Europeans, it is claimed, go for the absurd or surreal:

Americans like jokes that include insults or vague threats,

what is the funniest joke in the world?

It's pretty clear that whatever Wiseman came up with, it isn't gonna be the funniest joke in the world. His website was in English; so jokes in other tongues were excluded. Or consider this: maybe the funniest joke in the world isn't something that you can write down. Maybe it needs to be told. And even more to the point: maybe jokes are necessarily specific to situations, cultures, anxieties.

t jokes have deep sources in our human needs and psychologies. Human life is complex, not simple, although we have simple needs (food, sex, safety, sleep, friendship, etc.). Humor is a response to inevitable conflict. The humor isn't in the joke; it is in the attitudes of those telling and hearing the joke

What is the funniest joke in the world, at least according to Wiseman? Are you ready? Here it is: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?". The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guys says "OK, now what?"

rankle people from a nation that became independent in 1991 and is now fighting to maintain stable autonomy as Russian boots step onto their so

“It kind of denies their independence, denies their sovereignty.”

dropping it sends an important message, especially among world leaders, because “the Russians don’t really, in their gut, accept that there’s an independent Ukraine.”

Cliches can cut through claptrap like a knife through butter. We can use them as a kind of societal shorthand.

But the very fact that a word or phrase has become a cliche, "through popular use – and overuse ," the report continues, "suggests that the phrase has lost originality and ingenuity and, thus, impact."

"Avoid cliches ...like the plague," Toastmasters International, a worldwide group that works to improve communication skills, advises. Tongue-in-cheek, of course.

A cliche can be as comfortable as an old shoe, as helpful as all get out. A cliche is like a long lost friend,

. Though it's difficult to get to the point where you're comfortable enough with music as a language where you can speak freely."

"The answer to that probably lies more in figuring out what the nature of language is than what the nature of music is," said Mike Pope, a Baltimore-based pianist and bassist who participated in the study. "When you're talking about something, you're not thinking about how your mouth is moving and you're not thinking about how the words are spelled and you're not thinking about grammar. With music, it's the same thing."

"Music communication, we know it means something to the listener, but that meaning can't really be described,

So if music is a language without set meaning, what does that tell us about the nature of music?

During a spoken conversation, the brain is busy processing the structure and syntax of language, as well the semantics or meaning of the words. But Limb and his colleagues found that brain areas linked to meaning shut down during improvisational jazz interactions.

reason to suspect that the auditory brain may have been designed to hear music and speech is a happy byproduc

Ukraine's Government Disappears Overnight

only 48 percent knew that "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,"

Teaching factual knowledge is one thing, but empowering children to interpret the facts is another altogether – there is, after all, not one history but many.

n an increasingly multicultural classroom, it is surely anachronistic at best, if one is teaching about the history of the British empire, to present a fixed, monolithic interpretation of the past, one written by the victors

Pupils who simply have to listen, copy, repeat and memorise quickly find tasks meaningless and the subject of no relevance to them

Get them to write history themselves.

This year, I have encouraged a dozen or so pupils to write their own history of the second world war. Using print-on-demand publishing, at the end of the summer term they will have their own book – a physical, tangible product of their labours.

not just about funding, but also an appeal for moral help and attention from authorities.

Italian government spending on the arts has been slashed by some 76 percent over the past two years.

during the recession — when people don't have money to buy gasoline — the number of visitors to museums and archaeological sites is actually growing. Resca looks to the Greek philosopher Aristotle to explain the phenomenon. "He said that during successful period[s], culture was an ornament," Resca says. "In bad periods, culture is a big shelter.

My students are understandably preoccupied with money. They don’t have the privilege to not worry about it.

. The irony, though, is that many of these students aspire to go to a liberal-arts school but don’t necessarily understand its significance.

While the vagueness stems from the lack of models in their communities, it also comes from the lack of imagination with which mentors have addressed their professed college plans. Students hear that being a doctor is great because doctors can make money, enjoy respect, and have a great life. They don’t hear that being a doctor is great because doctors possess the expertise to do great things.

schools teaching the children of affluent families prepared those kids to take on leadership roles and nurtured their capacity for confident self-expression and argument.

Schools teaching children from low-income families focused on keeping students busy and managing behavior

School can either perpetuate inequity through social reproduction or have a transformative effect and help students transcend it.

College should be “sold” to all students as an opportunity to experience an intellectual awakening. All students should learn that privilege is connected to the pursuit of passions.

People are privileged to follow their hearts in life, to spend their time crafting an identity instead of simply surviving

in 1900 in America, if you asked a child, what do dogs and rabbits have in common, they would say, “Well, you use dogs to hunt rabbits.” This is not the answer that the IQ tests want. They want you to classify. Today, a child would be likely to say, “They are both animals.” They picked up the habit of classification and use the vocabulary of science.

