Tag: Communication

  • Nation & World

    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.

    4 minutes
    Steven Pinker.
  • Nation & World

    Climate made scary

    Journalist David Wallace-Wells and others debated the most effective way to communicate climate urgency in a Harvard discussion.

    4 minutes
    Nikhil Advani, (from left) University of Alaska, Nancy Knowlton, World Wildlife Fund, and Cam Webb talk about the best ways to understand and communicate about the environment's future inside the Harvard University Center for the Environment before the evening event at the Geo Lecture Hall.
  • Nation & World

    Bees, social and solitary

    Harvard study reveals underlying genetic basis for halictid bee communication and social behavior.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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.

    3 minutes
    grey parrot
  • Nation & World

    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.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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.”

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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.”

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Internet offers risks as well as benefit to patients

    The Internet has had a profound effect on clinical practice by providing both physicians and patients with a wealth of information. But with those rewards come risks of incorrect or…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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,…

    4 minutes
  • 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.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Dictionary collects American regional expressions

    Besides shedding light on mind-teasing and sense-pleasing expressions, the Dictionary of Regional English (DARE) is a fun book to browse through – all four volumes. Hundreds of maps show where…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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,…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Which side are you on?

    Andrew Kydd is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University who has developed an interesting theory about mediation. As Kydd writes in the introduction to a working paper, “Mediators…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    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…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    ‘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…

    1 minute