Category: Google

Our bookshelves, our memories

Here is Nathan Schneider’s essay In Defense of The Memory Theater. It is at once, both dystopian and entirely optimistic about the future of computing, the Net and books as any essay that I’ve read recently. His uncle, a former biologist at NIH plays a central role, inventing a text-based knowledge system that itself becomes alive as a “memory theater”.

Coincidentally, Dame Frances A. Yates‘, essay on The Art of Memory–referenced in Schneider’s piece–is next on my own reading list.

The joys of corporate IT culture

Slate has a great piece about the crippling stasis of corporate IT culture here. One of the things that I really value about George Mason University, is my freedom to use a Mac, to use Firefox, and to use Google Calendar. The contrast with the State department under Secretary Clinton as described in the Slate piece couldn’t be starker:

During a town hall meeting for State Department workers last month, an employee named Jim Finkle asked Hillary Clinton a very important question: “Can you please let the staff use an alternative Web browser called Firefox?” The room erupted in cheers. Finkle explained that he’d previously worked at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, where everyone enjoyed Firefox. “So I don’t understand why State can’t use it,” he said. “It’s a much safer program.”

Smarter or Dumber?

You’re recall Nicholas Carr’s very controversial article in the Atlantic over the summer that suggested that on-line searching was making us stupid. Today, CNN.com reports on a study which purports to show the opposite! Dr. Gary Small used fMRI showed that:

Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning

Meanwhile cross town rival…

Liz Zelinski, a professor of gerontology and psychology at the University of Southern California, said the findings about the brain activity differences aren’t surprising and offered this analogy: “If you wanted to study how hard people can exercise, and you take people that already exercise and people that don’t exercise, aren’t they going to be different to start out?”

Don’t you think fMRI is getting a bit oversold these days?

Jim

Scifoo rap up

This was without a doubt one of the very best meetings I have ever attended. From the “flying car” (known as the Transition) to the Tesla roadster, to meeting one Google’s founders, Sergey Brin, to some of the very best neuroscience on the brain-machine interface–I learned an awful lot. 

We had a good session on the Decade of the Mind project—I remain cautiously optimistic.

Now for the awful red-eye back to Washington and…..a regular work day tomorrow. I wish I could just teleport like they do in Second Life.
Jim