Category: ideas

“The high subscription cost of prestigious peer-reviewed journals has been a running sore point with scholars, whose tenure and prominence depend on publishing in them. But since the Public Library of Science, which was started by a group of prominent scientists, began publishing last year, this new model has been gaining attention and currency within academia. More than money and success is at stake. Free and widespread distribution of new research has the potential to redefine the way scientific and intellectual developments are recorded, circulated and preserved for years to come.”

An Argentinian physicist has analysed the patterns of music and of written words and concluded that musical notes are strung together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature. “His analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones, which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to make sense of atonal works.”

Businesses spend $1 trillion a year on advertising. But “the advertising industry is passing through one of the most disorienting periods in its history. This is due to a combination of long-term changes, such as the growing diversity of media, and the arrival of new technologies, notably the internet. Consumers have become better informed than ever before, with the result that some of the traditional methods of advertising and marketing simply no longer work.”

Prospect Magazine lists Britain’s top 100 public intellectuals. Its most interesting value is comparing it with lists of decades past. “The list may also seem curiously old-fashioned. It offers little room for the new “isms” that have broken through in recent decades: feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism. There aren’t many young voices: few under 45, hardly anyone under 40. It is very middle-aged, and also very male and very white.”

At least that’s what current research shows. “Researchers suspect that as much as 4 percent of the world’s population have a congenital brain abnormality that renders them tone deaf. Others can acquire amusia following head trauma or stroke. They have narrowed the hunt to the right auditory cortex, an area of the brain that processes pitch perception.”

Should universities teach you how to be moral? Nope. “The university also makes little effort to provide you with moral guidance. Indeed, it is a remarkably amoral institution. Today, elite universities operate on the belief that there is a clear separation between intellectual and moral purpose, and they pursue the former while largely ignoring the latter.”

New research suggests that happy people are not all they’re presented to be. “Researchers found that angry people are more likely to make negative evaluations when judging members of other social groups. That, perhaps, will not come as a great surprise. But the same seems to be true of happy people, the researchers noted. The happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments — like deciding that someone is guilty of a crime simply because he’s a member of a minority group. Why?”

“To understand music, we have been taught, that room has to be unlocked, the windows opened and the world fully engaged. But now the emphasis may be changing. The appeal of a more abstract way of thinking about music may be growing. There is a search for timeless laws and principles; it may be that something can be learned from the listener in the locked room.”

“Where is the artistic engagement with the huge, threatening issues that hang over us? One would have expected an intense blast of production if artists wanted to live up to the role in which they have been cast for over a century – as exponents of humane and liberal values, as revolutionaries, gadflies, the ones who see further than ordinary mortals.”