Employees waste two days per month surfing the Internet at work.
Human brain a marvel? Not if you ask this guy.
Newsweek: human brain from a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist: "A mouse brain with extra toppings,"and for that matter, the mouse brain is a lizard brain with some extra stuff, and the whole lot is a cobbled-together mess. That's evolution for you. The story is essentially a book review plus profile, and a refreshing break from the usual wonderful-mind stuff one reads. It also seeks to explain why dreams seem, sort of, to make sense. Thank reptiles for that, perhaps. Thin Clients are the New Black...
... on the ledger sheet, that is. Because according to a new report, it turns out that using these "super slimmed down" alternatives to the PC could reduce your cost of ownership by up to 25 percent, as compared to an office equipped with traditional desktops. Thin clients have been around for years; they are simply a computer that uses a central server for processing activities, where you send your keystrokes and mouse clicks to the server, and you see what is happening on a monitor at your desk. It's very much like having a desktop PC, except that thin clients typically have no almost no moving parts and little memory. This reduces their power consumption dramatically; according to the report, they can use up to 50 percent less energy than a typical PC. No word on the global impact of switching to thin clients, but if just the 10 million or so PCs in operation in the UK would be switched out for thin clients, businesses could save £78m a year and cut CO2 emission by 485,000 tonnes. http://www.webitpr.com/release_detail.asp?ReleaseID=5616
30 Days With Vista - Shot me now
"Hardocp.com has published "30 days with Vista" — with the same author from "30 days with Linux" doing the evaluation. And he doesn't like it. From the article: 'Based on my personal experiences with Vista over a 30 day period, I found it to be a dangerously unstable operating system, which has caused me to lose data [...] Any consideration of the fine details comes in second to that one inescapable conclusion. This is an unstable operating system.'"
From: slashdot.org
PowerPoint Bad For Learning
"This article in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting on research done at The University of NSW suggests the use of Microsoft PowerPoint (and similar products) in lectures and meetings actually makes it harder to absorb facts, rather than being a reinforcement of key points."
From slashdot.org
PayPerPost - Ethics of Paid Blogging
There-goes-the-least-common-denominator ..
The LA Times accuses PayPerPost of paying bloggers to make up fictional testimonials. For instance, the Times reports that a law firm is using PayPerPost to pay bloggers to write that a certain birth control patch is killing and injuring young women. Rua does not deny these claims, but simply states they are the exception and not the rule. How long before the FTC follows through on their promise to enforce blogger disclosure?"
Link http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/27/2153205&from=rss
The LA Times accuses PayPerPost of paying bloggers to make up fictional testimonials. For instance, the Times reports that a law firm is using PayPerPost to pay bloggers to write that a certain birth control patch is killing and injuring young women. Rua does not deny these claims, but simply states they are the exception and not the rule. How long before the FTC follows through on their promise to enforce blogger disclosure?"
Link http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/27/2153205&from=rss
Unfocused multitasking makes you less productive and dumb
Beyond IQ: Focus on the Task at Hand, "Attention span and reasoning" may get higher marks than intelligence...
© Jorge Delgado/iStockphoto
Turns out that sheer intelligence is not enough.... It also takes a good attention span and training your mind to "self regulate" or focus on the task at hand. This month's "Scientific American" article by Christie Nicholson points out, "The measure for academic success for decades has been a person's intelligence quotient, or IQ. But new research published in the journal Child Development says that a thought process called "executive functioning," which governs the ability to reason and mentally focus, also plays a critical role in learning, especially when it comes to math skills."
Inhibitory control is the ability to halt automatic impulses and focus on the problem at hand. For example, people use inhibitory control when they decide to take different routes to their jobs, because they have to make a conscious effort to override the regular route they otherwise would almost automatically follow.
Children with good inhibitory control are able, in essence, to multitask, or use known solution strategies in new ways. In this study 141 healthy children between the ages of three and five years took a battery of psychological tests that measured their IQs and executive functioning. Researchers found that a child IQ and executive functioning were both above average was three times more likely to succeed in math than a kid who simply had a high IQ.
