A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but it just doesn't feel right.Mark A Neal, CC BY-NC-NDWords are symbols that help humans communicate. The link between words and what they refer to is, with very few exceptions, arbitrary. Many of the words that we currently use (“table,” “dog,” “mug,” etc) could...
Read more: Why do people feel 'a rose by any other name' wouldn't fit as well?
A new identity for cheating?Don HankinsWhat if Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) aren’t actually courses at all?
Our research teams at Harvard and MIT have shown over and over again that MOOC students look and act nothing like conventional students of either residential universities or online programs.
With a broader age distribution, a more...
Brian Williams will be a breaking news reporter for MSNBC.Lucas Jackson/ReutersAfter being suspended without pay from NBC in February, Brian Williams returns to television this week. He won’t be heading back to the Nightly News desk (now anchored by Lester Holt), but he will be reporting breaking news updates on MSNBC, beginning with the...
Read more: Brian Williams returns to the air – and memory research says we should give him a break
Can Twitter improve students' engagement with course materials?Lauren Ann JImerson, Author providedWhen I was a college student, art history courses revolved around a 1960s-era carousel slide projector. Its monotonous humming and clicking in the darkened lecture hall often put my classmates to sleep.
For years, technology used in college art...
Read more: How an art history class became more engaging with Twitter
Repeating patterns are visually intriguing.Frank A Farris, CC BY-NDWhy do humans love to look at patterns? I can only guess, but I’ve written a whole book about new mathematical ways to make them. In Creating Symmetry, The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, I include a comprehensive set of recipes for turning photographs into...
Ads that appear in broadsheet newspapers continue to have more appeal than their annoying, online counterparts. 'Laptop,' via www.shutterstock.comWebsite ads fidget, interrupt and mislead. They’re loud and ungainly. They fixate on things you may not care about and they sometimes spread viruses.
Like adolescent boys, their designers seem to be...
Read more: How native advertisements could be the solution to the internet's bad-ad problem
Children and families wait in line, as holiday gifts and toys are distributed to underprivileged children at the Fred Jordan Mission in Los Angeles December 21 2013.Phil McCarten/ReutersWhen considering poverty, our national conversation tends to overlook systemic causes. Instead, we often blame the poor for their poverty. Commentators echo the...
Read more: It's not a lack of self-control that keeps people poor
Obama owes these three a thank you note.ReutersRepublicans in Congress failed to block the Iran nuclear agreement from taking effect by the September 17 deadline, which means the Obama administration can now focus on implementing the historic accord.
On the surface it might appear that the key players who lobbied lawmakers the hardest for the...
Read more: How Europe helped save Obama's historic nuclear deal with Iran
Telling Jeb Bush what matters in Las Vegas. REUTERS/David BeckerThe prevailing response from white politicians such as GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush to #BlackLivesMatter has been “all lives matter.”
Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley were heavily criticized for initially responding to...
Read more: #BlackLivesMatter and the myth of a postracial America
Methane monster – landfill in Danbury, Connecticut. Evan Schneider/UN Photo, CC BY-NC-NDThe amount of municipal waste being disposed of in the US is more than double – 262 million tonnes versus 122 million tonnes in 2012 – previous estimates, our new study shows. We also found that the US has plenty of space to put it all –...
Read more: Waste disposal in US landfills underestimated by 115%