This is an absolutely brilliant presentation given by Clay Shirky (author of the new smash hit on organizing Without organizations called “Here Comes Everybody“) on the topic of “Where do they find the time”. You hear this phrase, usually in response to some report of silly activity or massively time consuming hobby. We Clay knows [...]
Ever since I read Timothy D. Wilson’s magnificent “Strangers to Ourselves“, I have been fascinated with the fact that we often know less about ourselves than our closest friends and family (thanks probably to our many cognitive biases) .
Enter MIT’s Reality Mining Project:
[O]ur ultimate goal is to create a predictive classifier that [...]
The central tenet of those who support unrestricted mass immigration has long been its putative economic benefits.
When the social costs of mass immigration were pointed out, the Homo Economicus argument would be deployed.
I have long seen through the sham of this argument and I am on record slamming it regularly.
See or example:
Immigration sophistry debunked…again
The [...]
Also filed in Anthropology, Business & Finance, Civil Liberties, Economics, Education, History, News, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Race & Ethnicity, Urban Living
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South African journalist and pundit Ivo Vegter has rapidly become one of my favourite daily reads (his is one of the 30 surviving feeds in my “daily” list that once numbered 300 feeds).
One contemporary cultural phenomenon that he was dead right about is Facebook. In 2007, when Facebook was peaking, Ivo started [...]
Abelard.org has a lovely short introduction to the fascinating era of peace, prosperity and scientific now known as La Belle Époque:
La Belle Époque, the Beautiful Era, is an expression born after the First World War to evoke the period after in the Napoleonic campaigns and before the watershed in Europe of the Great [...]
In March 2003, social psychologist Richard Nisbett published his groundbreaking book “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why“, which challenged the received wisdom that all human groups perceive and reason in the same way. He came to the conclusion, based mostly on observation and social psychology studies, that Asians and Westerners
“Have [...]
Friday, February 22, 2008
Or how I came to believe that we should give them their country even though they don’t deserve it and it was stolen by the thieving hypocrite bullies of the EU/US…
The happy innocent days when Serbs thought that with Slobo gone, they would be treated fairly.
I have received a number of emails from friends curious [...]
Also filed in Civil Liberties, Contemporary Culture, Economics, Education, Law, Media, News, Philosophy, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Travel & Transport
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Friday, February 22, 2008
Belgrade’s Holocaust Memorial - one of several in a city populated by a people famed for their resistance to the Nazis
I am used to reading lies and vitriol about Serbs and Serbia but an article emailed to me today is one of the most racist, hateful and biased articles I have read in a [...]
Friday, November 30, 2007
Carlos Rotella at Slate has a good article on “The art, the poetry, the idiocy of YouTube street fights” - the posting of online fight videos. He reports from the virtual ”Land of a thousand asswhippings”.
The fight video is a compelling genre and holds a grim fascination for many. There are some great “stories” in some of these [...]
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
From Neurodudes:
So, Edge has a new question for 2006 for its All-Stars of Academia to answer: What is your dangerous idea? (Suggested to Edge by Steven Pinker, who perhaps got the idea from a colloquium series at his old haunting grounds.)
Offhand, one might expect a broad range of perceived dangerous ideas, varying by research [...]