"[The fact] that executive function, even in children this young, is significantly related to early math performance suggests that if we can improve executive function, we can improve their academic performance," says Adele Diamond, professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of British Columbia.
The key to successful "multitasking" and executive functioning at any age is to "tune" out multiple distractions and "self regulate" or focus on the task at hand.
"When people divide their attention, they react more slowly and make more mistakes, scientists say." New York Times beats the whole "multi-tasking reduces productivity" horse to death, citing that studies show young people are not better equipped to handle interruptions having grown up with digital distractions.... jumping every time their phone buzzes or a new message appears in their inbox, straying off to reply to messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites. Based on surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, concluded that 28 percent of their time was spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks... estimating the cost of interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year.
Want a higher I.Q. Hint: Start Playing Grand Theft Auto...
Why I don't think like Char....
Rising trend line in intelligence test scores. And that, in turn, suggested that something in the environment - some social or cultural force - was driving the trend.
Rising trend line in intelligence test scores. And that, in turn, suggested that something in the environment - some social or cultural force - was driving the trend.
FROM WIRED - "The best example of brain-boosting media may be videogames. Mastering visual puzzles is the whole point of the exercise - whether it's the spatial geometry of Tetris, the engineering riddles of Myst, or the urban mapping of Grand Theft Auto."
Twenty-three years ago, an American philosophy professor named James Flynn discovered a remarkable trend: Average IQ scores in every industrialized country on the planet had been increasing steadily for decades. Despite concerns about the dumbing-down of society - the failing schools, the garbage on TV, the decline of reading - the overall population was getting smarter. And the climb has continued, with more recent studies showing that the rate of IQ increase is accelerating. Next to global warming and Moore's law, the so-called Flynn effect may be the most revealing line on the increasingly crowded chart of modern life - and it's an especially hopeful one. We still have plenty of problems to solve, but at least there's one consolation: Our brains are getting better at problem-solving.
But something else in the data caught his eye. Every decade or so, "Every time kids took the new and the old tests, they did better on the old ones," Flynn says. "I thought: That's weird."
Flynn dug up every study that had ever been done in the US where the same subjects took a new and an old version of an IQ test. "And lo and behold, when you examined that huge collection of data, it revealed a 14-point gain between 1932 and 1978."
The classic heritability research paradigm is the twin adoption study: Look at IQ scores for thousands of individuals with various forms of shared genes and environments, and hunt for correlations.
This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness:
This is the sort of chart you get, with 100 being a perfect match and 0 pure randomness:
The same person tested twice: 87
Identical twins raised together: 86
Identical twins raised apart: 76
Fraternal twins raised together: 55
Biological siblings: 47
Parents and children living together: 40
Parents and children living apart: 31
Adopted children living together: 0
Unrelated people living apart: 0
Identical twins raised together: 86
Identical twins raised apart: 76
Fraternal twins raised together: 55
Biological siblings: 47
Parents and children living together: 40
Parents and children living apart: 31
Adopted children living together: 0
Unrelated people living apart: 0
What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter?
It's not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven't shown the same steady gains. It's not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II, just as the Flynn effect was accelerating.
It's not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven't shown the same steady gains. It's not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II, just as the Flynn effect was accelerating.
"And then I realized that society has priorities. Let's say we're too cheap to hire good high school math teachers. So while we may want to improve arithmetical reasoning skills, we just don't. On the other hand, with smaller families, more leisure, and more energy to use leisure for cognitively demanding pursuits, we may improve - without realizing it - on-the-spot problem-solving, like you see with Ravens."
When you take the Ravens test, you're confronted with a series of visual grids, each containing a mix of shapes that seem vaguely related to one another. Each grid contains a missing shape; to answer the implicit question posed by the test, you need to pick the correct missing shape from a selection of eight possibilities. To "solve" these puzzles, in other words, you have to scrutinize a changing set of icons, looking for unusual patterns and correlations among them.
