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Every year the NY Times publishes "The Year in Ideas" with a long list of short articles on the interesting/outrageous/silly/etc. ideas of the past year. Here are two. - Perdita
National Smiles By D.T. MAX
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. "I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile," Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.
Keltner hit upon this difference in national smiles by accident. He was studying teasing in American fraternity houses and found that low-status frat members, when they were teased, smiled using the risorius muscle - a facial muscle that pulls the lips sideways - as well as the zygomatic major, which lifts up the lips. It resulted in a sickly smile that said, in effect, I understand you must paddle me, brother, but not too hard, please. Several years later, Keltner went to England on sabbatical and noticed that the English had a peculiar deferential smile that reminded him of those he had seen among the junior American frat members. Like the frat brothers', the English smile telegraphed an acknowledgment of hierarchy rather than just expressing pleasure.
"What the deferential smile says is, 'I respect what you're thinking of me and am shaping my behavior accordingly,"' Keltner says. His theory was put to the test earlier this year when a British journalist showed Keltner 15 pictures of closely cropped smiles and Keltner guessed right - Briton or American - 14 times. "I missed Venus Williams like a fool," he remembers.
Porn Suffix, The By JASCHA HOFFMAN
Establishing a new Internet suffix like ".com" or ".org" takes deep pockets and patience. This has not deterred Stuart Lawley, a Florida entrepreneur, from trying to establish a pornography-only ".xxx" domain. In such a realm, Lawley could restrict porn marketing to adults only, protect users' privacy, limit spam and collect fees from Web masters. The .xxx proposal was finally slated for approval in August by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), but because of a flurry of protest, it has been shelved for now.
Lawley's scheme has aroused support and dissent across the political spectrum. The Family Research Council warns that it will simply breed more smut. But Senator Joe Lieberman supports a virtual red-light district because he says it would make the job of filtering out porn easier.
Meanwhile, some pornographers, apparently drawn by the promise of catchier and more trustworthy U.R.L.'s, have gotten behind Lawley. Other skin-peddlers, echoing the A.C.L.U., see the establishment of a voluntary porn zone as the first step toward the deportation of their industry to a distant corner of the Web, where their sites could easily be blocked by skittish Internet service providers, credit card companies and even governments.
The Free Speech Coalition, a lobbying group for the pornography industry, supports an entirely different approach to Web architecture. It recommends that children be confined to a wholesome ".kids" domain. This "walled garden" theory of Internet safety is not original. It is borrowed from Lawley himself, who has since dropped it because he deems it impractical.
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Other interesting 'ideas': Cobblestones are Good for You (Mat.!), Do-It-Yourself Cartography, False-Memory Diet, Forehead Billboards, The Genetic Theory of Harry Potter, Fertile Red States, In Vitro Meat, Monkey Pay-Per-View, Pleistocene Rewilding, The Runaway Alarm Clock (never!), Serialized Pop Song, Sitcom Loyalty Oath, Stoic Redheads, Stream-of-Consciousness Newspaper, The Toothbrush That Sings, Two-Dimensional Food, Zombie Dogs
You need to register (one time only) to the NYT online but it's free. NYT page
National Smiles By D.T. MAX
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. Think Julia Roberts or the gracefully aged Robert Redford. "I think Tom Cruise has a terrific American smile," Keltner, who specializes in the cultural meaning of emotions, says. In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth. The English smile can be mistaken for a suppressed grimace or a request to wipe that stupid smile off your face. Think headwaiter at a restaurant when your MasterCard seems tapped out, or Prince Charles anytime.
Keltner hit upon this difference in national smiles by accident. He was studying teasing in American fraternity houses and found that low-status frat members, when they were teased, smiled using the risorius muscle - a facial muscle that pulls the lips sideways - as well as the zygomatic major, which lifts up the lips. It resulted in a sickly smile that said, in effect, I understand you must paddle me, brother, but not too hard, please. Several years later, Keltner went to England on sabbatical and noticed that the English had a peculiar deferential smile that reminded him of those he had seen among the junior American frat members. Like the frat brothers', the English smile telegraphed an acknowledgment of hierarchy rather than just expressing pleasure.
"What the deferential smile says is, 'I respect what you're thinking of me and am shaping my behavior accordingly,"' Keltner says. His theory was put to the test earlier this year when a British journalist showed Keltner 15 pictures of closely cropped smiles and Keltner guessed right - Briton or American - 14 times. "I missed Venus Williams like a fool," he remembers.
Porn Suffix, The By JASCHA HOFFMAN
Establishing a new Internet suffix like ".com" or ".org" takes deep pockets and patience. This has not deterred Stuart Lawley, a Florida entrepreneur, from trying to establish a pornography-only ".xxx" domain. In such a realm, Lawley could restrict porn marketing to adults only, protect users' privacy, limit spam and collect fees from Web masters. The .xxx proposal was finally slated for approval in August by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), but because of a flurry of protest, it has been shelved for now.
Lawley's scheme has aroused support and dissent across the political spectrum. The Family Research Council warns that it will simply breed more smut. But Senator Joe Lieberman supports a virtual red-light district because he says it would make the job of filtering out porn easier.
Meanwhile, some pornographers, apparently drawn by the promise of catchier and more trustworthy U.R.L.'s, have gotten behind Lawley. Other skin-peddlers, echoing the A.C.L.U., see the establishment of a voluntary porn zone as the first step toward the deportation of their industry to a distant corner of the Web, where their sites could easily be blocked by skittish Internet service providers, credit card companies and even governments.
The Free Speech Coalition, a lobbying group for the pornography industry, supports an entirely different approach to Web architecture. It recommends that children be confined to a wholesome ".kids" domain. This "walled garden" theory of Internet safety is not original. It is borrowed from Lawley himself, who has since dropped it because he deems it impractical.
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Other interesting 'ideas': Cobblestones are Good for You (Mat.!), Do-It-Yourself Cartography, False-Memory Diet, Forehead Billboards, The Genetic Theory of Harry Potter, Fertile Red States, In Vitro Meat, Monkey Pay-Per-View, Pleistocene Rewilding, The Runaway Alarm Clock (never!), Serialized Pop Song, Sitcom Loyalty Oath, Stoic Redheads, Stream-of-Consciousness Newspaper, The Toothbrush That Sings, Two-Dimensional Food, Zombie Dogs
You need to register (one time only) to the NYT online but it's free. NYT page
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