Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult,
said Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and director of their Neuroscience Institute. This is a wake-up call. It’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.
This study has been repeated many times in the last thirty years, with analogous results; this one is unique in that is sorts out the variables that people have used to discount previous studies and yet ends by asking “Can this be replicated?” For heaven’s sake. What more proof do we need?
EEGs Show Brain Differences Between Poor and Rich Kids
Google’s Gatekeepers
A sobering piece by law professor Jeffrey Rosen about the critical and reluctant role that Google’s corporate gatekeepers play in deciding what we can and cannot see as it navigates the territory between providing neutral platform for free speech and a company in the media and advertising business:
“Right now, we’re trusting Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” [law professor Tim] Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its automated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security purposes. “Under pressure to fight terrorism or to pacify repressive governments, Google could track everything we’ve searched for, everything we’re writing on gmail, everything we’re writing on Google docs, to figure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Internet a much scarier place for free expression.” The question of free speech online isn’t just about what a company like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.
Overload!
“The tragedy of the news media in the information age is that in their struggle to find a financial foothold,” writes Bree Nordenson, “they have neglected to look hard enough at the larger implications of the new information landscape — and more generally, of modern life.” That is, information overload. Most of us lack the skills — not to mention the time, attention, and motivation — to make sense of today’s unrelenting torrent of information. Far from precipitating the demise of journalists and news organizations, it spells out why journalism won’t disappear. Paul Duguid explains: “[Information] needs a recommendation, a seal of approval, something that says this is reliable or true or whatever. And so journalists, but also the institutions of journalism as one aspect of this, become very important.”
Social Networks and Happiness
It seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you:
We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends — that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.
Obama In Your Heart
Elevation is one of a class of emotions that we feel when other people do good, skillful, or admirable things. These emotions are unusual in that they are not primarily about ourselves, our goals, and our normal petty concerns; rather, they make us feel like better people. Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, “Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.” Barack Obama is apparently an off-the-charts elevation inducer. Haidt’s research shows that elevation is good at provoking a desire to make a difference but not so good at motivating real action. But he says the elevation effect is powerful nonetheless. “It does appear to change people cognitively; it opens hearts and minds to new possibilities. This will be crucial for Obama.”
Procrastinating Again?
Procrastination is not a time-management problem. It’s a complex problem involving personality, situations and motivation. Everyone occasionally procrastinates, 15 to 20 percent of adults routinely put off activities that would be better accomplished right away, and a whopping 80 to 95 percent of college students have a penchant for postponement. Trisha Guru covers contemporary views on and advice for kicking the procrastination habit.
Technology Traps
I have a love/hate relationship with technology, much of my turmoil stems from the fact that I do not always have the luxury of saying no or even, let me think about it, before it becomes a technology I depend on. This is a symptom of what Peter Crabb calls technological traps, consequences of everyday decisions to use technological devices that make us feel good when in fact these devices are not good for us or the planet at all:
With the help of human enthusiasts and enablers, technology creates its own self-affirming ideology. It is widely believed that technology is infallible. Technology must not be questioned or criticized. Human needs are subordinate to the needs of devices and systems. If something goes wrong, it must be due to “human error.” The solution to technology-induced problems is always more and better technology. In fact, every arena of human activity is always improved when the latest, most complex technologies are applied. As a consequence of the ascendancy of technology, humans have become demeaned and powerless – second-class citizens in their own societies.
The Ambassadors
The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, is a portrait of two Frenchmen, one an ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII, the other a cleric. They are leaning on a cupboard with displays — on the upper shelf objects referring to the heavens; on the lower shelf, objects indicating their earthly interests. There are many hidden messages and meanings in this work, notes Donald Clark, including the large anamorphic skull, which he has chosen to interpret in terms of learning. The painting reveals a 1533 curriculum of the emerging split between the vocational arts and academia, and the retreating role of religion, a curriculum whose influence is clearly still felt some 500 years later.
Group Think
The explosion of online materials has two, somewhat contradictory effects. The scope of available information expands, remarkably so; but as a consequence, the information needs to be filtered somehow, and the filter is either reverse chronological order or popularity:
Many Internet users customize their consumption of news sources and other information in a way that fosters polarization. This, it could be argued, has elements both of the narrowing effect and the long tail. Americans seek out sources that reflect their personal beliefs, consistent with Anderson’s vision. But, akin to the narrowing Evans observes, large groups — liberals and conservatives — converge on different reference points, resulting in mutually unrecognizable versions of reality. The common lesson of all of these phenomena is to be cognizant that the tools we use affect us in ways we may not fully appreciate. We should always be searching, the findings suggest, for new ways to search.
Take a scientific question like the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees. Would you prefer to plough through an essay on the subject, or to glance at the visualization created by Ben Fry in which the 75,000 letters of coding in the human genome form a photographic image of a chimp’s head? Virtually all of our genetic information is identical, and Fry highlights the discrepancies by depicting nine of the letters as red dots. No contest. Alice Rawsthorn explains why.