This is not the kind of thinking that happens when you read a book or have a conversation with someone or take a history exam. But it is precisely the kind of mental work you do when you, say, struggle to program a VCR or master the interface on your new cell phone.
Over the last 50 years, we've had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media - interactive visual media in particular - poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure - you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.
The ultimate test of the "cognitively demanding leisure" hypothesis may come in the next few years, as the generation raised on hypertext and massively complex game worlds starts taking adult IQ tests. This is a generation of kids who, in many cases, learned to puzzle through the visual patterns of graphic interfaces before they learned to read. Their fundamental intellectual powers weren't shaped only by coping with words on a page. They acquired an intuitive understanding of shapes and environments, all of them laced with patterns that can be detected if you think hard enough. Their parents may have enhanced their fluid intelligence by playing Tetris or learning the visual grammar of TV advertising.
But that's child's play compared with Pokmon.
Intellectual breakthroughs are what happen when you're busy making other plans. (J.Lennon)
Read full here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/flynn_pr.html
Why was Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) scrapped?
We're on the verge of having computers with densities approaching a monkey's brain, and it won't be long before we'll have a computer with the density of transistors, or equivalent to neurons and almost human. What we're missing is the architecture. So it seemed like it was time. We had great advances in algorithms for reasoning and in algorithms that learned in general. At the same time, the computers, the actual intrinsic hardware, was really approaching the density of a human brain. And so it seemed like it was time to try again. We've had some great success.
Somehow, I doubt the agency is going to provide any more clues about why this research ended up on the chopping block.
Source: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/03/darpas_brain_dr.html
The real NY-Times story of "Terry Tao"
I would have titled the "Terry Tao" NY - Times story...
"Terry Tao" a normal "math genius" raised by smart father, Billy Tao
I think Billy's the really genius behind his families beautiful minds...
Dr. Billy Tao,"All along, we tend to emphasize the joy of learning," Billy Tao said. "The fun is doing something, not winning something."
Billy Tao knew the trajectories of child prodigies like Jay Luo, "I initially thought Terry would be just like one of them, to graduate as early as possible," he said. But after talking to experts on education for gifted children, he changed his mind.
"To get a degree at a young age, to be a record-breaker, means nothing," he said. "I had a pyramid model of knowledge, that is, a very broad base and then the pyramid can go higher. If you just very quickly move up like a column, then you're more likely to wobble at the top and then collapse."
"He probably was quietly learning these things from watching 'Sesame Street,' " said his father, Dr. Billy Tao, "We basically used 'Sesame Street' as a babysitter."
Pulled from private school... At age 5, he was enrolled in a public school, and his parents, administrators and teachers set up an individualized program for him. He proceeded through each subject at his own pace, quickly accelerating through several grades in math and science while remaining closer to his age group in other subjects. In English classes,"These very vague, undefined questions. I always liked situations where there were very clear rules of what to do."
The Taos had different challenges in raising their other two sons, although all three excelled in math. Trevor, two years younger than Terry, is autistic with top-level chess skills and the musical savant gift to play back on the piano a musical piece — even one played by an entire orchestra — after hearing it just once. He completed a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works for the Defense Science and Technology Organization in Australia.
The youngest, Nigel, told his father that he was "not another Terry," and his parents let him learn at his own pace.
Behind the mind is a family and father... Great job Dr. Billy Tao!
Original NY-Times story on "Terry Tao"
Big surprise that most generation-Y's blame their parents
Amazing "blame, blame" do nothing game...Wow they sound just like thier "parents" parents ;-)
An overwhelming number of young readers not only rejected being compared to the boomer generation, but also blamed boomers for the social conditions that gave rise to narcissism."The boomers screwed people my age royally," medstudgeek wrote in a post titled Why don't you read 'Generation Debt' for starters. "Everything costs too much ... housing, college, health insurance, etc. If you're 100K in debt you're going to play along with the corporate masters to pay off your loans ... and is this an accident? ... [Y]ou boomers polluted the environment, drove the country into debt (twice!), outsourced our jobs to India, and made all of us narcissistic with your 'self-esteem' movement, and now you're blaming the victim. Young people have Myspace pages? The horror."
