Smart Energy

A new study confirms it: Google is altering your brain. More precisely, our growing dependence on the Internet has changed how — and what — our brains choose to remember.

When we know where to find information, we’re less likely to remember it — an amnesia dubbed “The Google Effect” by a team led by psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University.

The finding, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, doesn’t prove that Google, Yahoo or other search engines are making us dumber, as some have asserted. We’re still capable of remembering things that matter — and are not easily found online, Sparrow said.

Rather, it suggests that the human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to new computing technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory. We’re outsourcing “search” from our brains to our computers.

“We’re not thoughtless empty-headed people who don’t have memories anymore,” Sparrow said. “But we are becoming particularly adept at remembering where to go find things. And that’s kind of amazing.”

via Google is changing your brain, study says, and don’t you forget it – San Jose Mercury News.

Blink charging stations at Seattle's Qwest Field (Photo courtesy ECOtality)

Seattle’s Qwest Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks football team, is now also home to the city’s first publicly available EV charging stations. This coming season, Seahawks fans can charge their EVs as they’re watching the games.

“The need to drive and the demand for driving is going to remain, but we need to give people more efficient options and better options for clean energy,” Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn said Thursday at the unveiling of the charging stations. “We’ll do all we can to make sure Seattle is eco-ready.”

“By the end of the year, more than 1,000 publicly available charging stations will be installed in Washington State, many of them in Seattle,” said Mayor McGinn.

Washington is one of six states participating in the public-private EV Project headed by ECOtotality, Inc. The company is in the process of installing 14,000 of its Blink charging stations nationwide.

Over the past few weeks, the company has begun to install Blink Pedestal chargers in commercial and publically accessible locations in Arizona, Oregon and Tennessee in addition to Seattle.

The Blink Pedestal is a Level 2 EV charger (240V) that features an interactive seven-inch color touch screen and web-based delivery via the Blink Network.

“Charging stations like the one at Qwest Field represent our first step toward a greener, cleaner transportation future,” said U.S. Congressman Jim McDermott, who represents Seattle. “In the not too distant future, federal investments in public-private projects like this will return immense rewards and really revolutionize the cars we drive and what fuels them.”

“It’s appropriate that some of the first charging stations in the nation are here in Seattle,” said McDermott. “We’re a city of innovation and have a track record of embracing the future.”

via Seattle Gets Its First Public Electric Vehicle Charging Stations.

Newsrooms are snarling nests of obsessive-compulsive disorder, with reporters staring at Twitter tickers with breath-baited for, well, these days, entire minutes at a time, waiting for something to change. For something to happen. And when something happens, like, say, one dopeware co.’s OS out hyphenates another’s in the mobile environment, that’s news. Even if the facts are wrong.

I only point out this obvious fact because everyone already knows it’s an ongoing problem with, for instance, the reporting about government, economics, personal relationships, cooking, and, now, in case you were worried that technology reporting has been  somehow lagging in its duty to shag your brain with utter nonsense on a daily basis, there comes this end-of-a-24-hour-news-cycle headline:

Android Browser Faster Than iPhone In Flawed Study Read the rest of this entry »

Get ready to take another clickin' from Facebook -- the "social" network that beats you silly and keeps coming back for more.

The only time you make an announcement on Friday night is when you want it to get lost in the weekend shuffle. The professionals are off, and sports and recipe-fillers are top of the hour and top of the page.  In the PR and news business, this is called “putting out the trash.” Witness Facebook’s latest piece of trash:

On Friday, Facebook made yet another change to its privacy policy, enabling third-party application developers to access your street address and cell phone number. This information was made public Friday night on the Facebook Developer Blog.

You really have to dig to delete your cell number, or whatever else of your personal info you don’t want shared. And, note, you have to DELETE the info — you can’t simply say, No, don’t share it with those guys. You must delete it, a process that requires at least four clicks (see the link below if you need step-by-step).

IMHO, you’re better off deleting Facebook from your life. But, hey, you wanna be a click farmer, a digital peasant, then go right on ahead. Just remember, every click you make on Facebook is making those guys money. And what, really, is it doing for you?

via How to delete address, cell number from Facebook | Safe and Secure – CNET News.

This might well be your tax dollars at work. The ultra-secret U.S. security agency N.S.A. (“no such organization”), as well as the Department of Gnomebrand Security, is capable of launching such attacks, according to information in an article by Seymour Hersh in the Nov. 1 issue of The New Yorker. The following is excetped from an article in Computerworld; warning: the site has multiple pop-ups:

WikiLeaks, the focus of attention since it released a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables two days ago, is again under a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, Internet researchers said today.

The site remained online with some short interruptions, however, as did a secondary site, cablegate.wikileaks.org, where nearly 300 U.S. State Department internal messages have been published thus far.

WikiLeaks echoed Labovitz’s take on today’s attack. [Labovitz is a chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a supplier of anti-DoS technology.] According to the organization’s Twitter account, Tuesday’s attack quickly reached 10Gbit/sec (gigabits-per-second), or two-and-a-half to five times larger than Monday’s.

