Featured series 
Tag: Communication
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Arts & Culture
Hollywood’s messaging problem: Sometimes people feel insulted
Experts took a virtual look at the role of satire in pushing climate change action, with reviews mixed on a recent film.
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Science & Tech
Climate made scary
Journalist David Wallace-Wells and others debated the most effective way to communicate climate urgency in a Harvard discussion.
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Health
Bees, social and solitary
Harvard study reveals underlying genetic basis for halictid bee communication and social behavior.
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Health
Polly want a vocabulary?
Irene Pepperberg, best known for her work with an African grey parrot named Alex — whose intelligence was estimated as equal to that of a 6-year-old child — recently relocated her lab to Harvard, where she continues to explore the origins of intelligence by working with birds.
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Campus & Community
Style and substance
The culmination of the Harvard Horizons initiative was a symposium in which eight Ph.D. students each offered five-minute presentations, styled on the popular TED talks, about a specific aspect of their current research.
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Science & Tech
The nearness of you
In research described earlier this year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Elinor Amit, a College Fellow in psychology, along with two collaborators, Cheryl Wakslak and Yaacov Trope, showed that people increasingly prefer to communicate verbally (versus visually) with people who are distant (versus close) — socially, geographically, or temporally.
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Campus & Community
Lights, cameras, reaction
Harvard Kennedy School students train to be leaders in the public sector — with the emphasis on public. A popular program makes the spotlight, whether in front of a camera, an audience, or a keyboard, less intimidating.
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Arts & Culture
Theater’s new frontiers
Offbeat Director John Tiffany, whose company stages productions in unlikely locales, is using a fellowship year at Radcliffe to explore the ways that people communicate, complete with tics.
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Arts & Culture
Cities on a hill
Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, who was raised in New York City, is an advocate of the metropolis, and upends the myths that cities are unhealthy, poor, and environmentally unfriendly in his book “Triumph of the City.”
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Arts & Culture
Language made visible
New Harvard lecture series, “Visible Language,” explores the origins of the written word across diverse ages and cultures, its origins marked by a “diverse oneness.”
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Health
Finding the seat of language?
A team of Harvard and University of California, San Diego (UCSD), researchers report having pinpointed an area of the brain where three essential components of language — word identification, grammar, and word pronunciation — are processed. Ned T. Sahin, a postdoctoral fellow in both Harvard’s Psychology Department and UCSD’s Radiology Department, and colleagues at both…
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Nation & World
Buddhism and the art of negotiation
Would the Buddha be an effective arbiter in a complicated and contentious land trust dispute or a messy divorce? For many experts, the answer is a resounding yes.
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Campus & Community
In brief
The Crimson Toastmasters Club, a local chapter of Toastmasters International, the public speaking and leadership organization, will welcome T Chendil Kumar to its Oct. 24 meeting. The Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics is now accepting applications from graduate students for its 2008-09 fellowship in ethics. Tickets for this season’s Christmas Revels will go…
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Science & Tech
Report documents importance of playlists
Drawing from an early-adopter survey conducted through Gartner, Harvard College student Derek Slater and Mike McGuire, Gartner research director, found that consumer-to-consumer recommendation tools, like playlists, enable consumers to actively present their individual tastes to each other and are becoming increasingly common. According to survey results, nearly 20 percent of online music listeners reported listening…
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Science & Tech
Diminishing returns
Election Night is one of the increasingly rare moments when large numbers of Americans gather in front of their television sets to hear about politics. Although a comparison of the 2000 election night broadcasts with those of 1968 indicates that these programs have increasingly employed sophisticated projection techniques, they now contain less of the content…
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Campus & Community
Scholars resuscitate dead languages
The goal of a Harvard academic research project is to develop advanced computer technology that will help scholars mine myriad scientific texts in a variety of languages, but also to connect the dots between them. In this way, it can broaden the scope of scholarship, but also sharpen the scholar’s ability to probe deeply into…
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Science & Tech
Researchers debate origin of language
Birds sing, chimps grunt, and whales whistle, but those sounds fall far short of expressing the richness of their experiences. Their lack of language goes to the question of why humans have it but no other animals do. That question in turn leads to two major theories of the origin of language. One is the…
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Science & Tech
Harvard science historian publishes results of unprecedented 30-year census of Copernican masterpiece
First published in 1543, Nicholas Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium introduced the world to the concept of a sun-centered universe. In it, Copernicus detailed how the motions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars could be explained if the earth orbited the sun — a revolutionary idea. Starting in the 1970s, researcher Owen Gingerich began…
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Science & Tech
Emergency communications
As almost 60,000 federal, state and local public safety agencies plan to upgrade their communications systems in the wake of 9/11, Kennedy School of Government Assistant Professor of Public Policy Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger took a hard look at communications interoperability and its implementation, in the United States and in Europe. Three steps have been seen as…
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Science & Tech
Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs grows rapidly
In the first analysis of patterns of direct-to-consumer advertising before and after 1997 guidelines issued by the Food and Drug Administration, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and the Sloan School of Management at MIT have found that such advertising increased three-fold between 1996 and 2000. Still, direct-to-consumer advertising accounted…
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Science & Tech
Study defines clear roles for parents of teenagers
A new study by the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health cuts through the confusion that parents of teenagers experience because of conflicting advice. The study lidentified key messages about raising teenagers on which experts agree. The results focus on practical guidelines and strategies that can contribute to healthy adolescent…
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Science & Tech
Nine keys to a knowledge infrastructure
Yesha Y. Sivan, CEO of the K2K Knowledge Infrastructure Laboratory and a visiting scholar at Harvard, has outlined a strategy to allow knowledge-based organizations to plan, implement and evaluate the success of their knowledge management (KM) strategies. In the emerging field of knowledge management, a bridge between the theoretical and the practical has been missing;…
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Science & Tech
Ancient Chinese script rewrites history
“This is like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” says Tu Weiming, director of the Harvard Yenching Institute, who has played a key role in the preservation of ancient texts that cast new light on early Confucianism. The texts were discovered in 1993 near a river in Guodian, China, not far from a farmhouse…
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Science & Tech
Should computer code be considered free speech?
Unlike all other forms of “speech” that are protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, computer source code holds a unique place in the law. Computer source code can be copyrighted, like a book. And it can be patented like a machine or a process. The result is confusion in the legal arena,…
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Science & Tech
Soft news and critical journalism eroding audiences
A rise in soft news and critical journalism “may now be hastening the decline in news audiences” and “weakening the foundation of democracy by diminishing the public’s information about public affairs and its interest in politics,” according to a Harvard study. The study, conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public…
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Health
‘Take two aspirin and call me manana’
Harvard Medical School is attempting to bridge the language barriers that sometimes arise in medical settings. A set of three medical phrasebooks was first offered in 1999 in three different languages: Communicating with the Patient during Urgent Care, Communicating with the Patient on Work Rounds, and Communicating with the Patient during Review of Systems. All…
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Science & Tech
State-of-the-art health guide created
Harvard Medical School believes it has a cure for problems associated with finding accurate, up-to-date medical information: a comprehensive (1,288 pages), $40 medical guide tied to a Web site that will update the book weekly. Published by Simon and Schuster in October 1999, it’s the first family health guide that will never go out of…