Tag Cloud See also My Widgets and My Animations
Welcome To Coursera (by CourseraVideos)
Inside Washington’s high risk mission to beat web censors
You know how tiring it is to walk through museums. Google has the answer: “street view for museums”.
I’m too busy surfing to take it.
Researchers in China scanned the brains of 17 adolescents diagnosed with “internet addiction disorder” who had been referred to the Shanghai Mental Health Centre, and compared the results with scans from 16 of their peers.
The results showed impairment of white matter fibres in the brain connecting regions involved in emotional processing, attention, decision making and cognitive control. Similar changes to the white matter have been observed in other forms of addiction to substances such as alcohol and cocaine.
“The findings suggest that white matter integrity may serve as a potential new treatment target in internet addiction disorder,” they say in the online journal Public Library of Science One. The authors acknowledge that they cannot tell whether the brain changes are the cause or the consequence of the internet addiction. It could be that young people with the brain changes observed are more prone to becoming addicted.
Professor Michael Farrell, director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia, said: “The limitations [of this study] are that it is not controlled, and it’s possible that illicit drugs, alcohol or other caffeine-based stimulants might account for the changes. The specificity of ‘internet addiction disorder’ is also questionable.”
Note how the headline differs from the passage quoted. And the The Independent doesn’t seem to be the only culprit; do a search on news for “internet addiction”.
Isaac Asimov on Creativity in Education & The Future of Science | Brain Pickings
Asimov in 1988. See the YouTube videos at the link.
The Washington Post lets you read the paper online as it was printed — viewing the whole page and then popping up articles in readable windows — for free.
One can do a bit of that for free for a myriad of papers at PressDisplay, and for the full papers at a price.
newspaper map can locate and (Google) translate (the web sites of) over 10,000 newspapers.
The musculature of the Library of Congress categorization scheme looks like it’s about concepts. It is organized into non-overlapping categories that get more detailed at lower and lower levels — any concept is supposed to fit in one category and in no other categories. But every now and again, the skeleton pokes through, and the skeleton, the supporting structure around which the system is really built, is designed to minimize seek time on shelves.
The essence of a book isn’t the ideas it contains. The essence of a book is “book.” Thinking that library catalogs exist to organize concepts confuses the container for the thing contained.
The categorization scheme is a response to physical constraints on storage, and to people’s inability to keep the location of more than a few hundred things in their mind at once. Once you own more than a few hundred books, you have to organize them somehow. (My mother, who was a reference librarian, said she wanted to reshelve the entire University library by color, because students would come in and say “I’m looking for a sociology book. It’s green…”) But however you do it, the frailty of human memory and the physical fact of books make some sort of organizational scheme a requirement, and hierarchy is a good way to manage physical objects.
The “Balkans/Asia” kind of imbalance is simply a byproduct of physical constraints. It isn’t the ideas in a book that have to be in one place — a book can be about several things at once. It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it’s one place, it can’t also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the ‘be in one place’ requirement, so each book needs to be declared to about one thing more than others, regardless of its actual contents.
People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you’d think we’d have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that’s forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you’d think we’d have learned that lesson by now.
Thanks to Allen Paltrow for the pointer.
Interesting “infographic”.
20,000 new posts are published on micro-blogging platform Tumblr
On the Internet, it’s important that other people can tell if you’re an idiot.
