Clive Thompson on Why Kids Can’t Search | Magazine Illustration: Tymn Armstrong We’re often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. Who’s to blame? Consider the efforts of Frances Harris, librarian at the magnet University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. But, crucially, she also trains students to assess the credibility of what they find online. “I see them start to get really paranoid,” Harris says. One can imagine even more entertaining ways to help kids grok the intricacies of the search world. Mind you, mastering “crap detection 101,” as digital guru Howard Rheingold dubs it, isn’t easy. In other words, Google makes broad-based knowledge more important, not less. Email clive@clivethompson.net.
The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world's 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world's billions of public web pages. Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA's cloud. 1 Geostationary satellites Four satellites positioned around the globe monitor frequencies carrying everything from walkie-talkies and cell phones in Libya to radar systems in North Korea. 2 Aerospace Data Facility, Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado 3 NSA Georgia, Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia 5 NSA Hawaii, Oahu
How to learn to concentrate | Brainframe I wish I had a pound for every parent who said “If only he would just learn to concentrate.” It’s a comment that appears frequently and seems to be at the root of all learning. The fact that “my child can’t concentrate” is blamed for all the problems. There have been studies involving diet, exercise and a number of other factors. Some are ignored, some end up as a daily pill. For most of us the major cause of lack of concentration can boil down to environment and expectation. It seems obvious to turn off the TV in order to aid concentration. There are few jobs that require absolute concentration. How can we then expect our children to concentrate? I’m not suggesting that every subject is contained in 10 minute blocks but the ability to concentrate is learned over a period of time. Sometimes it seems that “thoroughness” has been overtaken by “learning objectives.” That confidence leads to increased concentration. Small steps each day can lead to giant leaps.
untitled Tuesday, Sep 22, 2009 James, Going through some old gear last month, I found my food supply lists and notes from 1976-79. I thought the old list might be of interest and the lessons I learned during the first three years in the remote Alaska bush may be helpful to a few of your readers. I do not recommend Alaska for a TEOTWAWKI retreat but the lessons I learned the hard way may be helpful to any one in a cold climate. I grew up in California listing to stories from my grandfather about Alaska and the Yukon. When I got to Alaska I met my Grandfather’s old trapping partner. My first winter was a disaster. Before this the longest I had been in the wilderness was a 23 day Outward Bound survival class that I attended the year before and I had never spent a winter in a cold environment. To get to the trapping cabin it was at least a two week walk from the end of closest dirt road or a 1:20 hour flight in a bush plane. First lesson learned! The first winter at the cabin. Third Lesson! Lesson #9!
Why Do Some People Learn Faster? | Wired Science The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as “a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure. A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroenchephalography, or EEG. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. Image: mujalifah/Flickr
Star Wars Uncut / Watch the Movie A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... In 2009, Casey Pugh asked Internet users to remake Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time. In a few months time, thousands of fans responded with extraordinary creativity from around the world. Star Wars Uncut has been featured in documentaries, news features and conferences around the world for its unique appeal. Finally, the crowd-sourced project has been stitched together and put online for your streaming pleasure. Many thanks to Aaron Valdez (video editor) and Bryan Pugh (sound design/mixing) for the countless hours they put into this masterpiece.
Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Are Great for Creativity | Wired Science Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement below becomes true. Did you get it? In this case, the solution is rather obvious – you should move the first “I” to the right side of the “V,” so that the statement now reads: VI = III + III. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people (92 percent) quickly solve this problem, as it requires a standard problem-solving approach in which only the answer is altered. What’s perhaps a bit more surprising is that nearly 90 percent of patients with brain damage to the prefrontal lobes — this leaves them with severe attentional deficits, unable to control their mental spotlight — are also able to find the answer. Here’s a much more challenging equation to fix: In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects were able to solve the problem. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should take a hammer to your frontal lobes. This helps explain a new study led by Mareike Wieth at Albion College.
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