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  • Communication Breakdown: The Effects of Social Media and Texting On Relationships

    image source: http://www.columbiancentre.org/?p=2337

    When the line at Starbucks is long, when class gets dull, when conversations get personal, when loneliness strikes, we grab the phone like an Old West quick draw. Though our generation is marked by social media, experts are anxious of its effects on relationships, specifically our capacity for communication.

    “We’re setting ourselves up for trouble,” said Sherry Turkle, psychologist and cultural analyst, at a recent TED talk. “Trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection. We’re getting used to a new way of being alone together.”

    “From social networks to sociable robots, we’re designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship,” Turkle said. “We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control.”

    Students’ thoughts on conversational texting and social media’s effects on relationships teeter between convenience of control and the desire for true communication.

    “I think it’s made it easier to hang out with people and make plans and talk to people throughout the day, though you may not be able to hang out with them,” said Haley Brisben, sophomore. “You can talk to whoever you want, whenever you want. It’s just easier to communicate.”

    Senior Macy Brisben agreed.

    “Some people are always on their phones, and it makes it hard to even talk to them in person,” Macy Brisben said. “Otherwise, you can just use it to hang out more and see each other more.”

    Young people ages 18 to 24 are racking up the most time on the Internet. In the past year, consumers increased their social app time by 76 percent, and overall time spent on social media sites increased 24 percent, according to an annual social media report by the Nielsen Company. But the Internet’s most valued customers are becoming more aware of the dangers of overexposure to social media, hoping to improve their conversation skills.

    “I think it (texting) makes it harder for us to talk to people face to face,” said Avery Zorn, sophomore. “We are a lot more comfortable in confrontation and talking about bigger issues through texting than when we have to talk to the person. You can just text them and not have to look them in the eye.”

    Zorn and her friends gave up from social media for February.

    “It really has affected us,” Zorn said. “We went on a road trip and none of us had social media. We had three hours of talking to each other, and it was really good. We were forced to sit and have conversation with one another.”

    Click here to read the full article

    source: The Arkansas Traveler  /  Madelynne Jones

  • On Kurzweil: The Sleight of Hand That Makes It Seem We Understand the Mind

    Is the way we talk about the human mind messing with our ability to think about it clearly?

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    U.S. National Library of Medicine

    The philosopher Colin McGinn is a tough book reviewer. He looks like a cop in an old movie about cops and robbers, and writes like one. And when he decided to take down Ray Kurzweil’s new book,How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, he pulled no punches. First, he runs through Kurzweil’s “pattern recognition theory of the mind”:

    One cannot help noting immediately that the theory echoes Kurzweil’s professional achievements as an inventor of word recognition machines: the “secret of human thought” is pattern recognition, as it is implemented in the hardware of the brain. To create a mind therefore we need to create a machine that recognizes patterns, such as letters and words. …

    The process of recognition, which involves the firing of neurons in response to stimuli from the world, will typically include weightings of various features, as well as a lowering of response thresholds for probable constituents of the pattern. Thus some features will be more important than others to the recognizer, while the probability of recognizing a presented shape as an “E” will be higher if it occurs after “APPL.”

    These recognizers will therefore be “intelligent,” able to anticipate and correct for poverty and distortion in the stimulus. This process mirrors our human ability to recognize a face, say, when in shadow or partially occluded or drawn in caricature.

    Then the assault begins. First, McGinn states that Kurzweil’s whole theory is wrong, just on its face: “that claim seems obviously false.”

    But the fascinating part of the critique is why Kurzweil’s theory can seem plausible. And that comes down to the language Kurzweil (and other people) employ in writing about neuroscience. McGinn calls it “homunculism,” the erroneous attribution of human-like qualities to pieces of a human. And it generates the illusion that we understand how synapses firing leads to an appreciation for rock ‘n roll.

    [H]omunculus talk can give rise to the illusion that one is nearer to accounting for the mind, properly so-called, than one really is. If neural clumps can be characterized in psychological terms, then it looks as if we are in the right conceptual ballpark when trying to explain genuine mental phenomena–such as the recognition of words and faces by perceiving conscious subjects. But if we strip our theoretical language of psychological content, restricting ourselves to the physics and chemistry of cells, we are far from accounting for the mental phenomena we wish to explain. An army of homunculi all recognizing patterns, talking to each other, and having expectations might provide a foundation for whole-person pattern recognition; but electrochemical interactions across cell membranes are a far cry from actually consciously seeing something as the letter “A.” How do we get from pure chemistry to full-blown psychology?

