life:
Whoa.
See the photos from this LIFE cover here.
(Source: whiterabbitclub)
By Dan Ariely (PopTech 2009)
Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.
Much of what we have learned about the causes of dishonesty comes from a simple little experiment that we call the “matrix task,” which we have been using in many variations. It has shown rather conclusively that cheating does not correspond to the traditional, rational model of human behavior—that is, the idea that people simply weigh the benefits (say, money) against the costs (the possibility of getting caught and punished) and act accordingly.
New study is a further testament to the hardiness of the water bear
The water bear is the cockroach of microbes; they nearly always pull through when researchers throw them into Armageddon-like conditions. Now it seems that even their unborn young have unprecedented endurance.
The microscopic animals called water bears already have quite a number of accomplishments under their belts. In experiments, they’ve survived the vacuum of space, large doses of radiation, extreme heat, extreme cold, and extreme pressure, giving scientists cause to believe that the little guys could potentially live on other planets and weather long journeys across space…
But to pull this off, they’d have to reproduce. Scientists have now exposed water bear eggs to three of these stressors—extreme temperature, vacuum, and a dose of radiation so strong that exposure to even a fraction of it would kill a human in days. They found that provided the eggs are given a chance to dehydrate themselves and go dormant, surprising numbers that survive: more than 70% of eggs for the temperature test, and more than 50% for the radiation test, while vacuum-exposed eggs hatched at similar rates as control eggs.
(via crookedindifference)
The end of Playboy in Chicago has been a long time coming. In 1975, following the death of his longtime secretary Bobbie Arnstein, Hef moved to LA for good. By 1980, the empire had begun to decline. The brutal murder of Playmate Dorothy Stratten by her husband, a petty thug, made it seem as though the magazine was more like those smutty magazines Hef had tried to escape in the 1950s. Subsequently, during the Reagan administration, the attacks of the government-funded Meese Commission on Pornography sought to connect Playboy to crime, deviance and, most controversially, child abuse. At the same time, the appearance of hardcore pornographic magazines like Screw, Hustler, and Penthouse had made Playboy’s Girls Next Door seem positively Victorian.
(via the-feature)
Eclipse, California, circa 1924.
Photograph by Ansel Adams.
Wiens’s lips were fused, his jaw was clenched, and he was not getting enough air. Worried that he was slipping away, the paramedic injected him with a paralytic and performed a field tracheotomy—a common procedure in the military but one that she had never done before. A helicopter then flew Wiens to Parkland Hospital, which is a Level 1 trauma center, meaning that it can provide the highest possible level of care for such an emergency. President John F. Kennedy was taken to Parkland after Lee Harvey Oswald shot him—and, later, Oswald was taken there. The hospital also houses one of the country’s largest and best burn centers. It sees more than six hundred burn victims a year, but when a doctor there, a surgeon with twenty-six years’ experience, later examined Wiens he was shocked. People with that type of physical trauma rarely became patients. Usually, they died.
(via the-feature)
Bottoms Up. The way to design for social impact. -
By PopTech Board Chair and Fellows Faculty Cheryl Heller
When Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry was published in 1977 it was an awakening. Like Rachel Carson and Silent Spring over a decade earlier, one slim book changed the way we thought – in Janine’s case about design – and stunned us by uncovering what had been in plain sight all along – standards for manufacturing that made even our most refined efforts amateurish in comparison; elegant, beautiful, effective, and restorative.
We are creatures of making and acquiring; most of the lessons that have stuck from Biomimicry pertain to the manufacture of physical things. We remember the conch shell, made as strong as ceramic without heating the ocean. Spider silk tougher than nylon filament made without waste or petrochemicals. Or my favorite, the prairie, an emergent, diverse mix of plant species that are vulnerable alone but impervious to drought or disease when together. These examples and others have inspired designers and manufacturers to think differently.
As some of us cogitate about the challenge of creating more equitable life on earth, our focus is shifting; from artifacts to systems, from transactions to relationships, from design as craft to design as thinking, from habits of destruction to an awareness of the need for resilience.
As individuals, we devote abundant resources to changing ourselves, but are lost when faced with the challenge of instigating a shift in our collective behavior. Most of us can’t even move our own families to change their entrenched opinions let alone our cities, countries or the population at large. But here too, biomimicry has important wisdom to impart. Just like the conch shell and spider web, the social lessons of biomimicry have been hiding in plain sight all along.
“
One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.
So much of science and technology has been about pursuing efficiency, scale and “exponential growth” at the expense of our environment and our resources. We have rewarded those who invent technologies that control our triumph over nature in some way. This is clearly not sustainable.
We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system.
My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from nature, integrating with nature and using science and technology to bring nature into our lives to make human beings and our artifacts not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in.
” — Joichi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab (via networkedculture)(via poptech)
Political cartoon showing man in military uniform, with epaulets and plumed hat, holding sword and seated on pile of skulls. A scathing attack on Whig principles, as embodied in their selection of a presidential candidate for 1848. The Whig Party was a political party of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy. Considered integral to the Second Party System and operating from the early 1830s to the mid-1850s, the party was formed in opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party.
Here the “available candidate” is either Gen. Zachary Taylor or Winfield Scott, both of whom were contenders for the nomination before the June convention. The figure sits atop a pyramid of skulls, holding a blood-stained sword. The skulls and sword allude to the bloody Mexican War campaigns waged by both Taylor and Scott, which earned them considerable popularity among Whigs.