....the reasons for Generation Y's narcissism are abundant:
Lets start with our families. 50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce. Thats a lot of broken homes and step children. What are you saying to your child when you divorce his or her mother because 'things aren't working out between us'? You're saying that you don't care about anyone's problems but your own, and you'll take the easiest way out if possible. ......I haven't even begun to talk about the social pecking order that's been created because of this, or the materialism that helps feed it. We didn't create the world we've lived in thus far, it was created for us by our parents. We 'don't care' because we don't have time too, we're busy living up to everyone else's expectations. We're 'narcissistic' because we have no one to go to for support; we only have the groups of other kids that we made ourselves.
Full crap here:
http://www.alternet.org/story/49193/
New Study - Narcissist love themselves consciously and unconsciously
ScienceDaily: How Do I Love Me? New Study Presents A Twist On The Conventional Narcissist
We often attribute typical gen-y,x narcissist's shallow behavior to an unconscious self-loathing. However, new research suggests that narcissists actually view themselves the same on the outside as on the inside.
Previous studies have shown that narcissists' conscious self-views are not uniformly positive. Narcissists see themselves as being above average in areas such as status, dominance and intelligence, but not in areas such as kindness, morality, and emotional intimacy.
Yikes... he REALLY doesn't think he is a big jerk. REALLY ;-)
Devil's Advocate Really Just an Ass....
Why a career in computer programming sucks
Temporary nature of knowledge capital
Let’s being by reviewing what I previously wrote about the four types of human capital.
Nice comments on this digg... reddit... whatever, social timewasting network of the month
"If making $130k a year sucks, there are plenty of people willing to take HS's place. This kind of talk really gets very little sympathy from the rest of America. If programming sucks, try working in a factory or any job that gets exposure to the weathers. How many patent lawyers do we really need?"
Computer programming is a job that’s heavily dependent on temporary knowledge capital. Only if you're bad at it.
Linux reduces e-waste by 50%
A research report says that Linux boxes get used for twice as long as Windows boxes (just think of all those PCs that'll be thrown out in favor of something fast enough to run Vista's crippleware!). That means that GNU/Linux machines save landfill sites!
"A typical hardware refresh period for Microsoft Windows is 3-4 years. A major UK manufacturing organization quotes its hardware refresh period for Linux systems as 6-8 years." A significant difference...a doubling even, of the lifetime of a computer.
Thus, a world using Linux would be a world with half the computer waste (and, admittedly, halved sales for Dell and the rest.)
A widespread switch to Linux could prevent millions of tons of waste from going into landfills. Every computer not needed would prevent the use of 240 kg of fossil fuels. Spread that out over the 17.5 million computers that wouldn't be going obsolete every year and Linux could deliver the world a much more sustainable future. Link (via Digg)
AlterNet: Hey Under-30s Crowd, Have You Overdosed on Narcissism?
That makes "current college students more narcissistic than baby boomers and Gen-Xers," its authors conclude. (Data points between 1982 and 1990 are few, says Professor Twenge, also the author of "Generation Me.")
That quality can be amplified when school's out.
"Gen-Y is the most difficult workforce I've ever encountered, because part of them are greatest-generation great and the other part are so self-indulgent as to be genuinely offensive to know, let alone supervise," says Marian Salzman, a trendspotter and senior vice president at JWT, the global advertising agency.
Nice Free Video Conversion Program
Dr. DivX 2.5.1
Microsoft Vista, IE7 Banned By U.S. DOT
"According to a memo being reported on by Information week, the US Department of Transportation has issued a moratorium on upgrading Microsoft products. Concerns over costs and compatibility issues has lead the federal agency to prevent upgrades from XP to Vista, as well as to stop users from moving to IE 7 and Office 2007. As the article says, 'In a memo to his staff, DOT chief information officer Daniel Mintz says he has placed "an indefinite moratorium" on the upgrades as "there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade."'"
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197700789 (VIA - Slashdot.org)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
