Amira

Andrew Zuckerman book and project. Inspired by idea that one of the greatest gifts one generation can pass to another is the wisdom it has gained from experience, the Wisdom project seeks to create a record of a multicultural group of people who have all made their mark on the world. Presented agains the same white space, all of the subjects are removed from their context, which not only democratizes them, but also allows for a clear dialogue to exist between them. In an attempt to create a more profound, honest, and truly revealing portrait of these luminaries, the project encompasses their voices, their physical presence, andthe written word. This comprehensive portrayal of such a profound and global group is an index of extraordinary perspectives. Source: http://www.wisdombook.org/ - Amira from Bookmarklet

Amira I think you are right that there is wisdom to be learned, the issue seems to be that people, understandably, usually draw from lessons learned from their own experience rather than lessons learned before. So the same cycles reoccur. How do we disrupt these cycles? - Todd Hoff

The organization of this book is based on the idea that human language has a small set of basic properties, each of which plays a role in the workings of language as an instrument for communication and thought. Each chapter in the book (after this one) introduces a new property. Chapter 2 discusses words and word meaning. Chapter 3 discusses phonological categories, the units that are combined to make word forms. Chapter 4 discusses phonological processes, the ways in which the units of word form interact with one another. Chapter 5 discusses compositionality, the principle that allows complex meanings to be expressed by combinations of words. Chapter 6 discusses how words are organized into larger units and how these allow us to refer to states and events in the world. Chapter 7 discusses how the grammars of languages divide the world into abstract conceptual categories. Chapter 8 discusses the productivity and flexibility of language and how grammar makes this possible. - Amira

This article has been written of interesting a metaphor for the city and the brain neuron. - Ami Iida

OK, cool. - Kol Tregaskes

Children who are able to pass the marshmallow test enjoy greater success as adults. "A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room. (...) The initial goal of the experiment was to identify the mental processes that allowed some people to delay gratification while others simply surrendered. After publishing a few papers on the Bing studies in the early seventies. (...) “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”(...) Self-control is one of the fundamental “character strengths” emphasized by KIPP—the KIPP academy in Philadelphia (...) According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an... more... - Amira

"A new study demonstrates that thinking about love--but not about sex--causes us to think more "globally," making it easier to come up with new ideas. Love has inspired countless works of art, from immortal plays such as Romeo and Juliet, to architectural masterpieces such as the Taj Mahal, to classic pop songs, like Queen's “Love of My Life”. This raises the obvious question: why is love such a stimulating emotion? Why does the act of falling in love – or at least thinking about love – lead to such a spur of creative productivity? One possibility is that when we’re in love we actually think differently. This romantic hypothesis was recently tested by the psychologists at the University of Amsterdam. The researchers found that love really does alter our thoughts, and that this profound emotion affects us in a way that is different than simply thinking about sex. (...) The clever experiments demonstrated that love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Why does love make us think more globally? The researchers suggest that romantic love induces a long-term perspective, whereas sexual desire induces a short-term perspective. This is because love typically entails wishes and goals of prolonged attachment with a person, whereas sexual desire is typically focused on engaging in sexual activities in the "here and now". (...) According to... more... - Amira

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance (4 billion miles away), showing it against the vastness of space. In a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996,Carl Sagan related his thoughts on the deeper meaning of the photograph: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to... more... - Amira

Carl Sagan made a great contribution to the Voyager program. He is not only of the planet, a wide knowledge in various scientific areas. I was impressed also read many books of his work. http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Ami Iida

A place for creating and searching for imaginations and the people who imagine. In this bank, saving is sharing. Investing is liberation. Winning is squandering. And imagining is, as always, free. - Amira

brilliant - Wildcat

so cool, thanks! - Lethe Bashar

"Who says an aquarium has to be all about fish? All over the world, planted aquarium enthusiasts practice the art of underwater gardening -- creating lush, natural-looking landscapes that live in the confines of a tank. These hobbyists communicate via the Internet, trading plants and information. They also trade pictures of their tanks. Each year the Aquatic Gardeners Assn., a group of enthusiasts 1,300 strong, holds a contest to name the best tanks in the world. Here you'll find the winning aquascapes of the past five years and get a taste of a whole new way to look at an aquarium. To read more about the art of aquascaping from California to Japan, read our story here." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Awesome images. - Iván Abrego

