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Old and New: An Introduction

Greetings. As I bring in my html luggage and unpack, let me stop for a moment to introduce myself and this blog. I'm a science writer. I started out at Discover, where I ended up as a senior editor before heading out into the freelance world in 1999. Since then I've written for a number of magazines, and over the last couple years I've been writing pretty regularly for the Science Times section of the New York Times. I also write books, which I've placed in the left column for those who are interested. I'm now trying to crank through the sixth, a biography of Escherichia coli (at least when I…

Reconstructing The Brain in Action: Motor Reprogramming

Reductionism in the neurosciences has been incredibly productive, but it has been difficult to reconstruct how high-level behaviors emerge from the myriad biological mechanisms discovered with such reductionistic methods. This is most clearly true in the case of the motor system, which has long been studied as the programming of motor actions (at its least reductionistic). However, as pointed out by Mars et al., the brain is almost constantly enacting motor plans, and so the initiation of actions is more likely preceded by motor reprogramming than anything else. However, that process has…

Bonobo (Re)Visions

As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the first of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker. As expected, the apologists for unreason who promote Intelligent Design have jumped on the recent article in The New Yorker about bonobos. This inspired me to write at more length about the article since this is a species I've studied closely for the last two years. Denyse O'Leary at Uncommon Descent uses the article to proudly…

Sunday paean

Science is hard. But science, and the methodological naturalism that underlies it, has proved to be the best way to observe, describe, and explain our reality. Sure, people can come up with ridiculous straw man arguments like, "but how do you measure love?" but these arguments ring hollow. (We measure "love", a behavior, by the observable behaviors that human beings report when they are "in love".) To a scientist, the appeal to magic to describe the world is difficult to understand, since the real puzzle is so much more fun. If, for example, you discover the cause of a particular disease…

Keeping 'em alive

One of the frequent complaints I hear about real medicine is that it is dangerous. Of course, it's true---so is riding in a train, but it sure beats walking. And that's the danger of this particular fallacy---yes, medicine is a sharp tool, but it's also an effective tool, so we must use it properly. And this is where the tools of evidence- and science-based medicine can give us a hand. The potential harms of modern medicine must be approached carefully. If they are ignored or approached in an ineffective way, we'll miss an opportunity to save lives. This comment is typical of the type of…

Control A Computer with Your Brain, And Look Good Doing It

A few months ago, I attended Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables. It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his…

Computers are Interesting

I've always considered myself to be computer-savvy. After all, my Dad works for a major semiconductor manufacturer, I hung out deeply with MS-DOS when I was six, taught myself HTML in high school, and -- I promise you -- I have been on Myspace.com for much longer than you have. I've always scoffed at the kind of people who type with just their pointer fingers, have trouble installing software, and refer to that endless database of ours as the "internets." And, yet, when a friend of mine earnestly asked me, just the other night, "so, where is the internet, exactly?" I found myself stammering…

So long, and thanks for all the fish

Four years and four months ago, almost to the day, I started a humble little blog way over in a tiny corner of the blogosphere. Back in the day, there were few voices of women scientists in the blogosphere, and even fewer of women computer scientists. I had never had much luck keeping any semblance of a journal before, and I had no idea what I was going to say, really, because who really wants to hear the rantings musings of a lowly pseudonymous computer scientist? I'm not a betting woman, but I thought this little experiment would last one month, tops. Boy, was I wrong. People actually…

Do ADHD drugs give caretakers a placebo effect?

[note: addition/corrections at bottom added an hour after orig post. additions underlined. deletions struckthrough. See *] Meet the meta-placebo: A new study suggests that ADHD meds do much of their work by producing placebo effects -- and more constructive behavior -- among the parents, teachers, and other caretakers of the kids actually taking the meds. Via ScienceDaily: A recent review of research by University at Buffalo pediatric psychologists suggests that [ADHD] medication, or the assumption of medication, may produce a placebo effect -- not in the children, but in their teachers,…

A New Piece of Seizure Inducing Media: Sean Paul Reggae

Don't play any of the embedded videos if you've ever had a seizure. Now that we're done with the warning... We've all heard of the Pokemon incident in Japan where nearly 700 school aged children were admitted to the hospital with "convulsions, vomiting, irritated eyes and other symptoms" common to epilepsy. This lead to a number of government investigations and media companies searching their offerings to determine whether any of their shows had similar scenes that might induce photosensitive epilepsy. According to a CNN report of the incidents: Dr. Yukio Fukuyama, a juvenile epilepsy…

Is this the new Intelligent Design creationist strategy?

