http://www.artsjournal.com/ideas.shtml Copyright 2008 Fri, 16 May 2008 08:12:01 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.33 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss A study says that "although IM shared some of the patterns used in speech, its vocabulary and grammar tended to be relatively conservative. For example, teenagers are more likely to use the phrase "He was like, 'What's up?' than 'He said, 'What's up?' when speaking - but the opposite is true when they are instant-messaging. This supports the idea that IM represents a hybrid form of communication."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/does_instant_me.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/does_instant_me.shtml ideas Thu, 15 May 2008 18:40:48 -0800 "People who are good at interpreting facial expressions have 'mirror neuron' systems that are more active, say researchers. The finding adds weight to the idea that these cells are crucial to helping us figure out how others are feeling."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/how_our_brains_1.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/how_our_brains_1.shtml ideas Mon, 12 May 2008 18:41:08 -0800 "Despite the huge numbers who visit galleries and museums, most people don't go. If they do, the convention of the art gallery is that the work is entitled to be there and your right to question it is correspondingly limited. But in the street where you live, the supermarket where you shop, the square where you sit, you have a right to state an opinion." Such is the beauty (and the complexity) of public art.... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/when_art_meets.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/when_art_meets.shtml ideas Sun, 11 May 2008 10:12:14 -0800 "There are two distinct types of memory: Verbatim, which allows us to recall what specifically happened at any given moment, and gist, which enables us to put the event in context and give it meaning." A new study has surprised researchers with the finding that "verbatim and gist memory are separate, parallel systems. So separate, in fact, that 'there is some evidence' they occupy different sections of the brain."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/how_we_remember.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/how_we_remember.shtml ideas Thu, 08 May 2008 19:13:24 -0800 "In recent months American wine drinkers have taken their turn as pop culture's punching bags. In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/are_wine_buyers.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/are_wine_buyers.shtml ideas Thu, 08 May 2008 19:11:23 -0800 A new study reports that hierarchical awareness seems to be deeply embedded in the human brain. "If the hierarchy is stable, we seem to ignore those below us but focus on those higher up. If unstable, and we are in danger of losing status, areas of the brain linked to emotions are aroused."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/a_classless_soc.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/a_classless_soc.shtml ideas Wed, 07 May 2008 17:02:30 -0800 "Why are we as a species so often so desperately poor at achieving our goals? If we are, as the selfish-gene theory would have it, organisms that exist only to serve the interests of our genes, why do we waste so much of our time doing things that are not, in any obvious way, remotely in the interest of our genes?"... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/why_our_brains_3.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/why_our_brains_3.shtml ideas Tue, 06 May 2008 15:00:31 -0800 Scientists "are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal's health."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/in_nature_smart.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/in_nature_smart.shtml ideas Tue, 06 May 2008 06:07:32 -0800 "There is a gradual growing awareness that challenging your brain can have positive effects. Every time you challenge your brain it will actually modify the brain. We can indeed form new brain cells, despite a century of being told it's impossible."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/boomers_focus_o.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/boomers_focus_o.shtml ideas Sun, 04 May 2008 11:11:19 -0800 "SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/how_to_remember.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/how_to_remember.shtml ideas Sun, 04 May 2008 10:54:20 -0800 "As consumers use the internet to isolate and refine their particular interests - whether news and entertainment, or bomb-making and pornography - they create a fragmented world of 'echo chambers' isolated from the public space in which a healthy democracy thrives."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/our_wired_world.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/our_wired_world.shtml ideas Sun, 04 May 2008 10:36:06 -0800 "We're seeing the move from the sort of static idea of a copy that gets paid a certain rate to a revenue share and to a usage right which means that I am authorizing agents to give the license for the use of the music, like I always have in the past, for example with radio. I just want to collect a piece of the revenues that the other party is making rather than preventing any kind of copy."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/copyright_thats.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/05/copyright_thats.shtml ideas Thu, 01 May 2008 18:02:09 -0800 "Businesses hold creative-thinking seminars, universities teach creative writing, ministers makes speeches puffing our 'creative industries'. Even the splodges and squiggles that children daub in primary school are deemed creative. One could even say that the idea of creativity has become thoroughly debased."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/whats_so_creati.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/whats_so_creati.shtml ideas Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:18:26 -0800 Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as "smarts."