Monday, August 17, 2009

Slate Magazine: Seeking



Seeking

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that's dangerous.

By Emily Yoffe

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."

We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls.

To read the rest of the article, see: http://www.slate.com/id/2224932/pagenum/all/#p2

Monday, August 10, 2009

MIT Technology Review: A Deeper Look at Iranian Filtering

Thursday, August 06, 2009

A researcher finds telltale signs that the Iranian government has become more efficient at filtering.
Looking into Iran's portion of the Internet is not an easy task.
But the network security firm Arbor Networks recently released traffic data for both internal and external-facing Internet service providers in the country. This data shows that the country continues to filter Internet traffic and that its ISPs can filter larger quantities of data than before.
Arbor Networks uses data gathered from distributed network sensors to monitor the data going to Iran from the global Internet.
In a
post on Sunday, the firm showed that the overall trend for the first three weeks of July was an increasing amount of traffic headed into Iran. The country has a single national provider that handles Internet traffic, but a handful of internal providers. The picture painted by the data is of an ISP that is becoming increasingly skilled in filtering, says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks.
"It was speculated early on that they lacked capacity," Labovitz says. "It wasn't that traffic was being filtered, it was that it was being dropped because they lacked capacity. Now, it looks like they are navigating 5 gig of traffic again, and I don't think they have turned off filtering."


For more see: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/unsafebits/23946/

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Launching Your Career?

As Special Report by BusinessWeek and Technology is still HOT!

The Best Places to Launch a Career

To lure and keep young talent when cash is tight, companies of all stripes are appealing to Gen Yers' ambitions for speedy advancement—and their desire to do good while doing well

by Lindsey Gerdes

As career choices go, the hotel business isn't one that will put new college grads on the path to riches. With few exceptions, new employees can expect an annual salary of less than $40,000, a figure that has barely budged in recent years. So when Marriott International (MAR) visited the University of Delaware campus on a recruiting trip, it didn't wave a big wad of cash in front of Claire Pignataro. It didn't have to. It had already hooked her with something she considered far more valuable: a chance to help run a hotel.

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