If you watch the Discovery Institute, you'll discover they're constantly playing games, trying to find that winning PR technique that will persuade the hapless ignorati. Some of them are effective, even if dishonest: "irreducible complexity" injected all kinds of misleading chaos into the brains of their followers, and "teach the controversy" was a potent slogan. They've been flailing about in recent years, trying to emphasize their pretense of scholarliness with tripe like West's efforts to use pseudohistory to blame Darwin for Hitler, or Meyer's farcical, long-winded distortions of modern…

Scientists behaving deviously

There are some scientific technologies that rapidly become ubiquitious and indispensible, and they become the engine that drives tremendous amounts of research, win Nobel prizes, and are eventually taken for granted. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is one example: PCR is routine in molecular biology now, but I remember when PCR machines were magical objects of reverence, and you were cutting edge when you used one. No more; I actually tell my senior students presenting their final thesis presentation that they don't have to explain what PCR is anymore, everyone knows what it is and how it…

Why a "moonshot to cure cancer" is doomed to failure

A few days ago, David Bowie died of cancer. This morning I learned that the actor Alan Rickman has died of cancer. You all know the rule of threes, right? It has been satisfied, because in his state of the union address Barack Obama announced that he was going to kill American biological research, with cancer. OK, maybe that's a little strong: he was more devious about it. He announced a "moonshot" to cure cancer. It's the same thing. US President Barack Obama isn’t going quietly. He began his final year in office by announcing a “moonshot” to cure cancer in his State of the Union address to…

Malcolm Gladwell, risk pools, and why health insurance is killing American industries

In his recent New Yorker article, "The Risk Pool," as well as a blog post, Malcolm Gladwell has drawn attention to yet another reason to move to a single-payer health insurance system: the punishing competitive disadvantage that American companies and industries suffer when they provide health insurance, especially health insurance for their retirees and pensioners. Gladwell's piece is mainly about retirement benefits, both pensions and health-care; he focuses on the "dependency ratio," which is the ratio, within a company, an industry, or a country, of working wage-earners to nonworking…

Size does matter!

When I interned at Florida Aquarium I had the pleasure of working with two screech owls. Sure, there were bigger, more impressive looking raptors that I could hold and show people, but those pint-sized versions were my favorite. It wasn't just that they were small (though that totally helped). It was that when you'd go to take them out of their cage to walk around with, they would puff up and try to act all big an menacing - which, frankly, just made them look like giant brown cotton balls. What the birds were aiming to do was make themselves look bigger and more important. All kinds of…

The Friday Fermentable: Beer me, y'all

This is kind of a homer version of The Friday Fermentable, but I think that it has enough international interest that I am putting it here and on the oft-neglected local blog, Bull City Bully Pulpit. Many themes will come together here that involve science blogging and this will be our first discussion of beer since this feature began. To be honest, when I began making my own wine some 15 years ago, I realized it took so long to enjoy the wine I had made (at least a year or more) that I began brewing beer, a fermentable that can and generally should be enjoyed within three to four weeks.…

Upcoming Travel - England, Germany, France

One of my many distractions lately is travel planning. After spending several months living in the wilds of Lower Alabama, I'm getting to take a bit of a vacation. Right now, face a 60-minute round-trip commute to get to the nearest bookstore (a marginally acceptable Barnes and Noble). If I'm going to make a longer trip to restock the larder, I might as well go the full Monty and hit the Waterstone's on Piccadilly Circus. So I'm off to Europe for a few weeks at the beginning of April. I've got the rough outline sketched in, and I'm hoping that some of you can help me fill in some of the…

The Winkler County Nurse Trial, An Alleged Massive Conflict of Interest, and Morgellons

