Yet another world map! Anthropologist Dawn Nafus and Intel has created a map of countries’ wilingness to adapt new technologies, and the results are quite surprising! My own home country Norway comes out with a negative ranking, in contrast to neighbouring Sweden, but is in good company with Finland and USA in the negative group. While it may seem counter-intuitive, the map is based on adaptation rates relative to income, which gives strange rankings of some dirt poor and wealthy countries.

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As far as world maps of information goes, this infographic from the Guardian is beautiful: The internet’s undersea world. The story it came from highlights how sensitive the worlds information infrastructure is: On February 1, 2008, one single ship was able to cut 75% of Asia’s internet capacity with one foolish anchoring in the wrong place outside Alexandria, Egypt.

It’s old news, though. But the map is a great tool to see where information flows between the continents. And I see now why the net is so slow here down under..

Source: Security Buddha

Reuters reports (”Switching languages can also switch personalities“) on a recent study by Luna, Ringberg and Peracchio that touches upon some of the issues of personalities and language in the post about bilingualism and psychosis. However, in this study, a difference was found between real biculturalism and bilingualism in single culture people. By studying US hispanic women, the researchers found that women would be perceived as more self-sufficient and extroverted when speaking Spanish than English, and the women would classify themselves as more assertive in Spanish. 

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Notes about the World has a new domain! The new adress is www.world-notes.com (after a lot of qualms about what to go with). Please make a note of it - the old one will soon stop pointing here!

And there will be a bit of disturbances today while I freshen things up. It’s all in your interest, dear readers!

Also: Now would be a very good time to voice any ideas, concerns and criticisms.. 

It’s said that all travel is fundamentally travel in time, but actual time travel has always stood for me as the ultimate trip. Although that may seem a bit unrealistic at the moment, at least there is some recent research in how we subjectively experience the passage of time. As anyone who has waited for a bus knows, the experience and the objective measure is not always the same (as it rarely is in anything). Comparable, time flies when one’s having fun, but then again, a good one week vacation may stand out as the only memory from an otherwise eventless year. (more…)

There’s been reports for some time that people suffering from mental disorders with psychotic episodes, like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, will have different symptoms in their different languages if they speak more than one. One early report of this is from 1895, of a Welsh sailor who would change between a Welsh-speaking, passive and depressed personality and a English-speaking, manic personality where neither would remember the life stories of the other. Psychiatric reports from back then may not always be entirely reliable, but more recent observations have some lessons to tell. 

Although this is a bit heavy material for this blog, there are also some interesting observations about bilingualism in healthy individuals. Imagine the psychosis as taking some differences already there and turning up the volume to the maximum. A recent scientific review article reviews some of the observations made and also some observations about bilingualism in general that may explain what is going on:  (more…)

The HR consultants in Mercer releases a yearly report on the best and worst cities in the world, according to quality of life. This year the list is topped, as usual, by Germanic and Australian-Pacific cities, all in peaceful and pleasant countries (Zürich on top for the 7th time). And while all the top 10 cities differ in some ways, they have in common one thing: they are thoroughly boring. How come they always come out in top of lists like these? And when Adelaide, Australia comes out above Paris, France, something must be wrong, right?

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