Imaging The Entire World - A Way Of Visualizing Culture "I'm interested intellectually and culturally about how the imaged world is being knit together by technologies such as Photosynth. More or less public images on Flickr, they're all being knit together in this giant quilt. Any place you look has been photographed. Anything you want to see, from the street, from the air, by satellite photo."

Wired 02/03/12

email this story | Posted 02/06/12@06:51AM

Study: Social Media More Addicting Than Smoking Or Alcohol "Thankfully, the study showed we're all not slaves to vice and distraction, as the need for sleep and leisure topped the list. However, next on the list of 'self-control failure rates' was checking in with social media, email and work -- ahead of the urge to have a Camel Light, while sipping on that glass of 12-year single malt scotch."

Discovery 02/05/12

email this story | Posted 02/06/12@06:23AM

Spinoza, Godfather Of The First Amendment "He was an eloquent proponent of a secular, democratic society, and was the strongest advocate for freedom and tolerance in the early modern period."

The New York Times 02/05/12

email this story | Posted 02/05/12@11:55PM

Why Americans Love Zoos Diane Ackerman: "More than 150 million people a year visit zoos and aquariums in the United States. Why do we flock to them? It's not just a pleasant outing with family or friends, or to introduce children (whose lives are a cavalcade of animal images) to real animals, though those are still big reasons. I think people are also drawn to a special stripe of innocence they hope to find there."

The New York Times 02/04/12

email this story | Posted 02/05/12@11:48PM

Liberté, Egalité, Hostilité - Do America's Political Battles Have Their Roots In 1789? Garry Gutting argues that "we have never gotten over the French Revolution. The revolution introduced the basic liberal idea that government must be fundamentally democratic ... We all, in principle, share in the power to govern ourselves. But this idea led (or, at least, was feared to lead) to a much more radical one: that everyone should have an equal share in power."

The New York Times 02/01/12

email this story | Posted 02/03/12@12:03AM

Where Philosophy Class Is Mandatory For High Schoolers "A 2008 law requires Brazilian teenagers to study philosophy because it is 'necessary for the exercise of citizenship'." Carlos Fraenkel pays a visit to a class in Salvador.

Boston Review 01/25/12

email this story | Posted 02/03/12@12:02AM

When We Can't Speak, Could Our Brain Waves Speak For Us? "Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words."

BBC 01/31/12

email this story | Posted 02/03/12@12:00AM

Monogamy Leads To More Prosperous Societies, Say Researchers "It would be easier for men in the top 1% to support 3 wives, at least financially, than for a man in the lowest quartile of earners to support one. ... Yet in much of the world, particularly the wealthier parts, monogamy - albeit with cheating around the edges - has flourished. Why?"

The Wall Street Journal 01/29/12

email this story | Posted 02/01/12@11:54PM

Does The Internet Change The Way You Think? "The internet may not have changed the way we think, yet. But it is affecting our ability to concentrate."

The Telegraph (UK) 02/01/12

email this story | Posted 02/01/12@05:35AM

Ancient Babylonian Yo' Mama Jokes Deciphered (Sort Of) "Middle East scholars Michael Streck and Nathan Wasserman describe and interpret some thigh-slappers scrawled on a badly damaged tablet from Babylon, circa 1500 BC." And there is indeed a yo'-mama zinger among them.

Discover 01/27/12

email this story | Posted 01/31/12@11:47PM

End Of The TV-Industrial Complex? "The mass media which has been used to sell mass products to the mass market no longer captures a mass audience. Instead, digital technology, the internet and social media have shattered the media and its audience into tens of thousands of specialised niches. Seth Godin's argument is built on his belief that people do not naturally conform to the ideal of normality sold to us by the advertising industry, and free of its coercive influence millions of us will choose our own weird ways of living and working instead."

The Guardian (UK) 01/31/12

email this story | Posted 01/31/12@05:30AM

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind These Days? "What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness."

The Wall Street Journal 01/28/12

email this story | Posted 01/30/12@11:54PM

The Ways We Try To Learn? Some Of Them Are Just Wrong "People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true."