As some of you might know, there is a very scary criminal case currently underway out in West Texas. A registered nurse named Anne Mitchell is currently standing trial. She's been charged with misuse of official information, which is a felony carrying a 10-year maximum sentence. She allegedly committed this crime by sending a complaint to the State Medical Board, because she was concerned about what she believed to be a pattern of sub-standard care and ethics on the part of Dr. Rolando Arafiles, a physician at the hospital where she worked. Dr. Arafiles, according to the complaint filed by…

Getting Fit - A Scienceblogs Challenge

As you might have seen, there's a fitness challenge going on here at ScienceBlogs. A few years ago, when I first started blogging here, my non-participation in any fitness-related activity would have been a safe bet. But that was then. Over the last couple of years, I've come to realize that the numbers coming off the blood pressure cuff were not actually figments of the doctor's crazed imagination. I've also started to recognize that the number "2" should not be appearing in my weight twice, and it probably shouldn't be the first digit in the number. I've finally acknowledged, in other…

The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath

I just finished reading the torture memos that were released today. I cannot remember ever in my life being as ashamed of my country as I am at this moment. The contents of the memos are so insanely wrong that I'd like to believe that they're fiction, but they're clearly not. While I understand President Obama's desire to move forward, I am appalled by his decision to rule out prosecutions for anyone who relied on the excuse that these memos said that what they were doing was OK. Of course, prosecutions aren't the only possible consequences, and there are some disciplinary options that the…

Stimulus Spending and NSF Funding

Both the economic stimulus plan passed by the House and the plan passed by the Senate have quite a bit of funding for scientific research. As most of you know, scientific research is near and dear to my heart, and I'm generally in favor of spending lots of money trying to learn new things. For today, though, I'm going to set aside my usual criteria for evaluating scientific spending (more money = more better), and look at some of these proposals in terms of their effect as economic stimulus. There are quite a few different sections of the stimulus that contain funding for science. For now…

The Jessica Hardy Doping Case - Something Just Doesn't Make Sense

My scientific background leaves me more inclined to trust laboratory results than people, and I'm no more inclined to give athletes the benefit of the doubt in doping cases than anyone else who's been paying attention over the last couple of decades. When I heard that Jessica Hardy had tested positive for a banned substance at the Olympic Trials, and most likely will not get to swim in the olympics, I wasn't really surprised. Swimming hasn't been plagued with the same sort of doping scandals that other sports have seen, but it would be shocking if there weren't at least a few cheaters out…

Friday Bookshelf: Becoming Leaders

You're a smart woman, and a fabulous scientist or engineer. You know you can be a great researcher or professional engineer. But have you given thought to doing more than your job - to becoming a leader? F. Mary Williams and Carolyn J. Emerson hope you will, and to encourage you, they've put together Becoming Leaders: A Practical Handbook for Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology. The book is a joint project of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers. As the authors note in the introduction,…

A Moron in Utrecht

So, I'm catching up on my Chronicle of Higher Education reading, and I come across this article (you need a subscription): A Finger on the Pulse of Cool Finding out what young adults consider cool is the key to success for advertisers and marketers. College students alone spend billions each year on electronics, entertainment, fashion, and food. So when companies like Nike, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft want to figure out how best to appeal to young consumers, they track down Carl Rohde. Mr. Rohde, who teaches cultural sociology at the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, insists he is "…

But why should we save the Wiliwili

This is a repost. Specifically, it's the second of four posts from my old blog about the effects of an invasive insect on an endemic tree in the Hawaiian Islands. I moved the first in the series here last week; the remaining two will follow over the next few days. Once I've moved all of the relevant posts over here, I'll be posting an update on the situation. One of the comments that was inspired by my earlier post on the invasive gall wasps that are threatening some native Hawaiian plants raised a point that is worth responding to in detail, since it comes up fairly often both in…

Test your boundaries -- then find out how you made them

[Originally posted in February, 2007] When you look out the window and then look away, how do you remember what you saw? Do you hold a picture of the window in your head, frame and all? What about a photo? Do you remember the physical photo, or do you imagine the real scene it represents? If you remember the scene, and not the photo, then how do you form the boundaries of the scene? Does your memory end precisely where the photo does? Here's a little test to see how accurate your short-term memory of a photo is. When you play the movie below, you'll have a second to get ready, then a photo…