    Click here to read the full article

    source: The Atlantic / ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL

  • The Brain Is Not Computable

    A leading neuroscientist says Kurzweil’s Singularity isn’t going to happen. Instead, humans will assimilate machines.

    Miguel Nicolelis, a top neuroscientist at Duke University, says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the technological Singularity is “a bunch of hot air.”

    “The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it,” says Nicolelis, author of several pioneering papers on brain-machine interfaces.

    The Singularity, of course, is that moment when a computer super-intelligence emerges and changes the world in ways beyond our comprehension.

    Among the idea’s promoters are futurist Ray Kurzweil, recently hired on at Google as a director of engineering, who has been predicting that not only will machine intelligence exceed our own, but people will be able to download their thoughts and memories into computers (see “Ray Kurzweil Plans to Create a Mind at Google—and Have It Serve You”).

    Nicolelis calls that idea sheer bunk. “Downloads will never happen,” he said during remarks made at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on Sunday. “There are a lot of people selling the idea that you can mimic the brain with a computer.”

    The debate over whether the brain is a kind of computer has been running for decades. Many scientists think it’s possible, in theory, for a computer to equal the brain given sufficient computer power and an understanding of how the brain works.

    Kurzweil delves into the idea of “reverse-engineering” the brain in his latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, in which he says even though the brain may be immensely complex, “the fact that it contains many billions of cells and trillions of connections does not necessarily make its primary method complex.”

    But Nicolelis is in a camp that thinks that human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can’t be replicated in silicon. That’s because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells, Nicolelis says.

    “You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.”

    Click here to read the full article

    source: MIT Technnology Review / Antonio Regalado

  • Put your smartphone away and read this article

    Illustration Photo by Yael Bogen

     

    In 2009, the life of Levi Felix, a young Jew of 25 and a graduate of the University of Santa Barbara, looked quite glamorous. He was the vice president of Causecast, a startup that helps not-for-profit organizations gain exposure and organize activities, he earned a handsome salary, had a fine apartment and was looking forward to seemingly limitless possibilities of advancement.

    “I was one of the first employees in Causecast, which began as a small startup and grew fast into a company with a few hundred employees,” Felix told me during an interview in San Francisco. “I was in charge of the website’s design and content. Like everyone else, I worked around the clock and was connected to the Web at all times.”

    If this were a more conventional success story, it would have ended like this: The company exits, Felix rakes in millions, starts his own company and lives happily ever after. But that’s not what happened.

    “In 2009, on the way to the SXSW technology conference, I felt like I was about to pass out,” Felix relates. “I was working so hard that I had already become used to my body collapsing occasionally. I would go to the ER, ask for an IV and carry on. But this time, when I got to the hospital the doctors found that I was suffering from serious internal bleeding of the esophagus. If it hadn’t been discovered in time, I would have been dead within days. No one could say what had brought it on, but a few doctors said it was related to tension, improper nutrition and sleep deprivation. It’s usually said that ‘work kills you,’ but in my case I killed myself by leading a completely insane way of life.”

    Brooke Dean, 30, who was born in Montana and grew up in Colorado, became Felix’s partner shortly after his hospitalization. She persuaded him to accompany her to the Burning Man Festival later that year. The thousands of participants in the event, held every year in the Nevada desert, build temporary structures and create art without the use of electricity or technology.

    “We attended the festival five months after I got out of the hospital,” Felix recalls. “It was the first time I had ever felt free. Brooke and I then decided to travel around the world, and because I am from a traditional Jewish home and my brother was doing a residency in Israel, we decided to start the trip there.”

    It’s amusing to think that a future history of the Slow Tech movement ? of which Felix and Dean are two unofficial representatives ? might state that it had its genesis in the Holy Land.

    Click here to read the full article

    source: haaretz.com /  Neta Alexander

  • Getting through to your kids in the digital age

    How smartphones, family dinners, and admitting you don’t know everything can help you connect.

