What happens if you put science and religion into the viewer? TIME tried it first and found that science started to overtake religion around 1930. (Click on image for larger view.)

It’s a cool tool on its own, but it can also be used for a new type of science called “culturomics,” say a team of researchers (including Steven Pinker and Martin Nowak). They believe we can use digitized books to quantitatively analyze cultural trends, by tracking the frequency with which words appear in the English language. As they explain in a new paper, there are:

two central factors that contribute to culturomic trends. Cultural change guides the concepts we discuss (such as “slavery”). Linguistic change—which, of course, has cultural roots—affects the words we use for those concepts (“the Great War” vs. “World War I”). In this paper, we will examine both linguistic changes, such as changes in the lexicon and grammar; and cultural phenomena, such as how we remember people and events.

To track the frequency of certain words and phrases in the English language between 1800 and 2000, the researchers used a database of about 5.2 million books scanned by Google, containing more than 500 billion words. Here’s some of what they found:

• “We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year.”

• “The cultural adoption of technology has become more rapid.”

• “Science is a poor route to fame. Physicists and biologists eventually reached a similar level of fame as actors …, but it took them far longer. Alas, even at their peak, mathematicians tend not to be appreciated by the public.”

• “‘Galileo,’ ‘Darwin,’ and ‘Einstein’ may be well-known scientists, but ‘Freud’ is more deeply ingrained in our collective subconscious.”

• “Interest in ‘evolution’ was waning when ‘DNA’ came along.”

• “‘God’ is not dead; but needs a new publicist.”

when we are choosing between two or more very similar options, we tend NOT to take into account the consequences of not deciding. … a friend of mine spent three months choosing between two different cameras, only to miss countless photo opportunities that he will never get back. And given how similar the two cameras were, he might have been better off simply flipping a coin.

Ariely has also created the “At a boy!” app, which pays you a compliment every time you tap the screen. To help him figure out which comments make people feel best, he asks users to rate them using the thumbs up/thumbs down feature. You can also submit compliments that will be given to other people. According to Ariely, “not only are we sensitive to rude remarks from strangers, but we are also very excited when we get kind words, even if they are just random; they just make us feel much better, even if these strangers don’t know us very well.”

Green corresponds to a happy mood and red corresponds to a grumpier state of mind. The area of each state is scaled according to the number of tweets originating in that state. Note how the East Coast is consistently 3 hours ahead of the West Coast, so when we’re sleeping in Boston, the Californians are tweeting away. It’s also interesting that better weather seems to make you happier (or rather, that better weather is correlated with happier tweets): Florida and California seems to be consistently in a better mood than the remaining US. Also note how New Mexico and Delaware behave very differently from their neighbors.

Lehmann and his colleagues also found a few other interesting trends. We seem to be happiest on Sunday mornings and the least happy on Thursday evenings, and we’re happier on weekends than during the week (no surprise there). Our happiest times of day are early morning and late evening, and people on the West Coast appear to be significantly happier than people on the East Coast.

People tend to mimic each other’s body language, which might help them develop intuitions about what other people are feeling—intuitions about whether they’ll treat them fairly.

After the volunteers chit chat with the robot for 10 minutes, they’re asked to play an economic game in which they have to predict how much money Nexi will give them at her own expense—and, at the same time, decide how much they will give the robot. How the volunteers ultimately decide to treat Nexi might not depend on one particular gesture, DeSteno says in an early description of the research, but more likely results from “a ‘dance’ that happens between the strangers, which leads them to trust or not trust the other.”

A driver talking on a cell phone might not hear some things, might misspeak, might misunderstand, and might cut the conversation short of what it should be for optimal communication and comfortable relationship. In general, cell phone usage while driving might lead to missed relationship stop lights, slow reactions to dangerous relationship circumstances, loss of control of one’s part of the interaction, and interaction mistakes that could lead to conflict, hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and possibly even serious damage to the relationship.

When searching Google for information about nanotechnology, citizens are likely to encounter health-related content, either through suggested search terms or through the search results provided by Google. This pattern was pervasive across different areas of application, i.e., even for searches not directly related to health. Several non-health searches had more health-related keywords per link than any other domain when averaged over the time period of our study. …
It is reasonable to assume that search results that frame nanotechnology in a medical context will also be influencing people’s future searches, further reinforcing Google suggestions and website rankings that are at least partially based on previous searches and indexed web pages. This may create a self-reinforcing spiral that cements a link between health and nanotechnology in online news environments, and reduces the complexity and detail of the information that citizens are likely to encounter online.

Over the course of the year, the search terms shifted, with economic-related phrases (with words like “stocks” and “jobs”) moving down and health-related searches (with words like “medicine” and “cancer”) rising toward the top.


It’s hard to know what’s going on behind a search engine, but by August, the researchers say, “nanotechnology in medicine” was the top suggestion when they typed “nanotechnology” into the search box, even though it ranked sixth on the list of most popular nanotechnology search terms. As Dominique Brossard, a life science communication professor who worked on the study, points out in a write-up of the research:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google to sort search results, in part, based on how popular particular sites were. For science information, that means that surfers may be offered the most popular results rather than the ones that best represent the current state of the science.

The Internet can be considered the first weapon of mass construction, which we can deploy to destroy hate and conflict and to propagate peace and democracy. What happened in Iran after the latest election, and the role the Web played in spreading information that would otherwise have been censored, are only the newest examples of how the Internet can become a weapon of global hope.

If you agree, you can sign an online petition nominating the Internet for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

Trend watchers suggest the latest fad is the emergence of “micro-churches.” With over 10,000 identified religions worldwide, and two or three new ones being introduced every day, the religious future is looking more and more like a community fruit basket and less like an orchard growing red-only apples. Technology will play a key role in the localization and miniaturization of religion, because it puts organizing and communications tools directly into the hands of people themselves. Why go to the church on the corner, which may not speak to you directly, when you can organize your own church of like-minded individuals in your neighborhood? These micro-communities will likely gain guidance from online mini-gatherings from around the globe.
This is not to say that the mainstream churches will disappear any time soon, but if they view social media and technology change as purely a communications challenge, they risk being left standing on the docks watching the future sail away.