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/finally_softwar.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/finally_softwar.shtml ideas Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:47:30 -0800 New "brain-scanning studies suggest that the link between profits and power takes place in the striatum - part of the brain involved in sensing rewards. This provides the biological basis of our everyday experience that personal reputation is felt as reward."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/why_our_brains_2.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/why_our_brains_2.shtml ideas Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:07:38 -0800 "As other cities look to replace their blighted downtowns with new development, Las Vegas, known for its extravagant facsimiles of European and American landmarks, has come up with an unusual approach: Build another downtown, right next to the decaying one."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/why_fix_it_when.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/why_fix_it_when.shtml ideas Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:14:22 -0800 Researchers have discovered that as people perform monotonous tasks, their brain shifts towards an at-rest mode whether they like it or not.... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/study_dull_chor.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/study_dull_chor.shtml ideas Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:39:00 -0800 "Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world? The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/how_language_sh.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/how_language_sh.shtml ideas Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:16:32 -0800 "Researchers observed test subjects' minds going on autopilot up to half a minute before the subjects actually made mistakes, even though the subjects weren't aware of their own lapses of attention. If the same mechanisms produce other, more meaningful errors -- slips on the assembly line or behind a steering wheel -- then the research could be used to design biofeedback systems that could catch mistakes before they're made."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/scientists_obse.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/scientists_obse.shtml ideas Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:59:21 -0800 "Whoever controls the image controls modern history. In today's media world, the power of the image is almost limitless. So we need those who best understand that power to police it vigorously. Which, of course, is where art comes in. Art's domain is the image, too. And if the image isn't doing what it should be doing - recording the truth - then art has a creative duty to patrol and protect that domain. We need rustlers-turned-sheriffs, hackers-turned-security chiefs. We need artists as we've never needed them before. So, has art risen to this challenge? Is it vigorously policing the world of the image? Is it hell."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/an_artistic_ben.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/an_artistic_ben.shtml ideas Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:45:42 -0800 Eye-opening new research finds the happiest Americans are the oldest, and older adults are more socially active than the stereotype of the lonely senior suggests. The two go hand-in-hand: Being social can help keep away the blues.... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/study_older_ame.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/study_older_ame.shtml ideas Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:41:00 -0800 "There is little doubt that scientific research plays an important role in enhancing our quality of life and improving our future wellbeing. However, today the term 'the research shows...' is often deployed because we find it difficult to justify music or art or indeed anything cultural as true or good in its own terms. Yes, cultural entrepreneurs will sometimes rhetorically affirm that music is important in its own right - but increasingly such declarations come across as ritualistic."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/music_as_social.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/music_as_social.shtml ideas Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:03:19 -0800 Actress Cate Blanchett says that her home country has "an opportunity to put creativity and the arts back into the centre of Australian life here and abroad. This is how a middle power can exercise its soft power in a positive and stimulating way -- that shows the world that we are much more than the cliched images that come readily to mind."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/arts_culture_as.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/arts_culture_as.shtml ideas Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:42:14 -0800 "An ear's size is irrelevant; what matters are the properties of a shape that's intrigued humanity for millennia, inspiring ancient Greek mathematicians and Renaissance painters and anyone who's ever contemplated a nautilus shell or the center of a sunflower. As scientists better understand the cochlea, might they be able to tweak it? Could they someday make the bass on Junior Wilson's 'Dock of the Bay' remix carry my brain out of my head and across the Pacific, just like it wants to?"... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/reengineering_y.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/reengineering_y.shtml ideas Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:21:55 -0800 The only manipulation involved was color-coding, setting the virtual position of the camera, and some lighting effects. The project lives somewhere between pure art and information visualization.... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/how_to_understa.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2008/04/how_to_understa.shtml ideas Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:00:33 -0800