Why I am an amoral, family-hating monster…and Newt Gingrich isn't

Today is my wedding anniversary. I've been married to the same woman for 31 years, without ever straying. Newt Gingrich has been married 3 times, divorced one wife while she was recovering from surgery, and has had extra-marital affairs. Guess who is considered the defender of traditional sexual morality? It's a strange situation where the political party with more ex-wives than candidates, that houses and defends a disturbingly amoral network of fundamentalist operators is regarded as the protector of the sanctity of the family. They're anything but. I think I understand, though — it doesn't…

Practicing self-control consumes real energy

When I write an article for Cognitive Daily, I follow a similar pattern nearly every time. First I carefully read the journal article I'll be discussing. Next I take a break and work on something else. Then I get myself a caffeinated beverage and some kind of sweet treat (usually it's chocolate-covered raisins but today I'm in a coffee shop having just finished a toffee almond bar). Often it won't be until ten or fifteen minutes after I've eaten that I really get into a groove with the writing. Then I write the entire post, usually for an hour or two straight, pausing only to produce the…

Some insight into how we decide how fast music should be played

Listen to the following three short audio samples. Your job is to say whether the tempo (the rate at which the notes are played) is speeding up or slowing down. Even if it sounds like it's maintaining the same tempo, make your best guess as to whether it's speeding up or slowing down. [Update: There's a new demo here. And see this correction] Clip 1: Take the pollFree Poll by Blog Flux Clip 2: Take the pollFree Poll by Blog Flux Clip 3: Take the pollFree Poll by Blog Flux If the results here follow the pattern found in a number of studies, there should be a bias in the responses (and yes,…

Few listeners can distinguish between "average" and "best" MP3 samples

Two weeks ago, we challenged our readers to see if they could discern the difference between MP3 recordings at different sampling data rates. Nearly 700 completed our study. So does a very high data rate result in a noticeable difference? Here our are basic results: Respondents rated two recordings, one by rock guitarist Carlos Santana, and another by orchestral composer Aaron Copland. Each recording was encoded into an MP3 file at three different data rates: 64, 128, and 256 kbps. For both recordings, there was a significant difference between ratings of the 64 kbps data rate and the 128…

Test your boundaries -- then find out how you made them

When you look out the window and then look away, how do you remember what you saw? Do you hold a picture of the window in your head, frame and all? What about a photo? Do you remember the physical photo, or do you imagine the real scene it represents? If you remember the scene, and not the photo, then how do you form the boundaries of the scene? Does your memory end precisely where the photo does? Here's a little test to see how accurate your short-term memory of a photo is. When you play the movie below, you'll have a second to get ready, then a photo will flash for just a half-second. It…

Hill Report: "A Committee of the Future," and a Rep. From the Past

Why do House global warming hearings draw so many more people than Senate hearings? I don't know, but I arrived late today to Capitol Hill and so spent half of my time listening to the House Science and Technology Committee hearing on the new IPCC report in an overflow room. (I didn't try at first to invoke "journalist's privilege" to get in the main room, although later, Seed's Washington correspondent was ushered in.) The opening of the hearing was in some ways the most interesting part. In an historic moment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (left) gave testimony on her global warming…

21 Cat 4-5 Storms for 2006?

Cyclone Monica on April 24, 2006, possibly the strongest recorded hurricane in the Southern Hemisphere. So: According to Jeff Masters, there were 21 Category 4 or 5 hurricanes globally in 2006. Zero of them were in the Atlantic, which makes the total number sound even more staggering. I actually disagree with Masters on this; after doing my own count using Wikipedia, I only get 20 of these storms; and after doing my own count with the "best track" data provided by Unisys Weather, I get 19. But we'll get to that in a minute. First, let's talk about what the number, whatever it is, actually…