"In the center of a swirling whirlpool of hot gas is likely a beast that has never been seen directly: a black hole. Studies of the bright light emitted by the swirling gas frequently indicate not only that a black hole is present, but also likely attributes. The gas surrounding GRO J1655-40, for example, has been found to display an unusual flickering at a rate of 450 times a second. Given a previous mass estimate for the central object of seven times the mass of our Sun, the rate of the fast flickering can be explained by a black hole that is rotating very rapidly. What physical mechanisms actually cause the flickering -- and a slower quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) -- in accretion disks surrounding black holes and neutron stars remains a topic of much research." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman says your brain is one-of-a-kind in the history of the universe. Some of the most profound questions in science are also the least tangible. What does it mean to be sentient? What is the self? (...) Your brain develops depending on your individual history. What has gone on in your own brain and its consciousness over your lifetime is not repeatable, ever—not with identical twins, not even with conjoined twins. Each brain is exposed to different circumstances. It’s very likely that your brain is unique in the history of the universe. Neural Darwinism looks at this enormous variation in the brain at every level, from biochemistry to anatomy to behavior." (...) "How you define consciousness. It’s hard to get scientists even to agree on what it is? - William James, the great psychologist and philosopher, said consciousness has the following properties: It is a process, and it involves awareness. It’s what you lose when you fall into a deep, dreamless slumber... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"How did these various levels of consciousness evolve? - About 250 million years ago, when therapsid reptiles gave rise to birds and mammals, a neuronal structure probably evolved in some animals that allowed for interaction between those parts of the nervous system involved in carrying out perceptual categorization and those carrying out memory. At that point an animal could construct... more... - Amira

"An important neuroscience technology is the coming of brain enhancement. By that I mean increasing the power of your brain. It has started with technologies to help the disabled. However, sometime in the future, perhaps, the next generation will be able to improve their memory and their ability to calculate and communicate — basically, cell phones in the brain. Such an enhancement will be an order of magnitude greater than the brain’s capability today. Such an enhanced individual will be frighteningly powerful. (...) What did the computer industry look like 50 years ago? The ENIAC computer was operational in a large room with carefully controlled temperature. The equivalent computing power, and more, is now in your pocket as a cell phone. So, I believe the neuroscience technologies will be routine in 50 years. People who can afford them will get memory enhancements. They will receive memory packs that will make learning in school obsolete. Calculation ability will be as powerful as... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Do you dream of electric sheep? - Ami Iida

"Reading and writing is a recent human invention, going back only several thousand years, and much more recently for many parts of the world. We are reading using the eyes and brains of our illiterate ancestors. Why are we so good at such an unnatural act? Here I describe trecent evidence that, although we have not evolved to be good at reading, writing appears to have culturally evolved to be good for the eye. More specifically, recent research supports the exciting hypothesis that human visual signs look like nature, because that is what we have evolved over millions of years to be good at seeing. This ecological hypothesis for letter shape not only helps explain why we are such good readers, but answers the question, Why are letters and other visual signs shaped the way they are? (...)The topological shapes of non-pictorial visual signs are, then, for the eye, not the hand. But we are still left with the question, Why does the eye like these shapes? Here is where the evolutionary,... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"The answer may lie in the following pair of facts: (I) we wish to read words, not letters; and (II) we have evolved to see objects, not object-junctions. In this light, we expect culture to select words to look like objects, so that words may be processed by the same area in visual cortex responsible for recognizing objects. (...) Evolution by natural selection is too slow to design... more... - Amira

This paper discusses a central element of this change through globalization that has so far received relatively little attention - our relationship with time and how this is changing, in turn, the nature of power and politics. (...) How do we experience time? What is the nature of time in the network society? How does it contrast and compare with our relationship with clock time, an abstract and empty social construction that has dominated our relationship with time since the industrial revolution? And, finally, what does "network time" portend for what Barbara Adam terms "timescapes" - times that interpenetrate and permeate our lives but have been displaced, marginalized and sublimated by industrial clock time? (...) Perhaps an easily comprehended way to think about timescapes is to think of an array of temporal features - flowing durational "scapes" - that exist in lived reality, in us, in our cultures and in nature. Each feature, or temporal scape is implicated in all the others... more... - Amira

very good article indeed , thanks - Wildcat

"Scientists from University of Toronto and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital have discovered a molecular link between intelligence and curiosity, which may lead to the development of drugs to improve learning. (...) This modest overexpression increased the ability of brain cells to change how they communicate with each other and gave the mice superior memory in complex tasks and a significant increase in exploratory behaviour (curiosity). Because the exploratory behaviour was only altered in safe environments, Roder and Saab believe they have discovered a region of the brain that generates curiosity and a model for how brain activity leads to curiosity. (...) "Now that we know that some of the molecules and brain regions that control learning and memory also control curiosity, we can go back to the lab and design drugs that may improve cognition in humans - that's the potential benefit for the future," explained Saab. "Immediately, however, we can put into use the knowledge that fostering curiosity should also foster intelligence and vice versa."" - Amira from Bookmarklet

Alzheimer's disease have not been able to establish an innovative treatment of incurable disease so hard. - Ami Iida

