Category — General

The new voodoo economics. Economic dispatch: Mark Tran on why the Bush administration's $600bn economic plan could imperil America's finances. [Guardian Unlimited]

nothing new here, just another scam to get certain people rich….

NetGens Doing More Faster?.

Multitasking Becomes Continuous Partial Attention

“Will the rapid access to a great deal of information, and to many information devices, exceed our abilities to handle both them and our lives?…

'It's not the same as multitasking; that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: “How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting, or important, opportunity?… It's crucial for CEOs to be intentional about breaking free from continuous partial attention in order to get their bearings. Some of today's business books suggest that speed is the answer to today's business challenges. Pausing to reflect, focus, think a problem through; and then taking steady steps forward in an intentional direction is really the key.' ” [Smart Mobs]

Interestingly, they're also doing it much faster, which is making more difficult for the rest of us.

“This is one more way that the gap between old and young is widening as fast as the frequently noted gap between rich and poor. My father is frustrated not only by fast-paced commentator talk but also by countless other ways technology has made the world harder to navigate. When he makes a phone call to a business, he rarely encounters people he can ask to slow down, speak louder or explain what they said. Instead he gets menus that fly by too fast, are too hard to hear and offer choices that don't apply to the purpose of his call.” [The Washington Post]

And of course, last week Glenn Reynolds and his readers were reflecting on how this affects students in higher education (scroll up for more entries on the topic).

[The Shifted Librarian]

this is precisely what we should expect….

The Tyranny of the Tidy. The Tyranny of the Tidy: In college, after months of being chided by my roommate for an exceedingly messy room, I finally silenced her by repeatedly demonstrating my ability to quickly and easily retrieve any desired implement from the clutter without leaving my desk. Trying to be tidy always served only to make me inefficient. I understand that for others it may not be so, but is cleanliness really always a virtue? [MetaFilter]

there is a quote in bukowski that i have on my door, buk talks about the kitchen, i mangled it a bit to be office, but all in all, the ideas are somewhat the same..

When we have new business cards made at work, I'm going to add the title of Technology Anthropologist to mine. Thanks, Ernie!

[The Shifted Librarian]

now i know several people that are really just this, i wonder how far the title will spread

Multimedia Fun.

Scoble provided links to two great videos last week. The first is a Flash video titled Marry Me (get out your hankies), and the second is to Monster.com's What I Wanna Do When I Grow Up commercial (requires Quicktime), one of my all-time favorite commercials.

[The Shifted Librarian]

movies , movies, movies

Columbia's Internet Concern Will Soon Go Out of Business. Columbia University will fold Fathom.com, the commercial company it created to provide courses and other material over the Internet. By Karen W. Arenson. [New York Times: Education]

we knew this was going to happen eventually…

Affirmative Action For Blue-Bloods Comes Under Fire. Plastic::Politics::School: Democratic presidential contender John Edwards wants to end preferences for children of alumni at American colleges and universities. This may be an idea whose time has come or simply clever political posturing. [Plastic: Most Recent]

well this is a sinker, in a country where people aspire toward privilege, to start removing those will quickly burn you…

Hot New Marketing Concept: Mall as Memory Lane [New York Times: International News]

well i would rail against the fictions of nostalgia and the constructions of social control involved therein, but i've done that elsewhere.

In computer disease, there is no Edward Jenner. Lessons from the Laboratory [The Register]

this is a nice little article demonstrating the failure of the disease analogy

Mapping What We Read. Adina writes about some informal research done by Valdis Krebs that resulted in this diagram, which you can see full size by clicking here or on this gargantuan thumbnail: This is a rough-and-ready map of the reading preferences of the political left and the right. Valdis, who does superb maps of complex information, looked at some books easily identifiable as lefty or righty (e.g., Michael Moore's Stupid White Men and Ann Coulter's Slander) and then looked at each book's “buddy list” (”People who bought this book also bought…”). He followed those links and mapped the results. Given that Valdis is… [Joho the Blog]

interesting, i was just making the argument yesterday that communities of practice, epistemic communities, etc. are foundationally about shared beliefs