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

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/

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.

More

Amazon's '1984' Deletion From Kindle Examined

From National Public Radio:

After Amazon learned that it was selling George Orwell's novel 1984 to Kindle owners though it had no right to do so, Amazon deleted the novel and others from the devices of the people who had bought the works.

Amazon founder and CEO apologized for the move, calling the solution "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles."

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says devices such as the Kindle check in frequently with the mother ship.

"To be really useful you'd want to leave that wireless connection on," Zittrain, the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, tells Robert Siegel. "An unanticipated feature of that though is that you can have Amazon or the vendor that runs the device be able to reach into the device and make changes to the way it works."

Bill Gates Weighs in on Education and Global Competitiveness

Bill Gates has been a longtime critic of American public schools and has used philanthropy to advocate for a better educational system. This is a great article by eSchool News.

The U.S. must improve its educational standing in the world by rewarding effective teaching and by developing better, universal measures of performance for students and teachers, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said on July 21.

Speaking at the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual legislative summit, Gates told hundreds of lawmakers how federal stimulus money should be used to spark educational innovation, spread best practices, and improve accountability.

USA Ranks 3rd in The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009

The Report stresses the importance of ICT as a catalyst for growth in the current global turmoil

See the Full Report

See the Presentation (44 min 22 sec)

Denmark and Sweden once again lead the rankings of The Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009, released for the eighth consecutive year by the World Economic Forum. The United States follows suit, up one position from last year, thus confirming its pre-eminence in networked readiness in the current times of economic slowdown. Singapore (4), Switzerland (5) and the other Nordic countries together with the Netherlands and Canada complete the top 10.

The Report underlines that good education fundamentals and high levels of technological readiness and innovation are essential engines of growth needed to overcome the current economic crisis. Under the theme “Mobility in a Networked World”, this year’s Report places a particular focus on the relationship and interrelations between mobility and ICT.

With record coverage of 134 economies worldwide, the Report remains the world’s most comprehensive and authoritative international assessment of the impact of ICT on the development process and the competitiveness of nations.

The Report is produced by the World Economic Forum in cooperation with INSEAD, the leading international business school, and is sponsored by Cisco Systems.

The Global Competitiveness Report 2008-2009

The United States tops the overall ranking in The Global Competitiveness Report 2008-2009. Switzerland is in second position followed by Denmark, Sweden and Singapore. European economies continue to prevail in the top 10 with Finland, Germany and the Netherlands following suit.

The United Kingdom, while remaining very competitive, has dropped by three places and out of the top 10, mainly attributable to a weakening of its financial markets.

The rankings are calculated from both publicly available data and the Executive Opinion Survey, a compre-hensive annual survey conducted by the World Economic Forum together with its network of Partner Institutes (leading research institutes and business organizations) in the countries covered by the report.