The End of Individual Genius?

An anonymous reader writes "A recent study suggests the downfall of individual researchers, who are being rapidly replaced by enormous research groups. Quoting: '... in recent decades — especially since the Soviet success in launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the trend has been to create massive institutions that foster more collaboration and garner big chunks of funding. And it is harder now to achieve scientific greatness. A study of Nobel Prize winners in 2005 found that the accumulation of knowledge over time has forced great minds to toil longer before they can make breakthroughs. The age at which thinkers produce significant innovations increased about six years during the 20th century.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

 

Class of 76 'cleverer' than kids of today

Clever teenagers of today are not as bright as kids in the class of 1976, according to researchers.

The intellect of even the brainiest 14-year-olds has deteriorated dramatically over the decades despite an increase in the number of pupils achieving top grades in exams.

Their cognitive abilities are level with those of 12-year-olds in 1976, the study found.

The tests - designed to assess grasp of abstract scientific concepts such as volume, density, quantity and weight - found far fewer youngsters hit top scores than in 1976.

Professor Michael Shayer, who led the study, said the brainpower slump may be down to over-testing in schools.

He said: "The moment you introduce targets, people will find the most economical strategies to achieve them.

In previous research, Professor Shayer concluded that the cognitive abilities of 11-year-olds were up to three years behind where they were in 1975.

Your brain on the web... evolution?

Is technology changing our brains?

"Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

 

The impact of technology on our circuitry should not come as a surprise.  Professional musicians have more gray matter in brain regions responsible for planning finger movements. And athletes' brains are bulkier in areas that control hand-eye coordination. That's because the more time you devote to a specific activity, the stronger the neural pathways responsible for executing that activity become. So it makes sense that people who process a constant stream of digital information would have more neurons dedicated to filtering that information. Still, that's not the same thing as evolution.

 

To see how the Internet might be rewiring us, Small and colleagues monitored the brains of 24 adults as they performed a simulated Web search, and again as they read a page of text. During the Web search, those who reported using the Internet regularly in their everyday lives showed twice as much signaling in brain regions responsible for decision-making and complex reasoning, compared with those who had limited Internet exposure. The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain's capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.

 

Small says these differences are likely to be even more profound across generations, because younger people are exposed to more technology from an earlier age than older people. He refers to this as the brain gap.

 

Read full at newsweek

Listen to Yourself

From xkcd.com

 

State Of The Blogosphere: Get To 100K Uniques, Make $75K/year

Technorati, the blog search engine, put out Part I of its sporadic (now-annual?) State of the Blogosphere report this week. This year, it conducted a random survey of 1,079 random bloggers (a statistically significant sample) to paint a more detailed picture of just who exactly is out there blogging. Technorati has indexed a total of 133 million blogs since 2002. In terms of how many are active, 7.5 million blogs have added a new post during the last four months, and 1.5 million have been updated during the last week.

And the average blog that runs ads, according to Technorati, is actually making money:

Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month.

The $6,000 a year I can believe. The $75,000 figure is harder to swallow, especially with only 100,000 visitors a month. But directionally there is no doubt that blogs are bringing in more cash.

Who are these bloggers? Technorati breaks that down as well. The vast majority of all bloggers (79 percent) write about their personal interests. No surprise there.
But more than half of all bloggers also write about business. While only 12 percent identify themselves as official “corporate bloggers,” a full 46 percent consider themselves “professional bloggers” (meaning that they write about their industries, but not in an official capacity).

Blogs are also mostly a male affair: 57 percent in the U.S. are written by men, 42 percent went to graduate school, and 50 percent earn more than $75,000 a year, and 58 percent are over 35 years old. (Someone call the diversity police).

More than half have a separate full time job. More than half of survey respondents have been blogging for more than two years.Geographically, North America dominates, with 48 percent of respondents living here. San Francisco and the Bay Area has the most bloggers in the U.S., with New York City, Chicago, and LA also having a strong showing. Although, as the map below shows, the geographic distribution is actually pretty wide.