A few months ago a worm called Stuxnet attacked an Iraqui nuclear power facility’s computers; speculation at the time was that the Pentagon could well be behind the attack but, some experts said, Israel was an even likelier source of the worm, which spread world wide. In his New Yorker article, Hersh mentions this speculation but does not confirm or comment on it.

More from Computerworld:

Although a single hacker, who goes by the nickname of “The Jester” — penned in leetspeak as “th3j35t3r” — claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack, which one security expert said was not launched via a botnet, today’s DoS looked more coordinated, said Labovitz. He wasn’t able to tell, however, whether it originated from a single source or from a botnet.

“There’s enough publicity surrounding WikiLeaks [and the leaked cables] that this will be an ongoing event for them,” Labovitz said.

No doubt, but you have to wonder, what with the ongoing embarrassment WikiLeaks has been to the U.S. government: is this DoS harassment funded or directed by U.S. security agencies? It’s hard to believe they (Spooks R Us) are not in some way involved.

Great Expectations & Kochuu, 2 films on DVD
review by Brian Charles Clark, who gives the pair 4 stars

There’s a funny TED Talk video called “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” about how to make a good – and a bad – TED Talk. One way to go bad is to talk about architecture. We may be safe in generalizing from TED to the general culture: architecture makes most people grow faint and causes their eyes to roll.

Which is weird, because in and around architecture is where we engage with other people the most. Buildings great and small are pretty much exclusively where we conduct the four F’s — the two familiar ones, fight or flight, plus the two even more familiar ones that everybody forgets to put on the F-list: freeze (or space out) and fuck. Architecture is where we live all the fundamentals of, well, life. From coffee to water cooler to toilet to bed, we really, really need architecture to help house us. Read the rest of this entry »

The oldest ground-edge stone tool in the world has been discovered in Northern Australia by a Monash University researcher and a team of international experts.

Evidence for stone tool-use among our earliest hominid ancestors dates to 3.4 million years ago. However, the first use of grinding to sharpen stone tool edges such as axes is clearly associated with modern humans, otherwise known as Homo sapiens sapiens.

“This suggests that axe technology evolved into the later use of grinding for the sharper, more symmetrical and maintainable edges this generates,” said Dr David.

via World’s oldest ground-edge implement discovered in northern Australia.

I just posted this to my blog at work:

Philip Leigh has a really interesting piece about the future of publishing on MediaPost.

He writes that just as “the printing press transformed publishing, the true cultural significance of blogging — which is only incipient at present — will be a consequence of its production process. ”

When I was in comm school, we called that technological determinism and, after much debate, arrived at the conclusion that in fact cultural change is so complex than attributing change to any one cause is always going to result in fallacy and misdirection.

That said, there is certainly some great insight into Leigh’s analysis. The invention of the rotary press circa 1830 resulted in an explosion called the newspaper industry. (Which had previously been low-budget, low-circulation affairs that mainly announced ship movements.)

But we have to ask a question here: was the rotary press invented out of whole cloth or was it invented because there was a need for high-speed print-production capability?

via A Little History, and the Future of Publishing – Marketing, News, and Educational Communications.

As if we needed further evidence that Facebook is Microsoft’s evil love spawn, the two have mated. Facebook is taking the passive role, opening itself to Bing and making the wannabe search engine the site’s sole source of search.

Brian Acohido reports in USA Today:

“Facebook’s no. 1 threat right now is Google,” says [an industry wise guy]. “So Facebook is trying to align its forces with others, in this case Microsoft, who are also trying to compete against Google.”

Google has not been deterred. The search giant has recently “hired a bunch of people, repositioned management and continues to view the social Web as strategically important,” [continues the industry wise guy]. “Rumor has it Google will roll out a major new social Web initiative over the next few weeks or months.”

…the temperature of the Earth beneath the state of West Virginia is significantly higher than previously estimated and capable of supporting commercial baseload geothermal energy production.

The SMU Geothermal Laboratory has increased its estimate of West Virginia’s geothermal generation potential to 18,890 megawatts (assuming a conservative 2% thermal recovery rate). The new estimate represents a 75 percent increase over estimates in MIT’s 2006 “The Future of Geothermal Energy” report and exceeds the state’s total current generating capacity, primarily coal based, of 16,350 megawatts.

The high temperature zones beneath West Virginia revealed by the new mapping are concentrated in the eastern portion of the state. Starting at depths of 4.5 km (greater than 15,000 feet), temperatures reach over 150°C (300°F), which is hot enough for commercial geothermal power production.

Traditionally, commercial geothermal energy production has depended on high temperatures in existing subsurface reservoirs to produce electricity, requiring unique geological conditions found almost exclusively in tectonically active regions of the world, such as the western United States. Newer technologies and drilling methods can be used to develop resources in wider ranges of geologic conditions.

The Science News piece continues with a discussion of new technologies that might be tried on a commercial scale in West Virginia.

via Geothermal mapping project reveals large, green energy source in West Virginia.

A summary of the SMU Geothermal Laboratory report is available online (http://smu.edu/smunews/geothermal/documents/west-virginia-temperatures.asp).