Curated News (Page 5)

“EXECUTIVES in technology, retail, marketing and other industries like to say that data is “the new oil” or, at least, the fuel that powers the Internet economy. It is a metaphor that casts consumers as natural resources with no say over the valuable commodities that companies extract from them.”

via Company Envisions ‘Vaults’ for Personal Data - NYTimes.com

“Spreadsheets are functional, but they don’t encourage deep interaction. To derive the greatest value from big data, users need to view and engage with their data on an ongoing basis. A spreadsheet doesn’t offer any motivation to do that. An intuitive UI, on the other hand, promotes regular useage, enabling companies to befriend their big data.”

via No Data Scientists Required: Big Data is All About Business Users - GoodData

“The app is inspired by research that shows that focusing on the positive and sharing good things that happen to you with the people you care about makes you happier.”

via Happier Launches To Help You Share Your Daily Happy Moments | TechCrunch

“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore,” is a quotation often attributed to Mark Twain. These days, that advice is being heeded all too well.”

via The Global Farmland Rush - NYTimes.com

“What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make.”

via Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever - NYTimes.com

“In work published in Science magazine in 2011, Mr. Michel and the research team tapped the Google Books data to find how quickly the past fades from books. For instance, references to “1880,” which peaked in that year, fell to half by 1912, a lag of 32 years. By contrast, “1973” declined to half its peak by 1983, only 10 years later. “We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year,” the authors wrote.”

via Literary History, Seen Through Big Data’s Lens - NYTimes.com

“I’ve realized—Twitter is outsourced schizophrenia. I have a couple hundred voices I have consensually agreed to allow residence inside my brain.”

via adam brault: I quit Twitter for a month and it completely changed my thinking about mostly everything.

To understand the future, you do not need techno-autistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool - Salon.com

Amazing to think how far we haven’t come … Yikes.

Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least 25 centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn 5,300 years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps. At the restaurant, I will be using silverware, a Mesopotamian technology, which qualifies as a “killer application” given what it allows me to do to the leg of lamb, such as tear it apart while sparing my fingers from burns. I will be drinking wine, a liquid that has been in use for at least six millennia. The wine will be poured into glasses, an innovation claimed by my Lebanese compatriots to come from their Phoenician ancestors, and if you disagree about the source, we can say that glass objects have been sold by them as trinkets for at least twenty-nine hundred years. After the main course, I will have a somewhat younger technology, artisanal cheese, paying higher prices for those that have not changed in their preparation for several centuries.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The future will not be cool - Salon.com

“Evolutionary psychologist and sociologist Robin Dunbar balances out the poetics with a scientific look at what goes on inside the brain when we love:

What happens when we fall in love is probably one of the most difficult things in the whole universe to explain. It’s something we do without thinking. In fact, if we think about it too much, we usually end up doing it all wrong and get in a terrible muddle. That’s because when you fall in love, the right side of your brain gets very busy. The right side is the bit that seems to be especially important for our emotions. Language, on the other hand, gets done almost completely in the left side of the brain. And this is one reason why we find it so difficult to talk about our feelings and emotions: the language areas on the left side can’t send messages to the emotional areas on the right side very well. So we get stuck for words, unable to describe our feelings.

But science does allow us to say a little bit about what happens when we fall in love. First of all, we know that love sets off really big changes in how we feel. We feel all light-headed and emotional. We can be happy and cry with happiness at the same time. Suddenly, some things don’t matter any more and the only thing we are interested in is being close to the person we have fallen in love with.

These days we have scanner machines that let us watch a person’s brain at work. Different parts of the brain light up on the screen, depending on what the brain is doing. When people are in love, the emotional bits of their brains are very active, lighting up. But other bits of the brain that are in charge of more sensible thinking are much less active than normal. So the bits that normally say ‘Don’t do that because it would be crazy!’ are switched off, and the bits that say ‘Oh, that would be lovely!’ are switched on.

Why does this happen? One reason is that love releases certain chemicals in our brains. One is called dopamine, and this gives us a feeling of excitement. Another is called oxytocin and seems to be responsible for the light-headedness and cosiness we feel when we are with the person we love. When these are released in large quantities, they go to parts of the brain that are especially responsive to them.

But all this doesn’t explain why you fall in love with a particular person. And that is a bit of a mystery, since there seems to be no good reason for our choices. In fact, it seems to be just as easy to fall in love with someone after you’ve married them as before, which seems the wrong way round. And here’s another odd thing. When we are in love, we can trick ourselves into thinking the other person is perfect. Of course, no one is really perfect. But the more perfect we find each other, the longer our love will last.”

via Scientists and Philosophers Answer Kids’ Most Pressing Questions About How the World Works | Brain Pickings