The Blog : Twilight of Violence : Sam Harris - 0 views
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Steven Pinker is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, the author of several magnificent books about the human mind, and one of the most influential scientists on earth. He is also my friend, an occasional mentor, and an advisor to my nonprofit foundation, Project Reason.Steve's new book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Reviewing it for the New York Times Book Review, the philosopher Peter Singer called it "a supremely important book." I have no doubt that it is, and I very much look forward to reading it. In the meantime, Steve was kind enough to help produce a written interview for this blog.
Symbolic Unions - 0 views
Collective Intelligence: The Need for Synthesis by Kingsley Dennis | Between Both Worlds - 2 views
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To upgrade our thinking patterns is a beginning step to an upgrade in human consciousness, and is necessary if we are to succeed in adapting to our rapidly and inevitably changing world. In other words, if we don't enact a change, or learn to adapt to the incoming energies of change and transformation, our presence is likely to be no longer required, or needed. It is a sobering thought.
A potent combination of imagination and critical thinking - 0 views
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Architect Margot Krasojevic shoots a video of preparing her favourite cocktail - The Red Rum inspired by the Hollywood film, The Shining, showing us a more humane side of the architect who is known for her futuristic parametric architecture that explores sustainable practices in the most unlikeliest of built forms…
Air Pollution - 1 views
We Are Social Creatures: The Power of Others to Support Our Habits | Psychology Today - 3 views
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Your attempt to change a habit means that others will need to work at their lives too. They might even grumble and resist. The good news, of course, is that eventually they will become accustomed to your new way of doing things. Humans are incredibly adaptive creatures. What was once new becomes commonplace and what was once usual becomes odd and foreign.
Personalised commute: the train of the future! - 0 views
How Language Shapes Thought By Lera Boroditsky | Scientific American January 20, 2011 p... - 3 views
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In Brief People communicate using a multitude of languages that vary considerably in the information they convey. Scholars have long wondered whether different languages might impart different cognitive abilities. In recent years empirical evidence for this causal relation has emerged, indicating that one’s mother tongue does indeed mold the way one thinks about many aspects of the world, including space and time. The latest findings also hint that language is part and parcel of many more aspects of thought than scientists had previously realized.
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The notion that different languages may impart different cognitive skills goes back centuries. Since the 1930s it has become associated with American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied how languages vary and proposed ways that speakers of different tongues may think differently. Although their ideas met with much excitement early on, there was one small problem: a near complete lack of evidence to support their claims. By the 1970s many scientists had become disenchanted with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it was all but abandoned as a new set of theories claiming that language and thought are universal muscled onto the scene. But now, decades later, a solid body of empirical evidence showing how languages shape thinking has finally emerged. The evidence overturns the long-standing dogma about universality and yields fascinating insights into the origins of knowledge and the construction of reality. The results have important implications for law, politics and education.
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Under the Influence Around the world people communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages—7,000 or so all told—and each language requires very different things from its speakers. For example, suppose I want to tell you that I saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. In Mian, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the verb I used would reveal whether the event happened just now, yesterday or in the distant past, whereas in Indonesian, the verb wouldn’t even give away whether it had already happened or was still coming up. In Russian, the verb would reveal my gender. In Mandarin, I would have to specify whether the titular uncle is maternal or paternal and whether he is related by blood or marriage, because there are different words for all these different types of uncles and then some (he happens to be a mother’s brother, as the Chinese translation clearly states). And in Pirahã, a language spoken in the Amazon, I couldn’t say “42nd,” because there are no words for exact numbers, just words for “few” and “many.”
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A game-changing sandpit! - 0 views
This retail design does not focus on the product alone! - 0 views
Note from the Editor's Desk - 0 views
mirai- metaphors of a happy future! - 0 views
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