Essentials
theDiagonal is a personal blog by Mike Gerra, skeptic, technologist, psychologist, artist, humanist, collector of grand, eclectic ideas.theDiagonal blog connects the dots across multiple disciplines for inquisitive, objective and critical thinkers, exploring the vertices of big science, disruptive innovation, global sustainability, illuminating literature and leftfield art. It is on this diagonal that creativity thrives, big ideas take flight and reason triumphs.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Media Multi-Tasking, School Work and Poor Memory
It’s official — teens can’t stay off social media for more than 15 minutes. It’s no secret that many kids aged between 8 and 18 spend most of their time texting, tweeting and checking their real-time social status. The profound psychological and sociological consequences of this behavior will only start to become apparent ten to fifteen year from now. In the meantime, researchers are finding a general degradation in kids’ memory skills from using social media and multi-tasking while studying.
From Slate:
Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged impairment, memory, multi-tasking, psychology, social media, teenager
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Sunday, April 28, 2013
Google’s AI
The collective IQ of Google, the company, inched up a few notches in January of 2013 when they hired Ray Kurzweil. Over the coming years if the work of Kurzweil, and many of his colleagues, pays off the company’s intelligence may surge significantly. This time though it will be thanks to their work on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and (very) big data.
From Technology Review:
When Ray Kurzweil met with Google CEO Larry Page last July, he wasn’t looking for a job. A respected inventor who’s become a machine-intelligence futurist, Kurzweil wanted to discuss his upcoming book How to Create a Mind. He told Page, who had read an early draft, that he wanted to start a company to develop his ideas about how to build a truly intelligent computer: one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own.
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Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged artificial intelligence, big data, brain, Google, Ray Kurzweil
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