public figures feeling compelled to at least occasionally make nods toward their own piousness. In other words, it’s a rotten time to be an atheist. “USA Today put the number of nonreligious Americans at 30 million… There are 5 million Americans who are Jewish, but everybody knows a lot more Jews than they know atheists, and why? Because atheists are afraid to come out of the proverbial closet.”

“The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can ‘predict’ the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS). It has been developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music.”

“In all the airtime and column inches devoted to discussing art – its merits, its value, its place in our lives – the big questions that lie at the heart of the debate are often too difficult or too obscure to tackle. They are, roughly speaking, these: why do we care about art? And, given that we obviously do (and that this is worldwide phenomenon that has stretched throughout history), what is it in art that we care about?”

The pentagon has given a scientist a “$5 million grant to work on her theory that by monitoring brainwaves she can detect whether someone is lying. She claims the system has an accuracy of between 94% and 100% and is an improvement on the existing polygraph tests, which rely on heart rate and blood pressure, respiratory rate and sweatiness.”

“There is the choice that faces our increasingly multicultural society. We can try to defend an ever growing number of “cultures”, defined by religion, race, ethnic tradition or sexual preference, from public comment they regard as grossly offensive. There’s a case for this, but let’s be clear what it will mean. The result must inevitably be that we shall have less free speech. Future historians may look back on the last three decades of the 20th century as a high point of freedom of expression, never to be achieved again. There may be a net gain in other public goods – such as civic peace – but there’ll be a net loss of liberty. Alternatively, we can take the view that, precisely because Britain is increasingly multicultural, all variations of religion, all “cultures” – including, of course, atheism, devout Darwinism, etc – should get used to living with a higher degree of public offence.”

Want to live longer? A new book says the way to make it happen is kick back and be lazy. “The book begins with an explanation that we are all born with a limited amount of “life energy”. If we use it all up quickly – by exercising and getting stressed out – we will die early. If we do very little and live life at a snail’s pace, we can eke it out and live much longer. It’s a theory that doesn’t find much support in the scientific community…