Jon Tan discusses the aesthetics of web typography.
Employment lawyers are busier than ever.
Nick Monfort of Grand Text Auto asks, “Is game development an artistic practice? That is, is the making of a game like the making of an artistic work – visual, plastic, literary, performative, or otherwise? This is a different question. I am not one of those who believe that only those who identify themselves as artists can create art.”
Of a sad space needle in belltown Monica Guzman asks, “Is it rejected debris or spontaneous public art”?
When Alex the famous African gray parrot died in September 2007, at the age of 31, his last words to her were “You be good. I love you.” In her new book Alex & Me, Dr. Irene Pepperberg discusses their deep bond and the cognition research she conducted on Alex.
Michael Shermer of Scientific American lists five ways brain scans mislead us.
An Armed Forces Journal article on the usefulness of the blog format for sharing information in counterinsurgency operations.
The keynote speaker for the upcoming Cinema, Nature, Ecology conference in Chicago next April will be Hanna Rose Shell, assistant professor of Science & Technology Studies at MIT. Her forthcoming Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, from Zone Books, is much anticipated.
Writing about the medicalization of “normal sadness”, Allan V. Horwitz at the Psychiatric Times explains how unlike many other diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, “which contain qualifiers that require symptoms to be ‘excessive’ or ‘unreasonable,’ no such qualifiers exist for MDD [major depressive disorder]. Aside from the bereavement exclusion, the diagnostic criteria do not take into account the context in which symptoms arise.”
Three articles on the implosion of the US military’s ill-conceived Human Terrain System.
Vaughan over at Mind Hacks tips us off to a new Brain study which found that letter-color synaesthesia is relatively common in 6-8 year old children, but that the condition changes as the children grow.
Charlotte Roche’s scandalous German best-seller “Feuchtgebiete” will be published in the US next year under the title “Wetlands“.
A group of seventh- and eighth-grade students at Jefferson Elementary are participating in the Intelligence Technology Initiative, a new after-school program offered through Mercyhurst College, the Erie School District, and the Boys and Girls Club of Erie aimed at “training the a new generation of information technologists.”
Scientists from Maastricht University have kinda-sorta developed a method to look into the brain of a person and read out who has spoken to him or her and what was said.
Through some clever real-world experiments, Kees Keizer and colleagues from the University of Groningen have found that the presence of graffiti significantly increases littering.