Wired 01/30/12

email this story | Posted 01/30/12@06:31AM

Napoleonland, Where France Reigns Mostly Supreme, May Become Theme Park Reality Yes, really: "Mr. Jégo envisions visitors skiing through a re-enactment of Napoleon's catastrophic retreat from Russia surrounded by the frozen bodies of soldiers and horses,' he told the Sunday Times."

The Toronto Globe and Mail 01/27/12

email this story | Posted 01/29/12@08:46PM

Who Lies In Online Dating? Everyone, Even The Companies "For nearly 50 years, ever since computers were first used to help college kids hook up, people assumed, or hoped, that the fact of technology as mediator would mean not just more dates but better dates. The Great God Computer must know something we don't, the thinking went. It just must. The notion became a wonderful marketing tool--red meat for the media."

Fast Company 01/29/12

email this story | Posted 01/29/12@08:31PM

Smile In That Profile Photo - Your Future Happiness May Depend On It "People who smile in photos are generally warmer and friendlier than their sad face counterparts. The smilier they are, the easier time they have with social relationships. Heightened smiling intensity in said photos correlates with greater life satisfaction."

Read Write Web 01/27/12

email this story | Posted 01/29/12@08:24AM

We're All Cyborgs Now - But What Happens When Our Data Dies? "It's not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it's not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It's that we're collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data."

The New York Times 01/27/12

email this story | Posted 01/29/12@08:05AM

Know A Narcissist? It's Probably Tough On Him Too "A new study has found that men who are full of themselves may actually be stressed out by their own narcissism."

Jezebel 01/26/12

email this story | Posted 01/27/12@08:28AM

Proposing A 'Temple Of Atheism' In London "The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre (151ft) tower to celebrate a 'new atheism' as an antidote to what he describes as Professor Richard Dawkins's 'aggressive' and 'destructive' approach to non-belief."

The Guardian (UK) 01/26/12

email this story | Posted 01/27/12@12:01AM

How Misinformation Spreads On The Internet "Such democratization of information-gathering--when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements--has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories."

Slate 01/26/12

email this story | Posted 01/26/12@07:38AM

Dept. Of Overworking A Metaphor: Researchers Study Thinking Outside An Actual Box "Just how potent is the metaphor 'thinking outside the box'? To find out, researchers built a literal box out of PVC pipe and cardboard - 5' cubed."

The Wall Street Journal 01/25/12

email this story | Posted 01/25/12@11:43PM

The Neuroscience Of Integrity: Now They Can Measure In The Brain When You Sell Out "When test subjects agreed to sell out, their brains displayed common signatures of activity in regions previously linked to calculating utility. When they refused, activity was concentrated in other parts of their brains: the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is known to be involved in processing and understanding abstract rules, and the right temporoparietal junction, which has been implicated in moral judgement."

Wired 01/24/12

email this story | Posted 01/24/12@09:36AM

The Web Freed Us To Be Creators. But We're Sliding Back Into Being Consumers "Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read independently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive."

WebMonkey 01/24/12

email this story | Posted 01/24/12@09:30AM

Study: We May Be More Creative In Our Off-Peak Times "Participants in an experiment were more likely to solve "insight problems" -- mind-stretchers that require an "aha moment" to crack -- when quizzed during a time period when they weren't at their peak. "Morning people" scored higher in the late afternoon, while "evening people" did better in the a.m."

Miller-McCune 01/23/12

email this story | Posted 01/23/12@02:22PM

How Disgust Helps Shape Who We Are "In several new books and a steady stream of research papers, scientists are exploring the evolution of disgust and its role in attitudes toward food, sexuality and other people."

The New York Times 01/23/12

email this story | Posted 01/23/12@02:00PM

Believe In Evolution? That's Because Of Your Intuition "Intuition had a significant impact on what the students accepted, no matter how much they knew and regardless of their religious beliefs. Even students with a greater knowledge of evolutionary facts weren't more likely to accept the theory unless they also had a strong gut feeling about the facts, the results showed."

Discovery 01/22/12

email this story | Posted 01/22/12@10:43PM

Hacking Their Way To A Greener, And More Prosperous, Planet "As investors look back at the mistakes that have been made and money lost in capital intensive investments like next-gen solar, biofuels and electric cars, some investors are taking a different route and looking to make cleantech investing look a lot more like web and mobile investing -- literally."

