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| Watch out, Bruce Lee |
Here are some
off-topic articles from mostly the past week. Unless something crazy happens
during the weekend, this is my final post for the week, next update on Monday
morning. You can get update notifications by following MoreLiver on Twitter or Facebook. Contact me with any questions or
suggestions!
Previously
on MoreLiver:
SOCIOLOGY
People Are Losing Trust In All Institutions – The
Big Picture
Lack of Trust – Caused by Institutional
Corruption – Is Killing the Economy
FiveBooks Interviews: Ma Jian on Chinese
Dissident Literature
– The
Browser
Writers in China are afraid to
criticise their state and society, says the London-based author. He picks five
works of Chinese literature, from the 3rd century BC to 2008, which show how
it’s done
Hatred transformed: How Germans changed their
minds about Jews, 1890-2006 – voxeu.org
The
persecution of Jews during WWII is one of the darkest and most puzzling
chapters of recent history. This column asks how economics can help our
understanding, particularly of how people’s attitudes to Jews have changed over
time. It argues that ‘cultural economics’ shows that there is more to
understanding how people behave than looking at their incentives.
EU austerity is feeding racism, report says – euobserver
In its annual survey out on Thursday (3 May),
the council's European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), said
welfare cuts and shrinking job opportunities are factors behind the recent rise
in intolerance and violence directed at immigrants and other vulnerable
minorities.
FiveBooks Interviews: Jules Evans on Ancient
Philosophy for Modern Life – The
Browser
The philosophy author explores lessons of the
ancients relevant to our globalised, information age – by way of cognitive
behavioural therapy, and government measures of happiness
Did the Division of Labor Create Consciousness?
– Falkenblog
Ever since the invention of farming, productive
adults tend to specialize in some economic activity. People are plastic, they
can become many different kind of experts, but there's a lot of domain specific
knowledge involved in anything so you need to choose a parochial area of
expertise at some point.
MUSIC
Peace, Adam – The
New Yorker
The ideal memorial is written from distance, a
generous calculation of merit that proceeds honorably without abandoning
accuracy. I have to apologize right now for being unable to give you that—Adam
Yauch was a part of my childhood, an ambassador to America from our New York,
which is now gone, as is he.
Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch dies of cancer, aged
47 – Reuters
Adam Yauch, a founding member of pioneering
hip-hop group the Beastie Boys who captivated fans with their brash style in
early hits like "Fight for Your Right (To Party)," died on Friday
after a battle with cancer. He was 47.
It’s a sad day. For a long time we believed
Adam would pull through. Death is final. It creeps you out. Be sure to live
while you’re still alive.
Remembering the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, an
Icon of Remix Culture
– Wired
In losing Adam Yauch — the musician and
lyricist known to most as MCA — music has lost an icon, yes. But beyond that,
for those who love what’s become known as “remix culture,” a musical movement
is now minus one of its founding fathers.
Chicago house music is the sound of global pop today. In the 90s, though, it
was on life support—until a new wave of producers, including Cajmere and DJ
Sneak, got the city doing the Percolator.
TECHNOLOGY
Things That Will Change the World – Economist’s
View
1h video
from the Milken Institute’s conference. Robotics, thought-controlled
electronics etc.
10 GHz Optical Transistor Built Out Of Silicon – technology
review
In a significant step forward for all-optical
computing, physicists build a silicon transistor that works with pure light
Machine Politics: The man who started the
hacker wars – The
New Yorker
In the summer of 2007, Apple released the
iPhone, in an exclusive partnership with A.T. & T. George Hotz, a
seventeen-year-old from Glen Rock, New Jersey, was a T-Mobile
subscriber. He wanted an iPhone, but he also wanted to make calls using his
existing network, so he decided to hack the phone.
The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s
Changing the Rules of Business – Wired
Using A/B, new ideas can be essentially
focus-group tested in real time: Without being told, a fraction of users are
diverted to a slightly different version of a given web page and their behavior
compared against the mass of users on the standard site.
Digital archiving: Where source code goes to
die – The Economist
On April 30th Google Wave ceased to exist… The
flop could either be locked away in its code vault, the company trying hard to
forget about all the money and effort that went into it. Or it could be given
away in the hope that someone could do something useful with it.
SCIENCE
Update: Scale of the Universe – Chart Porn
Cary and Michael Huang have updated their
zoomable scale of everything (first seen in 2010). The graphics are nicer and
smoother, they’ve replaced the annotations with a scale in the corner, and
everything can be clicked on for popup detail.
Physicists Crack Fusion Mystery – technology review
A new theory might help researchers double the
power of fusion reactors.
MONEY
The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to
a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy – NYT
Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to
have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years
writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the
superrich’s role in our society.
A Stock Exchange for Your Personal Data – technology
review
Companies already make billions because they
know our online habits. What if we could take a cut?
Mindless With Money – The Psy-Fi Blog
We all know the feeling of mindlessness. You
get it when you drive the same roads as usual and get out at the end not
remembering anything about the journey, or when you eat a meal without tasting
it, or leave a meeting without the faintest idea what just happened. Yet to
everyone around us we’ve behaved just the same way we always do.
PSYCHOLOGY
Humans Still Evolving as Our Brains Shrink – Live Science
Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have
essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the
human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs
that our evolution may be accelerating.
Brain Scans Give Glimpse of How Your Dog Thinks – Wired
Of course, standing inside an FMRI machine
isn’t exactly a normal canine experience, and Berns’ team needed eight months
to train his dogs
Why First Impressions Don’t Matter Much For
Experiences – Farnam
Street
while we remember people by first impressions,
we don’t really remember experiences the same way. With experiences, we seem to
remember the peak moments and how they end.
This Is Why You Fall in Love With Brands – The
Atlantic
Advertising veteran and marketing expert Susan
Fournier reflects on her seminal 1998 study on brand relationship theory and
asserts that it's not just a metaphor.
The Storytelling Animal – brain
pickings
The science of how we came to live and breathe stories:
where a third of our entire life goes, or what professional wrestling has to do
with War and Peace.
Tuck into
our latest round-up of the best psych and neuro links:
Extras – The British
Psychological Society
Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final
cut
OTHER
10 tips for giving a world class presentation – barking
up the wrong tree
Embed Tableau Visualizations in PowerPoint – Clearly
and Simply
How to embed Tableau Visualizations in
PowerPoint Presentations – an alternative without using an add-in
A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa
1939 – brain
pickings
an intriguing old book originally published by
James Webb Young in 1939 — A Technique for Producing Ideas
The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Genius – Psychology
Today
Marge Profit was a maverick thinker in
evolutionary biology, possibly a genius, but never settled down in academia.
Won a MacArthur grant, published three landmark papers while still in her
thirties—and then vanished, in 2004
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals
Communicate – Amazon
Diego Gambetta shows that as villains balance
the lure of criminal reward against the fear of dire punishment, they are
inspired to unexpected feats of subtlety and ingenuity in communication. He
uncovers the logic of the often bizarre ways in which inveterate and occasional
criminals solve their dilemmas, such as why the tattoos and scars etched on a
criminal's body function as lines on a professional résumé, why inmates resort
to violence to establish their position in the prison pecking order, and why mobsters
are partial to nicknames and imitate the behavior they see in mafia movies.
Politics and the English Language by George
Orwell – Resort