Month: March 2010
-
Licensing and Patents for Green Technology and Drugs
The Seed Magazine ‘panel’ (who?) was asked How can intellectual property be adapted to spread green tech? Their short answer starts by looking at drug licensing (the last sentence is quite shocking): By World Trade Organization law, if a patented drug can improve public health in a developing country, it’s available for compulsory licensing. That…
-
The Denomination Effect: Banknotes vs. Coins
The denomination effect is the phenomenon whereby people spend coins faster than banknotes: it shows that we are more willing (there are fewer psychological barriers) to spend the same sum of money in coins than in ‘bills’. It’s obvious, but I like having these things ‘confirmed’ and having a name to go with them. Another experiment involved [NYU…
-
The Case for Redemption
In light of the recall into custody of Jon Venables–one of the ten-year-old boys who horrifically murdered the two-year-old James Bulger in Manchester, 1993–Brian Masters deliberates on the possibility of absolution for a heinous crime committed in one’s childhood. But I do know that [Jon Venables] cannot be the warped and skewed child who shared in…
-
On Being Foreign
Having (very) recently emigrated from the UK (to the Netherlands), this article on what it means to be ‘foreign’ was not only timely, but quite emotive, too. The [complaining foreigner] answers [the question of why he doesn’t go home] by thinking of himself as an exile—if not in a judicial sense then in a spiritual…
-
Art Forgeries and the Uncanny Valley
In the third instalment of the Bamboozling Ourselves series (a look at the master Vermeer forger, Han van Meegeren), Errol Morris interviews the author of The Forger’s Spell, Edward Dolnick, and the two discuss the application of the uncanny valley in the forgery of art. I particularly like Dolnick’s thoughts on the hindrance of expertise (final paragraph of…
-
For Continuous Learning and Generalisation
Stating that our “reality is out of date” and coining the term “mesofacts” for those pieces of knowledge that pass us by unawares, Samuel Arbesman shows why continuous learning and generalisation are advantageous behaviours–or at least that specialisation to the degree that it is currently encouraged is outdated. Slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts…
-
The New Nature-Nurture Argument
As it stands, the nature-nurture debate is wrong, proposes David Shenk in his book on the subject, The Genius in All of Us. Shenk submits the idea that we overestimate the effect genes have on many heritable traits, especially intelligence (or that ever-elusive ‘genius’). According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff…
-
The Language of Signs
Part five in a Slate series on signage around the world looks at the history of the green “running man” emergency exit sign and its ‘battle’ with the American red EXIT sign. We are told how the ISO-accepted emergency exit sign is Yukio Ota’s running man, adopted in the late 1970s. Interesting are Ota’s thoughts on…
-
Bilingualism and Dementia
I’ve noted previously how child bilingualism improves the “executive functions” and a recent study has corroborated these findings while also discovering how bilingualism can stave off dementia in old age: [Psychologist Ellen Bailystok] wanted to explore whether enhanced executive control actually has a protective effect in mental aging—specifically, whether bilingualism contributes to the “cognitive reserve” that comes…