GigaOm 01/22/12

email this story | Posted 01/22/12@10:40PM

Rethinking Urban Renewal And Its Successes (That's Right: Successes) "In the national war on blight, the poor were disproportionately targeted for eviction from dilapidated downtowns to make way for parks, office buildings, sports arenas, and high-rise apartments. But a new study for the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that urban renewal, or slum clearance, had some lasting positive effects on economic growth."

Miller-McCune 01/21/12

email this story | Posted 01/22/12@09:59AM

Three Cheers For The Sexual Revolution! The 18th Century One, That Is "The first sexual revolution can be traced in some of the greatest works of literature, art and philosophy ever produced - the novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, the pictures of Reynolds and Hogarth, the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. And it was played out in the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary men and women."

The Guardian (UK) 01/20/12

email this story | Posted 01/22/12@09:42AM

No - Biology Doesn't Make Us More Conservative As We Get Older "In fact, studies show that people may actually get more liberal over time when it comes to certain kinds of beliefs. That suggests that we are not pre-determined to get stodgy, set in our ways or otherwise more inflexible in our retirement years."

Discovery 01/20/12

email this story | Posted 01/20/12@06:03AM

How Is Technology Changing Our Brains? "One thing the luminaries mostly agree on is that the technological revolution of the late 20th century is the biggest upheaval since Gutenberg, and that growing up in a information-surfing culture is affecting us on a personal and social level."

New Statesman 01/19/12

email this story | Posted 01/19/12@07:01AM

So Facebook Isn't A Big Echo Chamber After All... "Although we're more likely to share information from our close friends, we still share stuff from our weak ties--and the links from those weak ties are the most novel links on the network. Those links from our weak ties, that is, are most likely to point to information that you would not have shared if you hadn't seen it on Facebook."

Slate 01/17/12

email this story | Posted 01/18/12@07:22AM

Steve Jobs On How To Revolutionize Education "I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I've had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent."

Wired 01/17/12

email this story | Posted 01/18/12@06:44AM

A PROTEST: STOP PIPA & SOPA. US Congressional bills S968 & HR3261 are threatening sites like ArtsJournal and the rest of your Internet. Most of the web sites you use strongly oppose these bills. Some, such as Wikileaks, have gone dark today. Find out why, and how you can help put a stop to this madness before it's too late!

Widespread Online Protest 01/18/12

email this story | Posted 01/17/12@08:35PM

Men With Women On The Brain Don't Perform As Well (Cognitively Speaking) For heterosexual men, even the thought of a woman can be be hard on brain function. "This mental-depletion dynamic can be triggered by the simple idea of such an encounter -- even when a man has no clue regarding a woman's attractiveness or availability."

Miller-McCune 01/16/12

email this story | Posted 01/17/12@07:30AM

An Architect, Crocheting Clouds To Learn More About Them Argentinean architect Ciro Najle "says crochet is the perfect medium for representing fractal structures because its surfaces can be subdivided again and again by varying the length of neighbouring crochet lines."

New Scientist 01/16/12

email this story | Posted 01/17/12@07:24AM

Innumeracy In The Digital Age "It's the mathematical equivalent of illiteracy, and it's surprisingly common among otherwise well-educated people." (Not least among us artsy types ...)

The Big Think 01/17/12

email this story | Posted 01/16/12@11:48PM

The End Of Honesty? "Nowadays, when cheating is considered by some teachers to be an excusable response to a difficult assignment, or even a form of pro-social activity, our society risks a future of moral numbness brought on by a decline of honesty and all the virtues that rely on it."

Defining Ideas 01/12/12

email this story | Posted 01/16/12@08:29AM

Save Some Bandwidth, Brain, And You Too May Work Harder And Better "Perhaps we humans, and a great many other organisms, too, are deploying a fundamental, thrifty, prediction-based strategy that husbands neural resources and (as a direct result) delivers perceiving, understanding and imagining in a single package."

The New York Times 01/15/12

email this story | Posted 01/15/12@09:49PM

Cooperation: It's Not Just For The Playground (It's For Species Survival) "As challenging and demanding as cooperation is, it has been our species' secret weapon, and those of us alive today are the descendants of people who had what it takes to make it work."

New Scientist 01/13/12

email this story | Posted 01/15/12@10:50AM