    GETTY IMAGES/RADIUS IMAGES

    THE YOUNG BOY with spiky blond hair lies in bed wearing football pajamas and staring at the miniature solar system hanging from his ceiling. His bearded father lies beside him, fielding a few questions before turning out the lights.

    “How far away is Mars?” the boy asks.

    “Well, it’s 141 million miles from the sun,” the father replies soothingly, “so, pretty far.”

    “Why is it red?” the boy continues, keeping his eyes fixed on the fourth planet dangling from the ceiling.

    “Because its surface is made of iron oxide.”

    “Why do they call it Mars?”

    “Well, it was named after the Roman god of war.”

    The boy flashes a slight, admiring smile. “You’re so smart, Dad.”

    Then the camera pulls back to show something that had been out of view: the slim tablet computer resting on the dad’s outer thigh. Slyly, he taps it to bring up the next Google results page before asking his son, “Did I ever tell you about Jupiter?”

    This 30-second spot for the Google Search app delivers a warm feeling of parental engagement and confidence?—?if not candor. But it masks an intriguing question. In this mobile era, when the answer to nearly every question lies a few taps away, just what are we as parents supposed to know?

    ISTOCK

    My mother likes to tell the story of how her father?—?an exacting, self-educated trolley driver for the T?—?would regularly interrupt mealtimes by pointing to the large map hanging in their kitchen and expecting her to recall the name of a certain mountain rising above Montana or some river cutting through Tennessee. He had committed all the answers to memory the old-fashioned way. I can only imagine the disgust he would have felt for that bearded father trying to play sage while surreptitiously tapping the tablet at his thigh.

    Times, of course, have changed radically since my mother was a kid in the middle of the last century. They’ve even changed considerably since the oldest of my three children was just getting going at the start of this century, when finding an answer still involved padding over to our den to call up Google on the desktop. Now even my youngest daughter, who’s in the second grade, can fact-check anything I say with a swipe on my iPhone.

    Will this instant access to all manner of information end up clarifying our role as parents, freeing us from having to supply lots of facts and allowing us to focus on providing wisdom? Or, because our kids are far more adept at tapping and swiping than we are, will it chip away at our sense of parental authority? In other words, will it make us lighter, or simply lightweights?

    Click here to read the full article

    source: The Boston Globe / Neil Swidey

  • Turn Off, Tune Out: The National Day of Unplugging Is Upon Us

    Reboot

    Twenty-four hours without your smartphone or tablet? Cue Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking Psycho violins for the next 1,440 minutes. Think you could do it? The folks behind the National Day of Unplugging are hoping that, to paraphrase Tim Leary, you can “turn off, tune out and drop by (and see someone).”

    The party kicks off tonight at sunset, March 1, and rolls through sunset tomorrow, March 2 (or as the site describes it, “sundown to sundown”). During those ostensibly blissful hours of cyber-abstinence, you’re encouraged to “start living a different life: connect with the people in your street, neighborhood and city, have an uninterrupted meal or read a book to your child.”

    Hey man, everyone’s doing it! Even Arianna Huffington (no really — she’s a few rows down in the site’s promotional picture collage). But okay, what’s this all about really? A bunch of wacky luddites on their anti-technology high horses?

    Not exactly, though there is a slight religious angle. This “unplug challenge” launched back in 2010 as a riff on the Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat — the Jewish day of rest, which starts Friday evening and runs through Saturday night. If you attended a parochial elementary school (as I did, though I’m not the least bit religious) and at one point had to read the Old Testament book of Exodus, you may recall the line ”Six days you shall labor, but on the seventh day you shall rest.” The event’s nonprofit sponsor group, Reboot, took that and spun it into more of a tech-angled holiday — as they put it, “an adaption of our ancestors’ ritual of carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and connect with loved ones.”

    There’s something alluring about unplugging for a day or two when your life looks more and more like a Sharper Image ad. In my house we have three laptops, a desktop PC and flatscreen, two smartphones, one tablet, multiple game consoles and handhelds, a wireless printer, a computer-connected hybrid digital piano, another computer-connected vintage keyboard, an Internet-connected baby-cam, an Internet-connected television and cable box, and dozens of other little USB or wireless gizmos that interlink with our cyber-ecosystem. Even my seven-month-old’s toys are in on the action: Someone recently gifted us a green plush-toy dog named “Scout.” Except Scout isn’t your garden variety stuffed puppy: He comes with a giant “hump” on his back, which upon closer analysis turns out to be a USB connection pack that’ll let you plug in and download songs for Scout to sing, customize playlists — even program him to speak our child’s name. It’s pretty cool…and a little terrifying.

