While caffeine reigns as the supreme drug of the professoriate, some university faculty members have started popping "smart" pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours, according to two University of Cambridge scientists who polled some of their colleagues ...

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Professors Could Take Performance-Enhancing Drugs for the Mind

The Internet makes it easy for people to create separate communities and niches, and in a free society, much can be said on behalf of both. They can make life a lot more fun; they can reduce loneliness and spur creativity. They can even promote democratic self-government, because enclaves are indispensable for incubating new ideas and perspectives that can strengthen public debate. But it is important to understand that countless editions of the Daily Me can also produce serious problems of mutual suspicion, unjustified rage, and social fragmentation — and that these problems will result from the reliable logic of social interactions.

We've had this conversation here before.

The Polarization of Extremes

Be sure to flip through the subsections on the left.

We're bidding adieu to 2007 with a look back at the breaking news, the big events and the must-have gadgets that captivated us this year (give or take a few weeks; we compile this list by early December). To get a glimpse of what's been on our collective consciousness, we mined billions of search queries to discover what sorts of things rose to the top. We encourage you to check out our findings to see if you, too, reflect the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times.

This is surprisingly lacking in rigor. They don't provide a scale for the vertical axis on their plots. Is it linear? Is the bottom zero? It would appear that Radiohead's free album was a bigger story than the iPhone. Or maybe people just went directly to Apple and didn't bother to search.

Who/what/how is interesting, and the plot comparing Hannah Montana to the Rolling Stones is amusing. I'm dubious of the parkour entry under Fitness.

Google Zeitgeist 2007

What qualifies as intellectual authority today is changing fundamentally. People are much less prepared to defer to the acknowledged experts in various fields. At the same time, however, we are being swamped with data and information — a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there is a dilemma: Whom do we turn to?

The Intellectual in the Infosphere

Around the world, an elite band of trend-spotters spend their days providing businesses with glimpses of the future. So what do these 'futurologists' predict for 2008?

The shape of things to come

The end of ethnic nationalism, building societies around sets of common values, seems like a good idea. But something is going wrong. In the 2007 Massey Lectures, writer Alberto Manguel takes a fresh look at some of the problems we face, and suggests we should look at what stories have to teach us about society. “How do stories help us perceive ourselves and others?” he asks. “How can stories lend a whole society an identity...?” From Gilgamesh to the Bible, from Don Quixote to The Fast Runner, Alberto Manguel explores how books and stories hold the secret keys to what binds us together.

These lectures are still available as podcasts, but only for a very limited time.

The City of Words, by Alberto Manguel | CBC Radio | Ideas | Massey Lectures

Afghans are often credited with maintaining a stubborn optimism in the face of 30 years of war, drought, displacement and lawlessness. Two writers fresh from visits to the country have delivered sharply differing views on whether that sense of hope has survived the country’s latest round of hardship.

Have Afghans Lost Hope?

Doc Searls - The User is the platform of the future

Utilizing loan-level data, we analyze the quality of subprime loans by adjusting their performance for differences in borrower characteristics, loan characteristics, and economic circumstances. We find that during the explosive growth of the subprime market in 2001-2006 the quality of loans monotonically deteriorated and underwriting criteria loosened. In this respect, the rise and fall of the subprime market resembles a classic lending boom-bust scenario, in which unsustainable growth leads to the collapse of the market. We show that the problems in the subprime market were imminent long before the crisis in 2007, securitizers were to some extent aware of it, but a high house price appreciation in 2003-2005 masked the true riskiness of subprime mortgages.

Understanding the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

A follow-up on the theme of educational niches.

John Seely Brown, a computing pioneer who focuses on learning, the social role of information, and innovation, argues that in the Internet age, tinkering is back, and that's good for education.

Read the introductory text. (Original is here, behind a paywall.)

Tinkering 2.0