"A short animation loosely based on the scientific recording of life's great species. And how this has given us clues that piece together, for us to discover the secrets of the evolution and diversity of life on Earth." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Yesterday night in bachata festival... - Amira

"How do we discover new things? For scientists, observation and measurement are the main ways to extract information from Nature. Based on observations, scientists build models that, in turn, are used to make predictions about the future or the past. To the extent that the predictions are successful, scientists conclude that their models capture Nature’s organization. However, Nature does not reveal secrets easily - there is no way for observers to learn everything about a process, so some information always remains hidden from view; other kinds of information are present, but difficult to extract. In a recent study, researchers have investigated how to measure the degree of hidden information in a process (its “crypticity”) and, along the way, solved several puzzles involved in extracting, storing, and communicating information." - Amira from Bookmarklet

For some reason, there were more works of art produced under not-so-good regimes than under better ones... may be it has something to do with the restrictions one has to overcome - the restrictions are necessary for art, provided that there are not too many of them of course; no restrictions brings too much chaos... still, it is a bit discouraging, isn't it? :) - Ashalynd

"..This remark was not in the script by Graham Greene but was added by Welles (in the published script, it is in a footnote); Greene wrote in a letter (Oct. 13, 1977) "What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence." Welles apparently said the lines came from "an old Hungarian play" ... In This is Orson Welles... more... - james reilly

Popular fairy tales and folk stories are more ancient than was previously thought, according research by biologists. They have been told as bedtime stories by generations of parents, but fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood may be even older than was previously thought. “Over time these folk tales have been subtly changed and have evolved just like an biological organism. Because many of them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or reinvented through hundreds of generations." - Amira from Bookmarklet

I heard this is what is that myth has its origins in India would be a fairy tale , the Bible and all stories. All kinds of prose are the kind of 36 , it can be classified as prototypes and archetypes. - Ami Iida

"Doxastic voluntarism is the philosophical doctrine according to which people have voluntary control over their beliefs. Philosophers in the debate about doxastic voluntarism distinguish between two kinds of voluntary control. The first is known as direct voluntary control and refers to acts which are such that if a person chooses to perform them, they happen immediately. For instance, a person has direct voluntary control over whether he or she is thinking about his or her favorite song at a given moment. The second is known as indirect voluntary control and refers to acts which are such that although a person lacks direct voluntary control over them, he or she can cause them to happen if he or she chooses to perform some number of other, intermediate actions. For instance, a person untrained in music has indirect voluntary control over whether he or she will play a melody on a violin. Corresponding to this distinction between two kinds of voluntary control, philosophers distinguish... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Thus, the debate about doxastic voluntarism is particularly intriguing and important for two reasons. First, it requires us to form a deeper understanding about vital aspects of human nature. For instance, it entails that we do further research in philosophy of mind, action theory, and moral psychology so that we can understand both the nature of belief and the nature of the will, or... more... - Amira

Haruki Murakami: "When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Haruki Murakami has deep knowledge of jazz and classical music and is also working on translation of foreign literature. He also likes movies in his college times, he was going to the theater every day. - Ami Iida

"Since 1953, when the first issue of the magazine appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, our Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: the Paris Review interview. More than fifty years—and more than three hundred interviews—later, the archive continues to grow with each new issue of the magazine. (...) In tandem with this publishing project, we offer here online a complete index of every interview ever published, searchable by author and by date—as well as a substantial sampling of the archive’s finest interviews, posted in their entirety. Taken together, these conversations with novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, biographers, journalists, and critics constitute what Salman Rushdie calls “the finest available inquiry into the ‘how’ of literature.” (...) Interview series offers authors a rare opportunity to discuss their life and art at length; they have responded with some of the most... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

I have read the book by written by Capote and the movies. http://www.youtube.com/watch... I'm familiar with this works. It's too avant-garde for me to read William Faulkner's style . - Ami Iida

"Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Gopnik about why babies might be more conscious than adults, the benefits of having an imaginary friend and why play, not necessity, is the mother of invention. (...) As adults when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. In fact, attending carefully to one event may actually make us less conscious of the rest of the world. (...) Babies and young children are much worse at intentionally focusing their attention than adults. Instead, they seem to pay attention to anything that’s unexpected or interesting – anything they can learn from. We say that children are bad at paying attention but we really mean that they’re bad at not paying attention – they easily get distracted by anything interesting. And young brains are much more... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"One of the big new ideas about how babies learn is that they use what computer scientists call “Bayesian inference”. That means that you imagine lots of different possibilities and test how likely each possibility is. When we have a theory of the world, we can not only say what the world is like now, we can also explore what would happen if the world was different. We can ask what... more... - Amira

Memories before 3, I have a lot of them : they are much more like either pictures or better said ambiances, atmospheres. May be the same impression that you get looking at an art painting. - bellegarde-webb