    Click here to read the full article

    source: TIME Tech / Matt Peckham

  • TED Prize Winner Sugata Mitra To Create A “School In The Cloud”

    The educational innovator receives $1 million to seed child-driven, Internet-enabled learning centers in India and around the world.

    Today Dr. Sugata Mitra became the eighth winner of the TED Prize, which now consists of $1 million presented to social entrepreneurs to make their dreams huge. Past winners include Bono’s ONE campaign, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, and artist JR.

    Mitra’s Hole in the Wall experiment, begun in 1999 and detailed in this Ted talk, has been on the minds of educational innovators ever since. He provided access to a computer connected to the Internet through a literal hole in the wall of his office in a Delhi slum and saw how children who didn’t speak English–and may have never attended school–taught themselves the basics of Googling information they needed, and even stumbled into interests like genetics.

    2013 TED Prize winner Sugata MitraHe later built on the experiment, realizing the importance of creating a “granny cloud” of adults who could encourage and enable children in their self-directed intellectual journeys by asking them great questions, whether or not the adults were themselves subject matter experts.

    With the prize, Mitra plans to build a “school in the cloud,” essentially a computer lab in India staffed with one adult and open to children 8 to 12 to explore their interests. This will be achieved with the help of retired online volunteer mentors who will Skype in when needed–the “grannies in the cloud.” He’s also releasing a toolkit for others who want to adopt the setup themselves to create Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) anywhere in the world.

    “My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together,” Mitra said.

    In the world of education reform, Mitra’s work falls squarely on the side of the conversation–along with longtime TED Talk all-star Sir Ken Robinson–that says what schools need most is to enable new kinds of creativity and learner-centeredness, without trying to micromanage the outcomes. The move to create “maker spaces” in U.S. schools equipped with 3-D printers and the like is another example of this line of thinking, which stands in stark contrast to innovators like Sal Khan of Khan Academy, who focuses on enabling students to learn traditional subjects like math more quickly and efficiently, with outcomes measurable on standardized tests.

    In addition to the million dollars and international exposure, the TED prize this year brings with it a grant from the Sundance Institute: $125,000 for anyone who wants to make a documentary about Mitra’s work.

    [Images courtesy of TED. Sugata Mitra Photo: James Duncan Davidson]

    source: fastcoexist.com

  • How social media can help wreck a home

    FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) – Recent surveys estimate Facebook is now playing a role in at least a fifth of U.S divorces and may be a factor in up to a third of divorces . With that in mind, and in the hopes that their story will serve as a lesson for others, one couple in northeast Indiana decided to share how social media contributed to the shattering of their marriage.

    Jeff and Denise, who asked not to have their faces shown or last names revealed in our TV interview, got married 12 and a half years ago. The early years, they say, were happy. But in 2009, Jeff -consumed with starting a small business- was working long hours, and problems began to emerge.

    “For me, it was the intimacy and the relationship in the bedroom,” said Jeff. “It just wasn’t there at all. Once a month, if lucky.”

    Denise added, “There was lack of communication there, too. In a sense, we both went our separate ways. He worked a lot and I was working also and taking care of the kids and taking care of the house, so time together was not there.”

    About this time, Jeff was reconnecting on Facebook with a woman he’d known in high school.

    “You felt like you could tell this woman things you couldn’t tell your wife?” NewsChannel 15 asked. “Absolutely,” Jeff responded.

    “Because that part of your life at this point was shut down?”

    “Yeah. I think it’s human nature to look back and say ‘What if ?’,” Jeff continued. “And that’s how it progressed. And it just clicked and started going in a direction that it never should have gone.”

    Two to three months after the chatting started, it had turned into an emotional affair. Though the adultery had not yet turned physical, Jeff and the other woman did start meeting in person, and the attraction only grew stronger. Within weeks, Jeff decided to divorce Denise.

