Homo-érotisme et homo-sociabilité dans les vaudevilles d’Eugène Labiche

Homo Socialis and Homo Sapiens

The assumption that individuals are behaving rationally can, at times, usefully constrain predictions of individual and collective behavior. However, success in predicting human and group behavior will often require relaxing this assumption of rationality, instead employing evolutionary, neural, and cognitive constraints. One particularly important form of neural and cognitive constraint is tha...

Homo floresiensis: microcephalic, pygmoid, Australopithecus, or Homo?

The remarkable partial adult skeleton (LB1) excavated from Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia, has been attributed to a new species, Homo floresiensis, based upon a unique mosaic of primitive and derived features compared to any other hominin. The announcement precipitated widespread interest, and attention quickly focused on its possible affinities. LB1 is a small-bodied hominin...

Les Démoniaques dans l'Art, and Les Difformes et les Malades dans l'Art

From Homo Economicus to Homo Sapiens

R esponding to a request for a forecast is especially tricky for someone like me, who specializes in other people’s biases. Research in psychology suggests that certain biases are very likely to creep into my forecasts about the future of economics (or anything else). 1. Optimism (and wishful thinking). We all tend to be optimistic about the future. On the first day of my MBA class on decision-...

Interaction et contexte dans les interfaces zoomables

Many interactive computer systems use menus as an important part of their interface. Menus allow users to select operations but not to control their execution. A second interactor, such as a dialog box, has to be used to control the chosen operation and thus complete the interaction. This decomposition of what is a single action from the user’s point of view into two distinct steps slows down i...