3 In 4: Internet Makes Us Smarter

source: Informationweek.com



A survey finds most believe the Internet enhances intelligence; but critics say its use zaps critical thinking.

By Antone Gonsalves


A survey of Web users and professionals found that a majority of them believe the Internet is making us smarter.

The Web-based survey of nearly 900 prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers found that three out of four believe the Internet "enhances and augments" human intelligence. In addition, two thirds of the respondents said the Internet also improves reading, writing and rendering of knowledge.

The survey was conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina and the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. The poll was motivated by tech scholar and analyst Nicholas Carr's 2009 Atlantic Monthly magazine cover story, entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

In a response to the survey, released Friday, Carr stuck by his original argument that the Internet shifts the emphasis of people's intelligence away from meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what he called "utilitarian intelligence."

"The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking," said Carr, who participated in the survey.

Other participants commenting on the survey disagreed, such as Craig Newmark, founder of Craigs's List, who said people use Google as an adjunct to their own memory.

"For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me," he said. "Sometimes, I see I'm wrong, and I appreciate finding that out before I open my mouth."

Respondent David Ellis, a professor at York University in Toronto, Canada, said that instead of making people stupid, Google was reinforcing intellectual laziness among people satisfied with the top 10 or 15 listings from search queries.

"Like other major technologies, Google's search functionality won't push the human intellect in one predetermined direction," Ellis said. "It will reinforce certain dispositions in the end-user: stronger intellects will use Google as a creative tool, while others will let Google do the thinking for them."

How to live to 100

Source: http://www.executivehm.com

How to live to 100

How would you fancy living to 100? Research has found that by controlling factors in your life, living to 100 is actually much more possible than previously thought.

In total, the US has the most centenarians with current estimates as high as 72,000, leading website The Centenarian states. In fact, if the population of centenarians continues to increase at its current rate of expansion, there could be close to one million people of 100 years of age or more by 2050 residing in the US.

Meanwhile, in the UK, while the overall numbers of centenarians are much smaller, the trend is the same. The Office of National Statistics reports around 9000 centenarians today in The UK and Wales, a 90-fold increase since 1911, and a seven percent increase from just half a decade ago in 2005. Estimates show that at the current rate of expansion, the UK's centenarian population could reach over 40,000 by 2031. And, just as in other parts of the industrialized world, people aged over 90 are the fastest growing segment of the population in the UK.

In Japan, the number of centenarians are also extremely high, making Japan only second to the US with a current population of about 30,000 centenarians. At its current rate of expansion, Japan's population of centenarians may rival that of the United States in sheer numbers in the years ahead. Certainly, by 2050, Japan proportionally will have the most centenarians in the world.

Danish research

New research in Denmark suggests that most babies born in rich countries this century will eventually make it to their one hundredth birthday. In fact, according to Danish experts, since the 20th century people in developed countries are living around three decades longer than in the past. Now some believe that this figure could go even higher. If improvements in health continues, "a majority of children born since the year 2000 will celebrate their hundredth birthday," states James Vaupel, of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Rostock, Germany.

The estimate comes after Vaupel and colleagues in Denmark examined studies published globally between 2004 and 2005 on numerous issues related to aging. They found life expectancy is increasing steadily in most countries and in Japan, which has the world's longest life expectancy, more than half of the country's 80-year-old women are expected to live to 90.

Overall, centenarians are the fastest-growing demographic group across much of the developed world and here at EHM we have taken a look at factors which can influence an increase your expected lifespan, so maybe you too can reach that grand age of 100.

Seriously Funny Print Ads

source: webdesignerdepot.com

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19. McDonald’s: Individuals

20. Fairfax/The Sydney Morning Herald: Size Change

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22. Utopolis, Group of cinemas: Free Willy

23. KISS FM 97.7: Father

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25. Tesa: Bush

26. General Tire: Wrapped by Adventure

27. Covergirl Teens: Anime

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29. Oranges – Wonderbra

30. Breath – Pedigree

31. Lion – Zoo Safari

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33. Zoom – Olympus

34. Sharp – WMF

35. Truck – Pepsi Light

36. Mask – Gear Drop

37. Magician – Glassex Window

38. Overloaded – 3M Scotch

39. Playground – Wonderbra

40. Pies – Pocket Pies

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Sixth Sense - a wearable gestural interface

Pictures:

Ten Rules for Being Human

Ten Rules for Being Human

by Cherie Carter-Scott ( http://www.bluinc.com )

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it's yours to keep for the entire period.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, "life."
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately "work."
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There's no part of life that doesn't contain its lessons. If you're alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better a place than "here." When your "there" has become a "here", you will simply obtain another "there" that will again look better than "here."
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life's questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.