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Tag archives for reading
Does Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus undervalue meatspace?
Posted by David Dobbs on June 19, 2010 Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky’s central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been wasting watching TV. Yet…
iPad, therefore iKludge
Posted by David Dobbs on June 10, 2010 Don DeLillo’s Players, as marked up by David Foster Wallace.Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. I just sat down to air a complaint about reading on the iPad when I discovered that Sue Halpern had done much of my work for me: For all its supposed interactivity, the iPad is a surprisingly…
Morning dip: reading, writing, merit pay, musical spouses, swine flu, and fire towers
Posted by David Dobbs on September 4, 2009 photo: U.S. Forest Service Notables of the day: John Hawks ponders the (bad) art of citing papers you’ve never read. Clive Thompson ponders the new literacy spawned of engagement with many keyboards. A poll on public education shows how much opinion depends on framing, context — and who else thinks an idea is good. In…
On my reading table
Posted by David Dobbs on April 8, 2009 The 10,000-year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Evolution, of which I’ve so far read about 1000 words — but I just got it. Appears to be The Beak of the Finch (faster than expected evolutionary changes) in humans, but with this delicious addtion: the idea that culture can drive evolution, so that the line between “nature”…
Morning Dip: Facebook (not) friends, paid learning, lip-reading babies, more on EHRs
Posted by David Dobbs on March 9, 2009 “Primates on Facebook” — “Even online, the neocortex is the limit” to how many people we can really have as friends. People who use more textual shortcuts (lk whn they txt in skl) when texting have higher reading skills. The coverage seems to assume this is causal, but it’s almost surely just an association —…