Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Google's Goal: "Understand Everything"
BW Online / May 3, 2004 has an interview with Google's Larry Page: "The Web is more of a superlibrarian. Imagine if you had a reference librarian who had all the knowledge of Google but could also answer instantly with all that knowledge. That would really change the world."
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Patternhunting and the Black Swan
Here is an excellent article on hindsight bias by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in the most recent edition of Edge: "A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past."
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
This Is Your Brain On Politics
Douglas Rushkoff's science fiction novel Exit Strategy continues to become more science and less fiction.
This article from The Observer UK News describes more attempts to make Exit Strategy a reality:
Here is a new article from today’s NYT on neuro-marketing for politics (just what we need!):
This article from The Observer UK News describes more attempts to make Exit Strategy a reality:
At Queen's Sonic Arts Research Centre, scientists led by Professor Michael Alcorn are studying ways to detect the emotional states of computer game users - from the way they hold and tap on keyboards and consoles - so that machines can spot when feelings are beginning to run too high. 'The game could be slowed down and more soothing background music played,' said Alcorn.
Here is a new article from today’s NYT on neuro-marketing for politics (just what we need!):
One of the most striking results so far is the way subjects react to candidates after seeing a campaign commercial. At the start of the session, when they look at photographs of Mr. Bush, Mr. Kerry and Ralph Nader, subjects from both parties tend to show emotional reactions to all the candidates, indicated in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with reflexive reactions. But then, after the Bush campaign commercial is shown, the subjects respond in a partisan fashion when the photographs are shown again. They still respond emotionally to the candidate of their party, but when they see the other party's candidate, there is more activity in the rational part of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. "It seems as if they're really identifying with their own candidate, whereas when they see the opponent, they're using their rational apparatus to argue against him."
Ethics of Boosting Brainpower
Stanford University Medical Center : "Illes said the key difference between physical enhancements such as plastic surgery and neural enhancement through drugs or brain implants comes down to personhood. A nose job doesn't change who you are. Drugs might, she said. 'Am I the same person on Ritalin as off?' Farah asked. Farah said there have been no studies that establish the long-term effects of brain function in children who take Ritalin to control hyperactivity or in people who take medication for depression. It could be that drugs alter the way the brain works, fundamentally changing personality. The drugs may even have unanticipated consequences such as speeding the brain's decline with old age."
Saturday, April 17, 2004
Brains and Beauty
Boing Boing: "A brain study released today shows that the human ability to appreciate aesthetics is based in the prefontal cortex, part of the brain involved in decision making. The scientists at the Balearic Islands University in Spain came to this conclusion by imaging their subjects' brains while looking at art and photography. According to the study, quoted in Scientific American, ''a phylogenetic change in the prefontal cortex could give way to the decorative and artistic profusion' in humans.'"
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
The Secret Source of Google's Power
Topix.net Weblog: "Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup."
Monday, April 12, 2004
Create RSS feeds for eBay Listings
eBay Listings: "Create your own RSS feed for your favourite eBay search..."
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Playing Surgery
New York Daily News: "A new study shows that playing video games increases some surgical skills by as much as 40%."
Saturday, April 03, 2004
Mark Pesce interview
The NeoFiles: "If we want to create a real ecology of ideas within the scientific framework, we must find a way to balance both the inspirational and operational modes of being, both within the individual and the institution. This ain’t easy. But that’s the work of culture, right here, right now."
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Continuous Partial Attention
Joi Ito's Web: "We talked last night with Linda Stone about her idea of continuous partial attention. She says it is different from multi-tasking. "It's not the same as multitasking; that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: 'How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting, or important, opportunity?" This is really relevant to some of the thoughts I've been having about the UI of mobile devices and how they fade in and out of your attention rather than being on or off like computer screens. Yes, you do this a bit with computers, but not nearly as seamlessly as mobile phones are integrated in the real world by advanced users."
Knowledge Mismanagement
Fast Company Now: "Studies of office interactions indicate that as much as 80 percent of work time is spent in spoken conversation, and that critical pieces of information are transmitted by word of mouth in a serendipitous fashion."
