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Is Google making us stupid?

The book, and the article, are worth the read. I, for one, am back to my goal of reading a book a week. You can track me here on this site in the BOOK tab. Beware. Google just partnered to launch a satellite to bring high speed internet to poor, remote countries–Start-Up Seeks to Link 3 Billion to Net Google and Others Invest $60 Million In Satellite Plan.
Internet-Free And Glad of It [Bookshelf review]

By PAUL BOUTIN, WSJ, September 9, 2008; Page A23
Anathem By Neal Stephenson (William Morrow, 937 pages, $29.95)
“Is Google making us stupid? Intellectuals fret that the Internet’s instant-answer machine may be making us dumber, as we learn to solve problems without applying long-term mental effort. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” worried technology pundit Nicholas Carr in a recent Atlantic Monthly article. After 10 years of Internet immersion, Mr. Carr finds that when he attempts to read a book his concentration wanes after three pages. A lit-major friend of his commiserates: “I used to be a voracious book reader. What happened?”

The threat of digital dumb-down has prompted science-fiction author Neal Stephenson, in “Anathem,” to concoct a deliciously nerdy alternative world, one populated by characters who possess what he calls “attention surplus disorder.” The 937-page novel isn’t a cautionary tale; it’s an escapist fantasy for readers who miss the joys of studious immersion in math, science and philosophy. What if, Mr. Stephenson wonders, the world’s most earnest intellectuals cloistered themselves, shunning any thought of Internet video or quarterly results, to focus on 1,000-year projects? If word problems got you excited in school, this is the novel for you.

“The tale — ”

I’ve been thinking about blogs as a way to jobs.

Today, Wednesday June 23rd, Indeed.com posts some 4,151 jobs related to blogs:
[All Blog Jobs | Indeed.comJob search for All Blog Jobs at indeed.com. one search. all jobs.]

Simplyhired posted 2,561. Blog jobs | SimplyHiredFind all blog jobs. Blog job search made simple at SimplyHired, the largest search engine for jobs.

Finding a list of job blogs is tough! But, I found some interesting lists along the way.

RiseSmart Top 100 Job Blogs

“Looking for information about the job hunt, a particular industry or the recruiting process? The recruiting site, RiseSmart has put together a list of the top 100 job blogs online today. The blogs range in topic from moderated lists of legitimate business opportunities for entrepreneurs to Human Resource blog networks like ERE. The list features some of our personal favorite job blogs like Brazen Careerist and One Day, One Job as well as some interesting new sites like Punk Rock HR (on a personal note: this is just about one of the most entertaining HR blogs I have ever read) and Beyond Madison Avenue (for all you industry people looking to keep up with the ad world). Check out the full list of 100 blogs here. It is a great resource for all of your job searching and industry news needs.”

 Top 10 College Blogs

http://www.onedayonejob.com/blog/top-10-college-career-services-blogs/

Perhaps the way to go is via Geographical area/newspaper blogs (for example Boston Globe):

Jobs

Help yourself to these mustered musings of a recareerist–a career and retirement counselor/coach.

This site is about the subtleties of Social Physics that are talked but never taught.

A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight
Researchers Map the Anatomy of the Brain’s Breakthrough Moments and Reveal the Payoff of Daydreaming

Following the brain as it rises to a mental challenge, scientists are seeking their own insights into these light-bulb flashes of understanding, but they are as hard to define clinically as they are to study in a lab.

To be sure, we’ve all had our “Aha” moments. They materialize without warning, often through an unconscious shift in mental perspective that can abruptly alter how we perceive a problem. “An ‘aha’ moment is any sudden comprehension that allows you to see something in a different light,” says psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “It could be the solution to a problem; it could be getting a joke; or suddenly recognizing a face. It could be realizing that a friend of yours is not really a friend.”

These sudden insights, they found, are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically. “Your brain is really working quite hard before this moment of insight,” says psychologist Mark Wheeler at the University of Pittsburgh. “There is a lot going on behind the scenes.”

Recommended Reading

Daydreaming is more demanding than it seems, researchers reported in “Experience Sampling During fMRI Reveals Default Network and Executive System Contributions to Mind Wandering” in Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences.

A positive mood makes an insight more likely, Northwestern University researchers reported in “A Brain Mechanism for Facilitation of Insight by Positive Affect” in the March edition of Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

In the journal Neuropsychologia, Drexel University scientists reported on “The Origins of Insight in Resting State Brain Activity.”

Together, the two research teams reported that people who solved problems through insight had different brain wave patterns than people who don’t. In PLoS Biology, they documented “Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight” and the “Neural Basis of Solving Problems with Insight.”

At the University of London’s Goldsmith College, researchers reported in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that brain waves heralding an insight can be detected 8 seconds before we become conscious of it.