Adam Kirsch on the convergence of east and west: “…if the West has achieved things we hold sacred – as we should – it has always been the result of internal struggle. What are now the cherished principles of Western civilization, from democracy to racial equality, have all started out as critiques and became generally accepted only after long and sometimes violent conflict.”
Cooked Books
Why are we still surprised when “non-fiction” is less than truthful? “The sad truth is that “non-fiction” has been unreliable from the beginning, no matter how finely grained a section of human knowledge we wish to consider.” The sadder truth is that journalist fact-checking and academic peer review are still the best alternatives.
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1,000 True Fans
Kevin Kelly does the math for artists in a networked age, and makes it all seem possible: A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author — in other words, anyone producing works of art — needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
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Are Our Brains Wired for Math?
An interesting summary of Stanislas Dehaene’s research in our numbers sense that has implications for how we teach math: The fundamental problem with learning mathematics is that while the number sense may be genetic, exact calculation requires cultural tools—symbols and algorithms—that have been around for only a few thousand years and must therefore be absorbed by areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes.
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Netflix Algorithms
The quest for Netflix’s prize to whomever creates a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own reveals some interesting ideas about what constitutes a better algorithm. Rogue contestant Gavin Potter: The 20th century was about sorting out supply. The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand.
Hence, demand is characterized by finely tuned algorithms and human behaviourial economics theories.
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Magical Thinking
We are wired to find meaning in the world, and often this means including superstition and other explanations into our world view Emotional stress and events of personal significance will push us strongly toward magical meaning-making. Susan Gelman explains it this way: God puts you in the path of an HIV-positive lover, but biology causes you to contract the virus from his semen.
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The Wisdom of the Chaperones
Is Web 2.0 democracy a myth? Is it more a case of wisdom of the chaperones than wisdom of the crowds? Chris Wilson concludes, Digg and Wikipedia would do well to stop pretending they’re operated by the many and start thinking of ways to rein in the power of the few.
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Alternate History and Time Travel
An reading list of alternate history and time travel! more →
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It is the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of user-generated content. The inevitable result of growing pains, all kinds of rules have been devised to measure a subject’s worthiness for inclusion in Wikipedia (or “notabilityâ€, in the jargon of Wikipedians). But now the “threshold for writing articles for Wikipedia is now so high that very few people actually do it.”