Category: ideas

Ivy League educators got together recently to worry about the future of liberal arts education. “The fact that professors at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth are worried about the health of liberal education is noteworthy. If the liberal arts are perceived to be struggling at these institutions, does liberal education stand a chance anywhere?”

New medical scans are showing the relationship between thinking, emotions and the brain. “It can show, for example, the parts of the brain that operate when we fall in love and when we have food cravings. It has even recently revealed the differences in the brains of Democrats and Republicans. But the technique also holds out the promise of answering deep questions about our most cherished human characteristics. For example, do we have an inbuilt moral sense, or do we learn what is right and wrong as we grow up? And which is stronger: emotions or logic?”

The Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia written and edited by its readers. As of November 2004, according to the project’s own counts, nearly 30,000 contributors had written about 1.1 million articles in 109 different languages.” While the stats are impressive, and the concept of “distributed editing” is Utopian, it’s user beware, according to a former chief editor at Britannica.

“Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property. In the past thirty years, copyright laws have been strengthened. Courts have become more willing to grant intellectual-propert protections. Fighting piracy has becom an obsession with Hollywood and the recording industry, and, in the worlds of academia and publishing, plagiarism has gone from being bad literary manners to something much closer to a crime.”

Ever since the U.S. presidential election, commentators and politicians everywhere have been calling for a return to national unity. Hogwash, says Julia Keller. Conformity and unity of thought have never helped the world advance, either culturally, politically, or artistically. “Only through avoiding consensus, only through steadfastly refusing to be unified, have artists progressed and evolved,” and the same holds true for politicians, activists, and American society as a whole.

The world’s patent system is a mess. Far too many patents are being applied for and too many are being granted. This has led to backups in the system. And America’s changes in patent law have made things worse. “It not only ushered in a wave of new applications, but it is probably inhibiting, rather than encouraging, commercial innovation, which had never received, or needed, legal protection in the past.”

A new study concludes that overweight people are at greater risk of mental decline as they age…

Students at several American colleges are organizing to oppose expansion of copyright laws. “They are forming Free Culture groups on campuses to explain copyright law to fellow students. Stressing its importance for culture and society, the group says copyright law is being abused. To illustrate their point, the groups hold remixing contests, promote open-source software and rally against legislation like the Induce Act, which would hold technology companies liable for encouraging people to infringe copyrights.”

Advertising is everywhere; it’s hard to escape. “Advertisers will spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach consumers this year. The result? Advertising clutter. Researchers guesstimate the average American is exposed to hundreds, or even thousands, of ads each day. But marketers may be losing ground. We’ve been sprayed so much that we’ve begun developing immunities.”