And blogs continue to be read: blogs in the aggregate now attract 77.7 million unique U.S. visitors per month according to Comscore, nearly double the number of people who visit Facebook.

This is just the first day of the report, so get ready for a lot of data over the next four days. Read full By Erick Schonfeld on Technorati

Stanford offers free CS, robotics courses

Stanford University has launched a series of 10 free, online computer science (CS) and electrical engineering courses. The courses span an introduction to computer science and an introduction to artificial intelligence and robotics, among other topics.

The free courses are being offered “to students and educators around the world” under the auspices of Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE). Each course comprises downloadable video lectures, handouts, assignments, exams, and transcripts.

The courses are nearly identical to what’s offered to enrolled Stanford students, according to the University. However, those taking courses through SEE are not eligible to receive Stanford credit for them.

Course participants do not register, and have no direct contact with Stanford instructors or professors. They do, however, have the ability to communicate online with other SEE students. A detailed SEE FAQ is available here.

The University says SEE’s initial courses include “one of Stanford’s most popular engineering sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates, and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.”

Specifically, SEE’s first 10 courses are…

• Introduction to Computer Science:
  • Programming Methodology — CS106A
  • Programming Abstractions — CS106B
  • Programming Paradigms — CS107
• Artificial Intelligence:
  • Introduction to Robotics — CS223A
  • Natural Language Processing — CS224N
  • Machine Learning — CS229
• Linear Systems and Optimization:
  • The Fourier Transform and its Applications — EE261
  • Introduction to Linear Dynamical Systems — EE263
  • Convex Optimization I — EE364A
  • Convex Optimization II — EE364B

Source: deviceguru.com

Will Collider Startup Turn Earth Into a Black Hole?

Will particle physics research lead to humankind's destruction? "That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic. To most physicists, this fear is more science fiction than science fact. At a recent open house weekend, 73,000 visitors, without pitchforks or torches, toured the collider without incident." Dennis Overbye's essay appears in the New York Times April 15, 2008.

 

GOD has given society the conscience to "create and destroy" all the things of this earth … what we do with that will be the determination of our judgment. 
 
It is always easier to destroy than create... 

When was your vote counted.

The Dumbing Down Of America

The Chronicle Of Higher Education has a commentary on the sorry state of ignorance that exists in American Universities, noting "Today's college students have tuned out the world, and it's partly our fault". One more example of what Hunter S Thompson called "The Dumbing Down Of America" - So Much for the Information Age. In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don't know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.

Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn't pretty. Read more here by By Big Gav peakenergy

Techno Crutches make you dumber than a POTHEAD

. . . A study carried out at the British Institute of Psychiatry . . found that excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence and that those distracted by incoming e-mail and phone calls saw a ten-point fall in their IQ, over twice the impact of smoking or marijuana use. . .

Programmers [for example ] know that task switches take a long time. It is easier to keep going once you're at full steam . . . than to stop work and finish later. That last hour might take three hours, since you have to retrieve all of the background info from long-term memory and bring it back to the front of your mind.

Studies report that the American worker wastes 2.1 hours per day due to multitasking. When distracted while performing a task, it takes a certain amount of time to begin the new task, complete the new task and get back on track with the original task. Microsoft employees had their computers log their work for a period and found that simply dealing with an e-mail message took an average of 15 minutes and often lead to subsequent distractions, which lead to the employee taking up to an hour to get back to their original task.

The bottom line is that multitasking has been proven to make us less effective, not more. Although our digital assistants can be time savers, they can also be time wasters, if we allow them to break our focus. So for all of you who trouble getting things done . . . turn off your chat, RSS feeds, Google Desktop, Outlook alerts and whatever else keeps distracting you, and see what it would it would be like to simply focus on [ the task at hand ].

The Great Firewall of China

China's Great Firewall is crude, slapdash, and surprisingly easy to breach. Here's why it's so effective anyway.

