Month: September 2009
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Your Job as an Artist
Andrew Keen, the so-called Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, tackles his common ground of technology and creativity in a piece from the Telegraph where he hopes to discover Why are Artists so Poor? After a bit of Twittering, Andrew found that his: responses extended to everything from lucid one-worders like “oversupply” to philosophical tweets such as…
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New Literacy Strategies
Seth Roberts recently reflected on the New York Times article The Future of Reading | A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like with his own piece entitled Student Power. Seth delivers his own constructive criticism regarding the American higher education system (emphasis his): 1. Students in a class are treated all alike. They’re not. All…
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In Defense of Sampling: Why Stealing is Inspiring
Audio sampling in contemporary music is a form of budding innovation that proves not only the evolution of the industry, but a method to build on creative works that inspire us. The practice of sampling is common in most creative industries, but often less obvious than it is in music. Music sampling happens to receive…
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Seeing with Tongues
A new breakthrough device, recently covered in Scientific American, restores partial eyesight to the blind by using sensors in the tongue to send sign signals to the brain. The research comes from neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita. Experiments have shown that: within 15 minutes of using the device, blind people can begin interpreting spatial information via the…
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To Invest is to Aim
In the land of financial markets, the phrase too big to fail has been brought into a new light. Two physicists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy, finding in numerous cases that 80% of a country’s market capital consisted of only a few shareholders.…
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Guest Posts (1)
Right now I’m in Japan. I’ll be staying here for another couple of weeks before heading to southeast Australia for another few weeks. While I’m away your occasional Lone Gunman fix will come from a selection of fine guest writers. For the coming week your host is Alex J. Mann. Alex has his own tag…
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The Inefficiencies of Multitasking
Those who regularly multitask are the worst at multitasking: In [a test] designed to measure how well [students] could filter out extraneous stimuli from the environment, the subjects had to look for changes in red rectangles while ignoring blue rectangles displayed on a computer monitor. Infrequent multitaskers scored well on the test, but habitual multitaskers…
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The Neuroscience of Driving
Elderly drivers are the most dangerous on the road, we are often led to believe thanks to the news highlighting accidents involving the aged. This is not necessarily the case, research is showing, but it’s partly true due to the decline of many cognitive functions. In a comprehensive article looking at the neuroscience of driving,…
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Paper Towels vs. Hand Driers
Fully accepting his bias, Paul Revere looks at the evidence in the long-standing paper towel–hand drier debate and finds in favour of the humble paper towel. There were four parts to the study: Part A looked at the drying efficiency of hand drying method; Part B involved counting the number of different types of bacteria…