In 1910, schools were focused on kids memorizing things about the real world. Today, they are entirely about relationships.

One of the fundamental things is the switch from “utilitarian spectacles” to “scientific spectacles.” The fact that we wear scientific spectacles doesn’t mean that we actually know a lot about science.

Formal schooling is terribly important; it helps you think in the way that IQ testers like.

we have learned to use logic to attack the hypothetical. We have an ability to deal with a much wider range of problems than our ancestors would.

In 1950, teenagers could not only understand their parents, but they could also mimic their speech. Today, teenagers can still understand their parents. Their passive vocabularies are good enough. But when it comes to the words they actively use, they are much less capable of adult speak.

The brighter you are, the quicker after the age of 65 you have a downward curve for your analytic abilities

Retire from your job, but read great literature. Read about the history of science. Try and keep up your problem solving skills

One of the most interesting predictions is what will happen to the developing world. If they industrialize, in theory, they should have the explosive IQ gains in the coming century that we had in the last century.

xperts say the rest of the 65 Chickasaw speakers, all of whom are bilingual, might be a big enough pool to preserve the language.

Hinson's program tries to counter further erosion of Chickasaw by offering language immersion programs — for both kids and adults. Tools, including an iPhone app and a stream of videos, make the language accessible to anyone,

imagine that in the future scientists will be able to map and decode all your mental states with arbitrary precision. They could then predict what you will do before you are aware of your choice.

the experiments in question here are limited to decisions that are far removed from the truly complex choices we make in our lives, those that involve a lot of back and forth thinking, prompt confusion, result in pondering, require talking to other people and generally take time to arrive at a conclusion

When it comes to the choices we make in life, there is a spectrum of complexity and this is reflected in the issue of free will. Some do indeed happen before conscious awareness, and others don't.

countries with lower GDPs ranked higher for meaning. Toward the top were Sierra Leone, Togo, La

os, and Senegal, a

in the end it came down to religion

Even among countries with similar GDPs, the more religious ones reported higher levels of life meaning.

“Instead of relying on religion to give life meaning, people in wealthy societies today try to create their own meaning via their identity and self-knowledge,

“creating the meaning of your own life sounds very nice as an ideal, but in reality it may be impossible.”

The changes persisted over the five days after finishing the novel, suggesting that reading could possibly make long-lasting changes to the brain.

Grammar is connected to values in people's minds. "Grammar peevers" in projects such as the Apostrophe Protection Society see "a connection between secure syntax and moral excellence",

Grammarians push Standard English at the expense of other forms, he asserts. It's an elitist view that ignores, for example, Americanisms and all the different ways of communicating online. Context and appropriateness are what really matter, Crystal believes.

It isn't always obvious what constitutes good and bad grammar.

Or is it just a handy shortcut? People make judgements about each other all the time for superficial reasons. Basing such assessments on use of language is fairer than the alternative,

What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."

In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production.

There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places.

The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood.

knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.

we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities

Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world."

"That our attitudes could bias something that we're exposed to so frequently is an amazing biasing effect,"

they may construct a political world in which they literally see candidates differently."

everyday family stories,

often have higher self-esteem and stronger self-concepts.

confer many of the same benefits of reading–and even some new ones.

demonstrate better understanding of other people’s thoughts and emotions. These advanced narrative and emotional skills serve children well in the school years when reading complex material and learning to get along with others.

when parents learn to reminisce about everyday events with their preschool children in more detailed ways, their children tell richer, more complete narratives to other adults one to two years later

family stories are always free and completely portable.

“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

researchers who have examined the method have found it wanting.

To be sure, a failure to replicate is not confined to psychology, as the Stanford biostatistician John P. A. Ioannidis documented in his much-discussed 2005 article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

in a variety of fields, subtle differences in protocols between the original study and the replication attempt may cause discrepant findings; even little tweaks in research design could matter a lot.

. The larger issue, though, is that because relatively few replication studies appear in the academic literature, it is difficult to know why several seemingly comparable experiments yield conflicting results

publish-or-perish world offers little reward for researchers who spend precious time reproducing their own work or that of others. This is a problem for many fields, but particularly worrisome for psychology. The field is suffering a “crisis of confidence,” as Mr. Pashler put it, thanks to a glut of neat results that are long on mass appeal but short on scientific confirmation.

group of psychologists established the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate the first 30 studies published in three high-profile psychology journals

illuminate the extent to which studies fail when they are reproduced by a different set of researchers, the factors that predict a study’s reproducibility and, perhaps, the conditions under which the goal-priming effect, assuming it exists, is most robust.