February 2012
18 posts
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Extra Credit No. 4
Here’s this week’s Extra Credit, a recap of the week’s features, the best longform writing of the week, and a digest of some of the week’s most interesting reading. If you’re a subscriber, you can log in below with your Memberly credentials. If not, you can subscribe here for just $1 a week. See the rest →
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Burn All the Liars →
“An unfinished autobiography and a 1980s biopic turned Frances Farmer, one of the great golden-era stars, into a lobotomized zombie. The main trouble: Frances Farmer wasn’t lobotomized. An investigation to set one of Hollywood’s most convoluted stories straight.”
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The Magic of Magic
The internet might be making it easy to spoil the pleasure of a great illusion, but greats like Ricky Jay and Penn and Teller will never be forgotten, and magic might yet have a few tricks to teach: neuroscientists are looking closely at what magic can tell us about the brain, and the CIA hired a magician to write a manual on soldier deception.
Wired in 2008 on the cognitive patterns that...
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What Neurology Can Tell Us About Human Nature →
Here’s Vilayanur Ramachandran talking to Edge (video and text) about his team’s study of apotemnophilia, a neurological syndrome that’s roughly opposite to phantom limb syndrome, where an individual, apparently otherwise healthy, has an intense desire to have a limb amputated. If his name seems familiar, it’s because he’s also done a lot of research on synesthesia.
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Time zones are fluid. What are the implications... →
Samoa switched timezones last year to better align with Eastern trading partners. In doing so, they skipped an entire calendar day to go from one side of the dateline to the other, becoming the last place on Earth to see the day out instead of the first. Stefany Anne Golberg took a closer look recently and found it to be an interesting reminder that time, though it seems inexorable and constant,...
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46 Things to Read and See for David Foster... →
Yesterday would have been David Foster Wallace’s 50th birthday. To mark the occasion, Carrie Frye rounded up 46 DFW-related things to read on The Awl. There’s some of his best writing online — including his profile of Roger Federer, which I included in my tennis reading list — writing about his childhood, his Kenyon commencement speech from 2005, his own reading...
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Extra Credit #3
Here’s this week’s Extra Credit, a recap of the week’s website features, the best longform writing of the week, and a handpicked digest of some of the week’s most interesting reading. If you’re a subscriber, you can log in below with your Memberly credentials. If you’re not, you can subscribe here for just $1 a week. See the rest →
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The Way We Plagiarise Now
Quentin Rowan published a novel, called Assassin of Secrets, under a pseudonym last year. It had been on sale for 5 days before anyone noticed that almost every word of it was plagiarised. Half of the novel alone is made up of various extracts from Charles McCarry’s writing, and the other half stitches bits and pieces of Robert Ludlum, John Gardner, Adam Hall, and a couple of others...
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Matchmaker, Matchmaker
Online dating is in the spotlight again with a study to be published later this month arguing that the methods of online pairing are unlikely to be as effective as the dating sites would like you to think. The authors’ column in the New York Times’ Sunday Review says that the past 80 years of research into compatibility suggests the most useful factors determining success in a...
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Extra Credit #2
Here’s this week’s Extra Credit, a handpicked digest of some of the week’s most interesting reading. If you’re a subscriber, you can log in below with your Memberly credentials. If you’re not, you can subscribe here for just $1 a week. See the rest →
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Extra Credit #1: A History of ...
Here’s this week’s Extra Credit digest. It’s got a selection of some of the week’s most interesting reading, a round-up of the week’s best longform writing, and a themed bundle exclusive to subscribers — this week’s is articles and essays that tell a history of something. If you’re a subscriber, you can log in below with your Memberly credentials. If you’re not, you can subscribe here for just $1...
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The Wisdom of Crowds
There have been plenty of high profile crowds in the last year or so, with Anonymous protests, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the London Riots, to mention just a few.
Generally, crowds are well-behaved as long as somebody is in control, or appears to be, but when things get out of control as they did at a Walmart last Black Friday, a crowd can quickly become dangerous. Scientists have...
