Rudy Garns's Public Library

The more pressing, if more complex, task of our digital age, then, lies not in figuring out what comes after the yottabyte, but in cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically formed world.
asking whether Google makes us stupid, as some cultural critics recently have, is the wrong question. It assumes sharp distinctions between humans and technology that are no longer, if they ever were, tenable.
24 more annotation(s)...
- there are those who claim that the digitization efforts of Google, the social-networking power of Facebook, and the era of big data in general are finally realizing that ancient dream of unifying all knowledge.
- As Nicholas Carr puts it, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”
- For Carr and many others like him, true knowledge is deep, and its depth is proportional to the intensity of our attentiveness. In our digital world that encourages quantity over quality, Google is making us stupid.
- they imagine our information age to be unprecedented, but information explosions and the utopian and apocalyptic pronouncements that accompany them are an old concern
- both narratives make a key conceptual error by isolating the causal effects of technology.
- we access, use, and engage information through technologies that help us select, filter, and delimit.
- These now ubiquitous technologies help us filter the essential from the excess and search for the needle in the haystack, and in so doing they have become central mediums for our experience of the world.
- technology is neither an abstract flood of data nor a simple machine-like appendage subordinate to human intentions, but instead the very manner in which humans engage the world.
- The specific technologies developed to manage information can give us insight into how we organize, produce, and distribute knowledge—that is, the history of information overload is a history of how we know what we know. It is not only the history of data, books, and the tools used to cope with them. It is also a history of ourselves and of the environment within which we make and in turn are made by technologies.
- The core issue concerns not particular modes of accommodating new technologies—nifty advice on dealing with email or limiting screen time—but our very conception of the relationship between the human and technology.
- Giving this broad cultural anxiety a philosophical frame, and beating Carr to the punch by more than two centuries, Immanuel Kant complained that such an overabundance of books encouraged people to “read a lot” and “superficially.”
- they presumed some unstated yet normative level of information or, in the case of a Bücherseuche, some normative number of books.
- such laments presumed the normative value of particular practices and technologies for dealing with all of these books and all of this information.
- hyperbolic techno-determinism.
- To emphasize a single and direct causal link between technology and a particular form of thought is to isolate technology from the very forms of life with which it is bound up.
- The modern hyperlink and the Enlightenment footnote share a logic that is grounded in assumptions about the text-based nature of knowledge.
- Whereas these scriptural commentaries simply “buttressed a text” that derived its ultimate authority from some divine source, Enlightenment footnotes pointed to other Enlightenment texts.
- citational logic
- In early 1998 there were an estimated 150 million nodes joined by 2 billion links.
- In highlighting the analogies between Google and Enlightenment print culture, I have attempted to resist the alarmism and utopianism that tend to frame current discussions of our digital culture, first by historicizing these concerns and second by demonstrating that technology needs to be understood in deep, embodied connection with the human.
- They write, “at the micro-scale, the Web is an infra-structure of artificial languages and protocols; it is a piece of engineering. However, it is the interaction of human beings creating, linking, and consuming information that generates the Web’s behavior as emergent properties at the macro-scale.”
- Whereas an Enlightenment reader might have been able to connect four or five footnotes without much effort, Google’s search engine follows hundreds of millions of links in a fraction of a second. The embodied human can all too easily seem to disappear at such scales.
- The Web is not just a technology but an ecology of human-technology interaction. It is a dynamic culture with its own norms and practices.
- Knowledge is hard won; it is crafted, created, and organized by humans and their technologies. Google’s search algorithms are only the most recent in a long history of technologies that humans have developed to organize, evaluate, and engage their world.

May

30

2012

I'm Confused: How Could Information Equal Entropy?

www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/...bionet.info-theory.faq.html

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entropy information

Entropy (information theory) | Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/...Entropy_(information_theory)

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entropy information

In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty associated with a random variable.
the Shannon entropy is a measure of the average information content one is missing when one does not know the value of the random variable.
5 more annotation(s)...
- Entropy, in an information sense, is a measure of unpredictability.
- English text has fairly low entropy. In other words, it is fairly predictable.
- If a compression scheme is lossless—that is, you can always recover the entire original message by uncompressing—then a compressed message has the same total entropy as the original, but in fewer bits.
- The entropy of a message is in a certain sense a measure of how much information it really contains.
- Shannon's entropy measures the information contained in a message as opposed to the portion of the message that is determined (or predictable).

May

29

2012

philosophy bites: Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will

Recent research in neuroscience following on from the pioneering work of Benjamin Libet seems to point to the disconcerting conclusion that free will is an illusion. Adina Roskies of Dartmouth College is not convinced that this conclusion follows. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast she explains to David Edmonds why the conclusion that free will is an illusion is far stronger than the evidence warrants.
Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will - podcast - http://t.co/06c9AfD7

philosophybites.com/...euroscience-and-free-will.html

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philosophy neuroscience freewill Roskies neuroethics

ifttt / Channels

ifttt.com/channels

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tools

10 Free Tools to Help You Organize the Internet | Twitter Tips And Updates From Buffer

The internet is a big place. For a long time, I found the task of organizing and remembering all the articles, images, videos, posts, tweets, and sites to be formidable. The mass of information only continues to grow, but I have latched on to 10 free tools that help me organize my online journey. 5 are common, and 5 are just getting big on the scene. I hope you can find some that help you as well.

blog.bufferapp.com/help-you-organize-the-internet

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tools ttl

May

28

2012

Playing the Role of MOOC Skeptic: 7 Concerns | Inside Higher Ed

But I also believe, and what I tried to make clear in the EWA panel, that MOOCs are in danger of being overhyped and their benefits being oversold.
In short, while I believe that MOOCS are wonderful for the people who teach them and can be wonderful for our institutions, I don't believe that MOOCs offer any sort of solution to increase access, raise quality, or decrease costs in the higher ed marketplace.

www.insidehighered.com/...g-role-mooc-skeptic-7-concerns

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MOOC education ttl

May

26

2012

20 Awesome Google+ Tips for Teachers

Whether you have been using Google+ for long time or you have just started , the following tips will help you better maximise the potential of this social network both in your classroom and for your professional development.

www.educatorstechnology.com/...-google-tips-for-teachers.html

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google tips teachers ttl

Rudy Garns's Public Library

Denim and Tweed: Evolutionary psychology: A dialogue

Deric Bownds' MindBlog: Serotonin modulates reward value in our decision making.

Joshua Knobe | Full Stop

3:AM Magazine » Brain hammer

[Human Nature as a Subject of Science - Mill selection

Philosophy o fMind and Human Nature - Pasnau

Quotes About Human Nature (289 quotes) | Goodreads

Philosophy and Science of Human Nature - Gendler | iTunes

Human Nature, Religious and Philosophical Aspects - eNotes.com

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature w/ Tamar Gendler - YouTube

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature - Gendler syllabus

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr |The Atlantic

Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon

I'm Confused: How Could Information Equal Entropy?

Entropy (information theory) | Wikipedia

philosophy bites: Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will

ifttt / Channels

10 Free Tools to Help You Organize the Internet | Twitter Tips And Updates From Buffer

Playing the Role of MOOC Skeptic: 7 Concerns | Inside Higher Ed

20 Awesome Google+ Tips for Teachers

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