Category: ideas

As the body ages, so does the brain, and as it does, some people lose their mental ability. This loss can become especially pronounced as we reach our seventies and beyond. Because the quality of life in old age is influenced by how well mental ability is maintained, considerable research is now being carried out on how aging affects our ability to think, reason and remember.” A new study reports that “the 70-somethings scored quite a bit better than they did at age 11; second, that mental ability differences are pretty stable from age 11 to age 77; with some interesting exceptions, the high scorers did well and the modest remained so.”

Children’s author Philip Pullman says relentless testing of reading and writing in UK schools is causing students to hate reading. “The things you can test are not actually the most important things. When teachers are under pressure to get so many pupils to such-and-such a point, in order to meet an externally imposed target, they have to do things – for the sake of the school – that might not be things they’d do for the sake of the children.”

Will a new literary translation website “help reconnect America with the rest of the world?” At least it’s an attempt to expose uni-lingual Americans to words written elsewhere in the world. “Words Without Borders (www.wordswithoutborders.org), whose far-flung network of consulting litterateurs includes the Nigerian-born Chinua Achebe and the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, is predicated on the idea that translation is as thrill-charged as smuggling. ‘Not knowing what the rest of the world is thinking and writing is both dangerous and boring’.”

“Forty years ago this month, Phillips launched the compact audio cassette at the 1963 Berlin Radio Show, and our relationship with music has never been quite the same since. Portable, cheap and relatively robust, the new format was an instant success. By the early 1970s, we were voraciously recording music onto blank cassettes: LPs, concerts, tunes from the radio. “

What if you could look at the entire world wide web all at once and make all the possible connections between information? “If this process was applied across billions of web pages—in effect, looking at the entire web at once—it would be possible to spot trends. A new film, for example, might have received terrible reviews from critics, but proved popular among middle-aged women. A new camera model might have some features that are popular, but others that users find too complicated. In short, there might be information hidden on the web that cannot be gleaned from any individual page, but becomes apparent when many pages are examined together. And that information could be of great commercial value.”

“The new practical philosophers are bringing critical thinking directly to the people. They are translating the dense, ancient writings of Socrates, Plato, Lao Tzu and Confucius into modern lingo and accessible wisdom. They are writing self-help books based on philosophical principles — books sometimes mocked by academicians for their dumbed-down approach but bought by the same hordes who seek answers from meditation, Oprah, psychologists, Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil. Philosophy, its proponents say, is an alternative to all that. It’s a way to think for yourself and to find satisfying guidelines for living. It’s a way to analyze complex issues through the prism of values, ethics and character. Philosophy (which means love of wisdom) is a search for answers that have made sense through the ages.”

Talk about pressure. Frank Gehry’s new Disney Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is expected to sound great and provide a transformative piece of architecture for a city not known for great buildings. “It is ironic that Gehry is being criticized for not producing a building that will transform a dreary, lifeless downtown area, since that is what he did more successfully than any other living architect when he designed the Guggenheim in Bilbao. (The phenomenon is even referred to generally as ‘the Bilbao effect.’) He made the first truly popular piece of avant-garde architecture in our time, and suddenly everybody else wanted one, including his own city, where he had not received a major commission until 1988, when he won a competition to design the new hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.”

Trying to fight new technologies with legal tactics is a losing strategy. Trying to block file-sharing will only delay the technology, not stop it. “Technologies can be stubborn. Efforts to knock them down can send them rebounding back with a new twist. In the case of encryption, the technology continued to grow more powerful and researchers poked holes in the government’s weaker alternatives. In the case of peer-to-peer applications, the makers have found increasingly clever ways to help traders act anonymously, and without a centralized service that can be shut down.”

“The urge to cast downloading as a kind of black-and-white moral issue that simply needs to be made plain to the kids so that they will knock it off is understandable, but it’s also wishful thinking. An estimated 60 million people have downloaded songs illicitly, which makes the phenomenon bigger than a youth fad. It’s more like speeding or marijuana use – activities that many people in a wide range of ages know are ‘wrong’ in a technical sense but not in a behavioral sense. By now, even if the music industry is right on the legal argument, it can’t win the moral one.”