Category: ideas

Is Mensa, the “genius” IQ organization, inflating applicants’ test scores so as to boost its membership numbers? “Membership in the UK currently stands at a lowly 26,247 – the lowest figure in 15 years, more than 17,400 below the figure 10 years ago, when membership reached an all-time high of 43,652. While Mensa has a worldwide membership of 98,861, British Mensa, the heart and home of the society, is in a very sorry state indeed. So what has gone wrong? Well, pretty much everything…”

Not all generalizations are wrong. “Lawyers, philosophers and others have long pondered the legal and moral distinctions among discrimination, stereotyping and statistical probabilities, but they have not reached broad agreement. Beyond suspicions about rounding up the usual suspects, how do we know whether generalizations are based on sound empirical information or are a jumble of pop culture shorthand and bad science? What kinds of broad judgments are right and what kinds are wrong? How are categories constructed in the first place?”

“In the 1970’s and 80’s, legions of students and professors in humanities departments embraced the view that the world was a ‘text’ – that the personal and political were shaped by language and that literary and cultural critics possessed tools as powerful as those of, say, political scientists for understanding the world and effecting social change. While outside observers have long inveighed against theory’s abstruse argot and political pretensions, this year theory seems to have lost much of its cachet, even among its would-be defenders.”

Astronomers in Texas have determined that the famous figure in Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, is meant to be reacting to a frightening, fiery Norwegian sunset, caused by the eruption of an Indonesian volcano. Kate Taylor would like these astronomers, and all other art-explaining scientists, to kindly take a seat and stop telling her what her favorite paintings are about. “The eager detectives who ferret out the scientific details of these artistic experiences always argue they don’t mean to diminish the art, but that is the effect, however unintended, of their discoveries.”

“Over the past decade, those cultural phenomena that we once filed as geeky minority pursuits have become our masters. The internet now boasts a global community numbering 679 million. Video gaming pulls in more annual revenue than Hollywood. For its part, the film industry seems increasingly in thrall to the comic-book movie , the sci-fi epic and the wizard fantasy. Next week sees the release of the final instalment in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, awash with elves and hobbits and surely the most monumental nerd-fest of the lot. All of which raises some frightening implications. Could it be that there are more nerds today than there were before?”

Every generation has those writers who somehow help define it. But “Generation Y, the teens and early twenty–somethings who are said to represent the biggest chunk of pop culture marketing power, have no one who has encapsulated their generation in their writing so far. Sure, there are some authors their age but they haven’t produced a work meant to encapsulate the generation. Nor has one of them been called upon to become the chief essayist, chronicler or spokesperson for their peers. So where are they? ‘This isn’t a literary generation. It’s the MTV/high–speed Internet generation’.”

The gap between countries with ready access to information technologies and the internet, and those without, is rapidly becoming the next likely staging ground in a global class war of haves and have-nots. A summit in Geneva is attempting to identify some potential solutions before the problem explodes into an open conflict which could result in the have-not countries setting up their own semi-global networks in an effort to sidestep American ‘net dominance. But the major obstacle to finding an equitable solution appears to be that the countries with all the clout – most notably, the U.S. – have little to no interest in sharing their power.

Many Americans probably aren’t aware that their country controls the global Internet, and the vast majority of information technologies which make it up. But the rest of the world is well aware of it, and many other countries aren’t happy about it. “Some developing countries, including China, South Africa, India and Brazil, want control out of the hands of a private organization selected by the United States and instead with an intergovernmental group, possibly under the United Nations.”

Did Alexander Graham Bell really invent the telephone? “Documents marked ‘confidential’ that recently were found buried in the archives of the Science Museum in London suggest British telephone executives covered up the fact that a German science teacher invented a working telephone 13 years before Alexander Graham Bell created a somewhat similar device.”