    Jeff remembered breaking the news to his wife. “We just sat in here and I told her I was done. I [could not] continue on this way. I had fallen in love with somebody else, and I was leaving.”

    Denise’s response? “I was totally devastated because I hadn’t even seen any warning signs, if I want to say that. It was just like a bombshell had been dropped.”

    Jeff walked out on his wife and three kids, an especially crushing blow to their oldest daughter, who was eight years old at the time.

    “I still remember the look on her face and the tears rolling, you know, from the devastation,” said Denise. “Because I think in a kid’s eyes, the person that Dad should like or love is Mom, not anybody else.”

    Click here to read the full article

    source: wane.com

  • Why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants school kids to learn coding

    (Tech CEOs are among the luminaries appearing in a new video promoting the teaching and learning of computer coding in schools.)

    NEW YORK: Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter creator Jack Dorsey are among the tech luminaries appearing in a new video promoting the teaching and learning of computer coding in schools.
    Titled “What most schools don’t teach,” the video released online begins with Zuckerberg, Gates and other tech icons recalling the time they got their start in coding. For some, that was in sixth grade. For others, such as Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook’s first female engineer, that happened in college. Freshman year, first semester, intro to computer science, to be exact.

    Dorsey, who also founded and runs the mobile payments startup Square, said in an interview that he didn’t grow up being a programmer.

    “I wanted to work on ideas. In order to see them grow, I had to learn how to code,” Dorsey told The Associated Press. “I think there is a lack of desire, there is a lack of push to teach people how to program and how to code. It’s not all that dissimilar to learning a foreign language. It’s just a way to instruct a machine on what to do. It empowers people to start a business, to start a project, to really speak to a daily issue that they are having or other people are having.”

    Running less than six minutes, the video promotes Code.org, a nonprofit foundation created last year to help computer programming education grow.

    “The first time I actually had something come up and say `hello world,’ and I made a computer do that, that was just astonishing,” Gabe Newell, president of video game studio Valve, recalls in the video.

    But it’s not just tech leaders promoting programming in the video. Chris Bosh, of the Miami Heat basketball team, says about coding: “I know it can be intimidating, a lot of things are intimidating, but, you know, what isn’t?”

    Code.org was founded by tech entrepreneur Hadi Partovi, an early investor in Facebook,Dropbox and the vacation rental site Airbnb. The nonprofit wants to address an oft-cited problem among technology companies – not enough computer science graduates to fill a growing number of programming jobs. The group laments that many schools don’t even offer classes in programming.

    “Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” Zuckerberg says in the video. “The whole limit of the system is just the there just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.”

    source: THE TIMES OF INDIA

  • Broadband access can help bridge educational divides, empower students – UN report

    ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure (right) co-chairs the Broadband Commission with UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova. Photo: ITU

    25 February 2013 – Broadband connectivity has the potential to transform education by giving teachers and students access to learning resources and technologies that will allow them to improve their skills in the context of a globalized economy, according to a United Nations report released today.

    The report, Technology, Broadband and Education: Advancing the Education for All Agenda, argues that access to high-speed technologies over fixed and mobile platforms can help students acquire the digital skills required to participate in the global economy and contribute to ensure their employability once they finish their studies.

    “The ability of broadband to improve and enhance education, as well as students’ experience of education, is undisputed,” said the Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Hamadoun Touré, adding that online access widens education and employment prospects for students all over the world.

    “A student in a developing country can now access the library of a prestigious university anywhere in the world; an unemployed person can retrain and improve their job prospects in other fields; teachers can gain inspiration and advice from the resources and experiences of others. With each of these achievements, the online world brings about another real-world victory for education, dialogue, and better understanding between peoples.”

    According to ITU estimates, the digital divide remains deep despite rapid technological advances. At the end of 2012, there were nearly 2.5 billion people using the Internet. However, only a quarter of these people are located in the developing world. There are also severe disparities in the cost of broadband, which in some 17 countries still represents more than the average person’s monthly salary.

    The report, released by the Broadband Commission for Digital Development during the World Summit on the Information Society +10 in Paris, emphasizes the importance of broadband access as a way to accelerate the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) pertaining education, which aims to achieve universal primary education for boys and girls by the year 2015.

    Click here to read the full article

    source: UN News Centre