In the face of the failure of a perspective, Thomas Edison once optimistically said, “we now know a thousand ways not to make the light bulb.” Edison rightly saw these failed perspectives as a cost worth bearing.

In our brave new world we can communicate without effort and reach out to more people than ever before, but have we lost the ability to truly connect to people in the process?

Searching for new clips to add to this Monday’s Liftoff, I was drawn to the side bar of the Washington Post headline page. My cousin, Tammy Gary, shared A dose of reality for the HPV debate and my good friend Meryn Chimes echoed this thread of interest by sharing Bachmann questions safety of HPV vaccine [...]

And I’m not talking about Kelsey. In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky, a linguistics professor at MIT, argued that we can blame Twitter for the langu-apocalypse – the demise of the English written word. “An awful lot of communication [today] is extremely rapid, very shallow communication. Text messaging, Twitter…[they] erode normal human relations and make [...]

Why then was it this case that captured so much attention? When do certain events capture the public eye while others are ignored? What is it about the news that makes some stories exciting and others mundane?

Continuing in the vein of issues with technology… an article in this week’s Newsweek discusses the effect of stimulation on our decision making abilities.  Angelika Dimoka finds that as we become overloaded with information, the part of our brain associated with decision making works harder and harder until a certain breaking point at which its [...]