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January 2012
22 posts
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Extra Credit: Weekend Reading List
Here are some good reads from the last week or so that you may have missed. I tweet these through the week and collect them in a post every Friday. Follow The Syllabi on Twitter if you prefer the trickle feed. Open this in your browser to see Read Later buttons.
The fractal dimension of zip codes
Bilingualism has some interesting cognitive benefits
Scientists are finding out that...
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The War on Spam
Experienced email users often wonder why they get so much spam — all but the most subtle emails are immediately deleted or quarantined in a spam folder — but the millions of less savvy users make email spam a highly profitable enterprise, and are probably unwittingly part of the problem.
Most spam operations control the torrent of email they send — up to 44 billion a day...
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The Demise of American Manufacturing
The Atlantic has a great article in this month’s issue on the demise of the manufacturing industry in the U.S. Although America’s manufacturing output has risen by a third in the last decade (when adjusted for inflation), the decade prior to that saw employment in manufacturing collapse to levels not seen since the Depression. The article takes a close look at how some manufacturers...
Extra Credits: Weekend Reading List
Here are some good reads from the last week or so that you may have missed. I tweet these through the week and collect them in a post every Friday. Follow The Syllabi on Twitter if you prefer the trickle feed. Open this in your browser to see Read Later buttons.
Vanity Fair on the recent history and uncertain future of NPR (with a wonderful title)
Vanity Fair interviewed dozens of people...
Culture-Bound Syndromes
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is currently undergoing an update and one specific section causing some controversy is an appendix on culture-bound syndromes: mental illnesses that, in theory, occur only within a specific society.
One of the more well-documented culture-bound syndromes is Hyperstartle Syndrome, widely observed in Malaysia, where its sufferers are...
In Inside Darwin’s Tumor, Carl Zimmer revisits evolution in cancer to explain how recent advances in genome sequencing technology have enabled scientists to study cancer in a way they’ve never been able to before. They’ve found that cancer cells evolve in the same way free-living organisms do to become more aggressive and dangerous.
Disease in India
Thanks to a lot of help from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, India is reporting its first full year without a new case of Polio. The battle to eradicate Polio worldwide is now in its endgame, with success hinging on making sure the vaccine itself doesn’t keep the disease going. While the eradication of Polio is going well, India’s problems with Tuberculosis continue: last week...
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Truth Vigilantism
Arthur Brisbane asked yesterday if the New York Times should be what he referred to as a “truth vigilante.” He wrote: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” Should the NYT be calling bullshit, in other words. Well, yes, obviously, but Brisbane says he was misunderstood....
The Pseudoscience of Internet Addiction
The Independent is reporting that Chinese scientists have yet again shown that internet dependency alters the brain, but are things like internet and video game addiction real? Vaughan Bell says probably not; it’s the result of “a perfect storm of pop medicine, pseudo-neuroscience, and misplaced sympathy.” The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual...
A medical study of the Haitian zombie. Haitians believe a person’s “awareness and agency” can be split from a human being by a type of magician leaving a zombie, used for free labour.
Guantanamo's 10th Birthday
Today is the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo Bay. Lakhdar Boumediene was held there under suspicion of blowing up an embassy in Sarajevo — a clear mistake from the beginning, but he wasn’t released for seven years. The Atlantic tells the story of Mustafa Ait Idr, also held for seven years, but never told what evidence the US had against him. Then there’s the Afghan...
The Violinists Vs The Stradivarius
Both NPR and Ed Yong on Not Exactly Rocket Science have recent features on a study revealing violinists couldn’t tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a modern violin. Laurie Niles, one of the study’s participants says the media are misrepresenting the study’s methodology. Two more study participants have also written their own perspectives. The general public, of...
What makes some people learn language after language? The Economist reviewed Michael Erard’s “Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners.” The Morning News also has an extract from Erard’s book today about Emil Krebs, a German that reportedly knew 65 languages and swore in dozens of them.
How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? “Lately, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it.”
Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users. “This may be the year where newspapers finally drop the idea of treating all news as a product, and all readers as customers.” Clay Shirky talks about newspaper business models in 2012.
King of the Cosmos. Carl Zimmer with a wonderful profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson, from January’s Playboy. See also: Tyson’s answer to “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?”