Illustration by John Ritter
Interview: "Penetrating the Great Firewall"
James Fallows explains how he was able to probe the taboo subject of Chinese Internet censorship.

Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government's attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it—at least with me—they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government's approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people's daily lives.

Disappointingly, "Great Firewall" is not really the right term for the Chinese government's overall control strategy. China has indeed erected a firewall—a barrier to keep its Internet users from dealing easily with the outside world—but that is only one part of a larger, complex structure of monitoring and censorship. The official name for the entire approach, which is ostensibly a way to keep hackers and other rogue elements from harming Chinese Internet users, is the "Golden Shield Project." Since that term is too creepy to bear repeating, I'll use "the control system" for the overall strategy, which includes the "Great Firewall of China," or GFW, as the means of screening contact with other countries.

Breaking it:

A VPN, or virtual private network, is a faster, fancier, and more elegant way to achieve the same result. Essentially a VPN creates your own private, encrypted channel that runs alongside the normal Internet. From within China, a VPN connects you with an Internet server somewhere else. You pass your browsing and downloading requests to that American or Finnish or Japanese server, and it finds and sends back what you're looking for. The GFW doesn't stop you, because it can't read the encrypted messages you're sending. Every foreign business operating in China uses such a network. VPNs are freely advertised in China, so individuals can sign up, too. I use one that costs $40 per year. (An expat in China thinks: that's a little over a dime a day. A Chinese factory worker thinks: it's a week's take-home pay. Even for a young academic, it's a couple days' work.)

As a technical matter, China could crack down on the proxies and VPNs whenever it pleased. Today the policy is: if a message comes through that the surveillance system cannot read because it's encrypted, let's wave it on through! Obviously the system's behavior could be reversed. But everyone I spoke with said that China could simply not afford to crack down that way. "Every bank, every foreign manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs VPNs to exist," a Chinese professor told me. "They would have to shut down the next day if asked to send their commercial information through the regular Chinese Internet and the Great Firewall." Closing down the free, easy-to-use proxy servers would create a milder version of the same problem. Encrypted e-mail, too, passes through the GFW without scrutiny, and users of many Web-based mail systems can establish a secure session simply by typing "https:" rather than the usual "http:" in a site's address—for instance, https://mail.yahoo.com. To keep China in business, then, the government has to allow some exceptions to its control efforts—even knowing that many Chinese citizens will exploit the resulting loopholes.

Because the Chinese government can't plug every gap in the Great Firewall, many American observers have concluded that its larger efforts to control electronic discussion, and the democratization and grass-roots organizing it might nurture, are ultimately doomed. A recent item on an influential American tech Web site had the headline "Chinese National Firewall Isn't All That Effective." In October, Wired ran a story under the headline "The Great Firewall: China's Misguided—and Futile—Attempt to Control What Happens Online."

Let's not stop to discuss why the vision of democracy-through-communications-technology is so convincing to so many Americans. (Samizdat, fax machines, and the Voice of America eventually helped bring down the Soviet system. Therefore proxy servers and online chat rooms must erode the power of the Chinese state. Right?) Instead, let me emphasize how unconvincing this vision is to most people who deal with China's system of extensive, if imperfect, Internet controls.

Think again of the real importance of the Great Firewall. Does the Chinese government really care if a citizen can look up the Tiananmen Square entry on Wikipedia? Of course not. Anyone who wants that information will get it—by using a proxy server or VPN, by e-mailing to a friend overseas, even by looking at the surprisingly broad array of foreign magazines that arrive, uncensored, in Chinese public libraries.

What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won't bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

Read more from theatlantic.com

If Darwin and Einstein Had A Web Browser, they would have never achieved there goals...