I get email

It's an unfortunate fact of google life that links to my criticisms of Kent Hovind pop up quite high in google listings, so I'm always getting these letters from pissed-off creationists who are shocked, shocked, shocked that there they are, innocently searching for information on their hero, when Pharyngula rises up and dares to criticize the great bible-thumping convicted tax cheat. In addition to the usual incoherence and refusal to offer any scientific support for their position, these letters are usually marked by a rather sniffy attitude of offended sensibilities and surprise that web…

Unknown White Male

What's it like to have all your memories erased? Well, not all your memories, because if that happened, you'd simply be like a newborn infant, and you'd have to relearn everything. The more interesting scenario is to lose only certain memories -- the memories that most people think of as "true" memories: episodic memory. Memories can be divided into three rough categories: episodic, semantic, and procedural (there are actually many more categories). Procedural memories are the memories of how to do things: driving a car, walking, sewing, and so on. Semantic memories are bits of factual…

Does our language affect our thoughts?

One of the oldest questions in the study of language involves how it influences our thought. One of the most controversial answers comes from Benjamin Whorf, the student of renowned anthropologist Edward Sapir: language not only influences thought; language determines thought—thought cannot exist without language. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least in its strongest form, has been discarded by mainstream psychologists. After all, it's not difficult to come up with many examples of thought that do not involve language, such as mentally rotating an object or learning how to juggle (think about…

The New Scientist damns science blogs with faint praise

Ever since it was made available last month I have been anxiously awaiting the first formal reviews of the new edition of The Open Laboratory: The best science writing on blogs 2008. Today the first appeared over at the New Scientist, but much of it had little to do with The Open Laboratory itself. Although I was happy to see that my contribution about what Joseph Hooker's kids did to Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species manuscript merited a mention, the rest of the review left me somewhat perplexed. According to the author, Michael Le Page, the review was heavily influenced by the…

Newsweak? Risk Assessment Expert Slams Bob Samuelson on Global Warming

Several weeks ago, Newsweek ran a much-discussed cover story by Sharon Begley "revealing" the story that many of us have been writing for years: There has been a campaign, supported by many fossil fuel interests, to sow doubt about mainstream climate science. Duh. The main newsworthy thing about this effort, to my mind, is that it now appears in decline. But it was a naughty, naughty thing to do, and it certainly ought to be exposed and re-exposed. So far, so good. But then comes Newsweek's own Robert Samuelson with a chowder-headed takedown of his own magazine's "Truth About Denial" cover…

Signs of a Growing U.S. Climate Consensus?

What are the appropriate roles of the defense and intelligence establishments in understanding and responding to global warming? In a recent op-ed, my colleague Mark Drapeau and I reviewed a study by the CNA Corp. that highlighted the natural security threats posed by unchecked climate change. The CNA report observed (rightly, in our view) that the predicted impacts of climate change - among them, critical shortages of food and water in some regions - could act as "threat multipliers" in some of the least developed, but strategically important parts of the world. In light of this, we argued…

Casual Fridays: How does Star Wars end? Depends on how old you are

Here's a bonus bit of analysis from last week's Casual Fridays study. In addition to asking respondents how familiar they were with our selection of stories, we also asked them to describe some detail of the story that was independently verifiable, like how the story ended. The reason we did this was to double-check the self-reported responses. If everyone had said they were familiar with the Fox and the Grapes fable, but then half of the respondents got the ending wrong, we would have had a reason to discount the self-reported responses. As it turned out, for most of the stories, people who…

Office noise: Are your homicidal thoughts about your noisy office-mate justified?

A reader recently emailed to ask us if there's been any research about whether poor working conditions such as a noisy or overheated office affect motivation and efficiency. Wouldn't it be great if you could document to your employer that the guy in the next cubicle's constant gabbing on the phone is negatively affecting the company's bottom line? Greta did a search of the literature (and made some queries to colleagues who specialize in industrial / organizational psychology) and confirmed my suspicion that there has been a great deal of research into how working conditions affect…

Casual Fridays: Who spotted Richard Dawkins?

