Category: Uncategorized
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Encouraging Debt With Advertising
In Home Equity Frenzy Was a Bank Ad Come True, The New York Times‘ Louise Story digs up the history on financial advertising encouraging consumers to take on debt – specifically, home equity loans. Advertising historians look back at the ’80s as the time when bank marketing came into its own. Citigroup led the way…
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Google’s ’10 to the 100th’ Project
As part of Google’s tenth birthday celebrations, Project 10100 has been announced as Google’s most recent philanthropic gesture – it’s “a call for ideas to change the world”. Asking for submissions in eight categories (community, opportunity, energy, environment, health, education, shelter and ‘everything else’), Google is pledging $10 million to bring to life five of…
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The Future of Science Blogging
Earlier this month Seed Media, the organisation behind the excellent Seed Magazine, launched Research Blogging – a great new website/hub for disseminating peer-reviewed research. In light of this, The Economist discusses the future of scientific debate on the Internet. Although Web 2.0, with its emphasis on user-generated content, has been derided as a commercial cul-de-sac,…
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Loud Music Increases Alcohol Consumption
When Gueguen et al. manipulated the music volume in a bar in the west of France, their suspicions were confirmed: louder volumes correlate with higher alcohol consumption. [T]urning the music up so loud that people are forced to shout at each other doesn’t have quite the same beneficial effect on social interactions. Because everyone is…
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Lost and Found (The Red Queen and Tri-X)
On the 14th August I travelled from Cardiff to London on the first leg of my journey to Dijon. Once in London I mislaid a book of mine: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley – one of the most enthralling pieces of non-fiction I’ve read in a long…
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Crow Intelligence
A couple of interesting ornithological studies: Like elephants, could it be that crows never forget a face, and learn to recognise threatening (and, conversely, rewarding) humans from both parents and others in their flock? Crows and their relatives — among them ravens, magpies and jays — are renowned for their intelligence and for their ability…
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Collective Creativity is Key to Pixar’s Success
Programmer and Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull leads by empowering others to achieve. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, he describes the architecture of Pixar’s Success: a community where people at all levels support one another. A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance…
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Believing in Impossible Things
Lewis Wolpert, the Emeritus Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology at UCL who gave the Is Science Dangerous? lecture (pdf) at the 120th Nobel Symposium, recently wrote the book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. In this book Wolpert explores the evolutionary origins of belief, and ABC News discusses this opinion in Why Do We Believe…
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The Last Supper in Detail
The highest definition photograph in existence is one of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. The 16 billion pixel photograph of The Last Supper can be viewed online in all its glory, and allows viewers to enlarge and observe any portion of the painting down to as little as one millimetre square. According to…
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Gresham College, London
Gresham College is an unusual institution of higher learning in Holborn, Central London. It enrols no students and grants no degrees. Instead, Gresham College provides lectures free and open to the public, and has done so since its foundation in 1597, long before there was any university in London. The success of the college led…