How can today's wired, multitasking scientists ever compete with the great scientists of the past? One feature of Darwin's work as a scientist was that it proceeded slowly, very, very slowly. He wrote massive groundbreaking books, compiled huge amounts of data on orchids, barnacles, and Galapagos animals, but all over a long period of time. Scientists in Darwin's day had hours to kill on long voyages, took long walks out in the field, and waited while their scientific correspondence leisurely wended its way across oceans or continents.

Even in the first half of the 20th century, great scientists are famous for what they accomplished on long walks, hiking trips, and train rides. Niels Bohr would walk for hours around Copenhagen and come up with groundbreaking ideas, while Werner Heisenberg spent weeks every year hiking in the mountains. Even Richard Feynman, working in our more modern (but still pre-internet) era, insisted on long blocks of time to concentrate; he likened his thought process to building a house of cards, easily toppled by distraction and difficult to put back together.

Does that mean the kind of science we do in our overscheduled, multitasking world will never be the same as it was in the past? Certainly in one sense it won't - earlier generations of scientists had one distinct advantage we don't have today: Servants.

What kind of research is getting done in this kind of world? Surely some really, really great stuff; OK I agree that more good science is being published than ever before. But much of it also follows two trends: big-team science, solving big problems by brute force; and detail-filling science, not especially innovative, but usually useful. Where does this leave the kinds of deep breakthroughs, that in the past have always arisen in the minds of very focused individuals? A new, conceptually difficult and immature field like systems biology, desperately in need of some really good, new ideas, seems to be suffering from this scientific climate.

Read more from  if_darwin_had_a_web_browser_he_would_never_have_written_the_origin

The Dumbing of America

The zombie hordes are outside my window, ho hum, maybe I'll write a piece for the Washington Post.

Via: Washington Post:

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

… source cryptogon

Online Parent-Child Gap Widens

...there is an enormous gap between what parents think their children are doing online and what is really happening. 'The data tell us that parents don't know what their kids are doing,' says Lemish. The study found that 30% of children between the ages of 9 and 18 delete the search history from their browsers in an attempt to protect their privacy from their parents, that 73% of the children reported giving out personal information online while the parents of the same children believed that only 4% of their children did so, and that 36% of the children admitted to meeting with a stranger they had met online while fewer than 9% of the parents knew that their children had been engaging in such risky behavior. Lemish advises that parents should give their children the tools to be literate Internet users and most importantly, to talk to their children. 'The child needs similar tools that teach them to be [wary] of dangers in the park, the mall or wherever. The same rules in the real world apply online as well.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista

Slashdot...being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."

Multitasking Makes You Stupid, Slow and ADHD

The Atlantic: Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.

 

"Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on... studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy."

 

Our freedom to stay busy at all hours, at the task—and then the many tasks, and ultimately the multitask—of trying to be free.

 

VIA slashdot.org

Why The Web Tells Us What We Already Know

The Internet is not the font of all knowledge, despite the plethora of information available at your fingertips.

 

"Even if people read the right material, they are stubborn to changing their views," said one of the authors, UNSW Professor Enrico Coiera. "This means that providing people with the right information on its own may not be enough."

 

"Our research shows that, even if search engines do find the 'right' information, people may still draw the wrong conclusions -- in other words, their conclusions are biased."

 

Read full VIA sciencedaily

'dumbing down programs, hoping to make them more accessible and popular.

"A prior article on the damage Java does to CS education was discussed here recently. There was substantial feedback and the mailbox of one of the authors, Prof Dewar, also has been filled with mainly positive responses. In this follow-up to the article, Prof. Dewer clarifies his position on Java. In his view the core of the problem is universities 'dumbing down programs, hoping to make them more accessible and popular. Aspects of curriculum that are too demanding, or perceived as tedious, are downplayed in favor of simplified material that attracts a larger enrollment.'"  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"most people" they usually mean "most of the two dozen sophomores who filled out a questionnaire for beer money.

Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the "moral" setting isn't just a matter of how much harm it does. We don't show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible, but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles. Read more of the "The Moral Instinct"  From NYTimes