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The Chemistry of Information Addiction: Scientific American
So why do dopamine neurons treat information as a reward? It’s easy to see how treating information this way might be a useful evolutionary adaptation. For many animals, each day consists of numerous decisions that pertain to eating, reproducing and socializing. Obviously, having access to more relevant information – such as knowing where the food is located - allows animals to make better decisions. Furthermore, having access to such information might give us better control over our environment, thus increasing our chances of survival.
Habitual multitaskers do it badly, study shows | Crave - CNET
links to press release on Stanford study and PNAS for the study
How Different Groups Spend Their Day - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
Why Is Bob Herbert Boring? - T. A. Frank
Proposes and disposes of some theses on why liberal columnist Bob Herbert doesn't get more attention.
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ince I've examined two theories of blame—it's Bob's fault; it's Washington's fault—and found both to be partly wanting, that leaves another possibility: it's the world's fault. Or, at least, it's the fault of human nature. Sadly, history and science make a compelling case that most of us are, indeed, hard-pressed to give a damn. -
In 2005, the psychologists Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic found the limits of human compassion to be even more irrational and constrained. In their study, students at a university in Pennsylvania were paid five dollars to complete questionnaires on technology. Enclosed with the questionnaire was a seemingly unrelated letter soliciting donations to a hunger relief organization in Africa.
The study's first conclusion was what the researchers had expected: people are more compassionate when they are told about a specific victim. When respondents were asked to donate money to help feed a seven-year-old African girl named Rokia, they contributed more than twice what they did when just confronted with general statistics on hunger.
But then things got surprising. When Rokia was presented with the statistics, the donations fell by nearly half. Worse still, when the authors asked one set of subjects to perform mathematical calculations and the other set of subjects to describe their feelings when they heard the word "baby," the subjects who'd done math gave only about half as much to Rokia as the ones who'd thought about babies. Apparently, just thinking analytically makes us stingier. The authors of the study concluded that "calculative thought lessens the appeal of an identifiable victim."
Facebook and Google: Parochialize your Intarnet! | Savage Minds
The metrics of trust embodied by Google are a set of ideals grounded in the idea of a vast library, a global brain, “the world’s information” and the Internet as a vast sea of computable texts and actions; those of Facebook are ideals of human contact, facefulness, recognition, mimicry, identity management, constant contact, powerful control over one’s identity, social network and reputation, self-actualization. Google is dominated by an ethic of information openness in which more is better, because it makes it easier to comb through collect, sort and analyze data. The more open data is, the better your analysis of it will be. Facebook is dominated by something like an ethic of “revealed preferences”—the only information that matters is information tied to a autocthonous system that gives it meaning.
Bulletin of the World Health Organization - Kenneth Arrow and the birth of health economics
Nasslli Home Page -- www.nasslli.com
North America summer school in logic, language, and information.
Overcoming Bias : Why Signals Are Shallow
Geoffrey Miller says we try too hard to collect shallow signals that don’t say much to those who know us well. But a boss who has known you for years may not promote you unless you get a better degree, even if school teaches you nothing useful on your job. He might not hire you without that degree, even if he knows and trusts folks who have known you for years. Why do people who know us well care so much about shallow signals?
How Much Information?
2003 study by UC Berkeley researchers - Peter Lyman and Hal Varian.
Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: E-mailaholics: How to Tell If You've Got The Habit
For demographers and ethnographers, there can never be too many ways to classify individuals--by age, sex, ethnicity, work etc.
Now there's another tyep of classification they can use to group individual: by their email habits developed.
TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine | Word of Mouse
So here is how we may reinterpret Socrates’ ethical intellectualism: we do evil because we do not know better, in the sense that the better the information management is the less moral evil is caused. ICTs can help us in our fight against the destruction, impoverishment, vandalism and waste of both natural and human (including historical and cultural) resources. So they can be a precious ally in what I have called elsewhere synthetic environmentalism or e-nvironmentalism. The challenge is to reconcile our roles as agents within nature and as stewards of nature. The good news is that it is a challenge we can meet.
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