Do you recognize this man? If so, you're not alone: over three-quarters of our readers were able to spot Richard Dawkins as he flashed by in a QuickTime video. So does this mean that the gatekeepers at Expelled who ejected the much-less-famous PZ Myers but not Dawkins two weeks ago are a bunch of incompetent oafs? Not necessarily. Many of those participating in the study came via Greg Laden's post on the subject, which included jumbo-sized pictures of both Dawkins and Myers. Maybe they had an unfair advantage over the harried gatekeepers for Expelled, who didn't have photos as a reference --…

Psychotherapy Changes Brains

href="http://www.researchblogging.org/"> alt="Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" height="50" width="80">The researchers did fMRI of brains of persons with href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder" rel="tag">Borderline Personality Disorder, before and after psychotherapy.  This was a small study, using a design that would be difficult to use routinely, but it is provisionally interesting.  Difficult, because the patients received 12 weeks of inpatient therapy (perhaps…

Control of rodent motor cortex with an optical neural interface

This year, several research groups have used bacterial proteins called channelrhodopsins to develop a technique with which light can be used to control the activity of nerve cells or the behaviour of small organisms. For example, Ed Boyden's group at the MIT Media Lab used the method to activate or inhibit neurons on a millisecond-by-millsecond timescale, while Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford have created an optical on/off switch that can control the movements of the nematode worm. Devices employing such technologies could in theory be used in advanced neural prostheses for a…

Invading Hands, Sleeping Beauties (bioephemera archive)

This entry originally appeared November 24, 2007 on the old bioephemera. I was inspired to repost & update it after seeing this post over at Morbid Anatomy earlier this month. Wounds (2007) Nicole Natri I ran across this collage by the talented Nicole Natri shortly after attending an interesting lecture, "When Sleeping Beauty Walked Out of the Anatomy Museum," by Kathryn Hoffmann, who is a professor of French at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. The connection here is pretty cool, but it's roundabout, so bear with me. Dr. Hoffmann's talk was my introduction to Pierre Spitzner's…

Friday Grey Matters: The Mind of Alex

One of my favorite authors is Margaret Atwood, the Canadian sci-fi writer who has penned "The Handmaid's Tale," "The Robber Bride," and "Oryx and Crake." The first on that list is the book that initially hooked me, but I think "Oryx and Crake" holds a special place on my bookshelf for perhaps the silliest of reasons--it mentions a character who's obsessed with Alex the parrot. Naturally, I could relate. Atwood's mention of Alex in her book made more sense to me when I met Irene Pepperberg, and she mentioned offhand that she was friends with Atwood. What at first seemed a coincidence was…

Hewlett Packard "Infomania" Study Pure Tripe, Blogs Not

A "study" conducted for computing firm Hewlett Packard warned of a rise in "infomania", with people becoming addicted to email and text messages and this impacting (what else?) their IQ. This came in 2006, but I just stumbled upon it today and became predicably irate at yet another example of terrible science reporting. The study, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers' intelligence. Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ - more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking…

Terrorism and the Punishment of Unrelated Crimes

Humans are strange animals. We have such a deep need for social order that, when that order is threatened, we'll do irrelevant things in an effort to preserve it. For example, when people are told that the conviction rate for a particular crime is low, they'll assign harsher punishments to individuals who commit that crime1. Because the low conviction rate is perceived as a threat to social order, they take it out on the next person associated with that threat, even though increasing one person's punishment does nothing to actually affect the perceived threat. Since terrorism is clearly one…

No Suicide Cringe

Usually I cringe when I see yet another newspaper article about suicide.  But I always read them.  This time, I did cringe, but needlessly.  The article turned out to be OK. href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/washington/24fda.html?ei=5090&en=69952ee3ab69a7b3&ex=1358917200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">F.D.A. Requiring Suicide Studies in Drug Trials By href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/gardiner_harris/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Gardiner Harris">GARDINER HARRIS January 24, 2008 src…

Sounds Cool, But What Good Is It?

The latest issue of href="http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/110/index.html">Fast Company has an article about href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bell" rel="tag">Gordon Bell, who is running a project to digitize and record all of the information he generates and encounters in the course of his life.  He calls the project href="http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx">MyLifeBits.  (The article is not openly accessible, but there are others out there on the same topic, and at least one href="http://participationage.wordpress.com/2006/03/22/…