Dr Jonathan Smallwood, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig, Germany, said: “What this study seems to suggest is that, when circumstances for the task aren’t very difficult, people who have additional working memory resources deploy them to think about things other than what they’re doing.”Working memory capacity is also associated with general measures of intelligence, such as reading comprehension and IQ scores, and also offers a window into the widespread, but not well understood, realm of internally driven thoughts.
Dr Smallwood added: “Our results suggest the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life — when they are on the bus, when they are cycling to work, when they are in the shower — are probably supported by working memory. Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.”
Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?For two reasons. One is about inequality, the other about corruption. First, consider inequality. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence—or the lack of it—matters. If the only advantage of affluence were the ability to afford yachts, sports cars, and fancy vacations, inequalities of income and wealth would matter less than they do today. But as money comes to buy more and more, the distribution of income and wealth looms larger.
The second reason we should hesitate to put everything up for sale is more difficult to describe. It is not about inequality and fairness but about the corrosive tendency of markets. Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged. Paying kids to read books might get them to read more, but might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Hiring foreign mercenaries to fight our wars might spare the lives of our citizens, but might also corrupt the meaning of citizenship.
Our version of Big Brother, unlike Orwell’s, is the product of the free choice of both its viewers and participants. It wasn’t created by corporate monsters or the military-industrial complex to keep us in our place. If, as The Hunger Games seems to imply, reality TV is an evil opiate for the masses, we’re eagerly doping ourselves. Panem’s problem is straightforward compared with our own: sadly, the failings of our free society are our own fault, and can only be addressed on that basis.Nonetheless, the film sticks to the comforting message that misery stems from the actions of the authorities. Its protagonists are the innocent victims of a system that they’re powerless to influence. Its target audience, the young, are invited to pride themselves on the blameless nobility of their age-group, but not expected to interrogate the realities of their world, or question their own passion for The X Factor.
Main reading room, New York Public Library (before 1924)
I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz, which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity… I don’t like the Singer Midgets under any circumstances, but I found them especially bothersome in Technicolor… I say it’s a stinkeroo.
Nepal, Badgaon, palais et Darbar Batsala Durga. 1988.
“Virtually all young people are familiar with electronic games and social networking and might be considered as ‘digital natives’, but they are not “digitally competent” in the sense that they do not know sufficiently how to use the digital world in a business context,” said the EC.The European e-Skills Week will comprise a number of activities and events designed to inform young people on how to acquire such skills from between the 19 and 30 March. The EC says that the driving force behind the initiative was the importance of ICT skills to the future of the European economy and an increase in jobs which require a high level of education.
Without nonfiction writers dedicated to producing factually accurate accounts that convey the horrific particulars of our world, we end up living a collective lie — a lie readily perpetuated by those who stand to lose political, military, or economic power if the truth is told.That, in part, is why it matters exactly how many people died in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, and by whom they were killed, and how, and under what circumstances. Why it matters exactly how many victims were tortured or otherwise abused or humiliated in Abu Ghraib, and by whom, and how, and under whose authority. Why it matters exactly how many people are dying in Homs, Syria, right now, and who is killing them, and how. And why it matters exactly how old the workers are at the Foxconn plants in China, exactly how many of them are suffering injuries on the job, and exactly what sort of misconduct Apple is — or is not — engaged in.
Twitter is often mislabeled as a social network when it’s actually more of a real-time information network. Yes, people make connections, but they tend to connect based on shared interests and location above existing friendships. You don’t follow your friends from high school, or others with whom you have nothing in common; You follow people who have something to say. And-more importantly for Google-Twitter is the most expansive, real-time, searchable window to the world today.Twitter and Facebook both have things Google needs if it wants to move into the post-web world. Facebook has social relevance. Twitter has real-time information. But Facebook and Google view themselves as competitors. And while Google and Twitter once had an arrangement, that deal fell through, for reasons neither party will fully disclose.
Enter Facebook. The site began as a free but closed system. It required not just registration but an acceptable email address (from a university, or later, from any school). Google was forbidden to search through its servers. By the time it opened to the general public in 2006, its clublike, ritualistic, highly regulated foundation was already in place. Its very attraction was that it was a closed system. Indeed, Facebook’s organization of information and relationships became, in a remarkably short period of time, a redoubt from the Web — a simpler, more habit-forming place. The company invited developers to create games and applications specifically for use on Facebook, turning the site into a full-fledged platform. And then, at some critical-mass point, not just in terms of registration numbers but of sheer time spent, of habituation and loyalty, Facebook became a parallel world to the Web, an experience that was vastly different and arguably more fulfilling and compelling and that consumed the time previously spent idly drifting from site to site. Even more to the point, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg possessed a clear vision of empire: one in which the developers who built applications on top of the platform that his company owned and controlled would always be subservient to the platform itself. It was, all of a sudden, not just a radical displacement but also an extraordinary concentration of power. The Web of countless entrepreneurs was being overshadowed by the single entrepreneur-mogul-visionary model, a ruthless paragon of everything the Web was not: rigid standards, high design, centralized control.