World Airmail Links

Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models, and here at the White House, we’re going to lead by example.

President Obama, announcing “that the White House would begin holding an annual science fair starting next year” in A Push for Science and Technology Learning

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We prefer the vivid anecdote to the dry and statistically useful fact, which in a complex world, is to our detriment. ¶… if I was marketing the swine flu vaccine, I’d name it after a kid who died last season and put her picture on the release form.

Seth Godin, The amateur scientist (that’s us)

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How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?

Lera Boroditsky: “For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.”

One of the changes that I would like to see — and I’m going to be talking about in this in weeks to come — is seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things — engineers, scientists, innovators. For so long, we have placed at the top of our pinnacle folks who can manipulate numbers and engage in complex financial calculations. And — and that’s good. We need some of that. But you know what we can really use is some more scientists and some more engineers who are building and making things that we can export to other countries.

Barack Obama, US President, quoted in Career Advice from Obama and Bernanke [via]

…denying certain facts about the world around you, according to any number of new studies, produces people who it turns out are better at business and better at working with teams and — now here’s the real kicker — they turn out to be happier people.

Robert Krulwich, in “Lying to Ourselves,” a segment of Radiolab show #402, “Deception” (quote starts around 56:52)