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Posted: 14-09-2010 13:31 Post subject:

I fear the writer is undiscliplined and easily distracted.

Posted: 15-09-2010 08:50 Post subject:

Baroness Susan Greenfield: society should wake up to harmful effects of internet
Society should be aware of the potentially harmful effects of the internet, networking sites and computer games on the brain, leading neuroscientist and peer Baroness Susan Greenfield has said.
Published: 6:30AM BST 15 Sep 2010

Lady Greenfield, one of Britain's most prominent female scientists, claimed the issue was "almost as important as climate change".
"I think the quality of our existence is threatened,'' she said. ''We need discussions about this, we need debate, we need more of an effort put in.
"We need to recognise this as an issue rather than sweeping it under the carpet.
"We should acknowledge that this is bringing an unprecedented change in our lives and we have to work out whether it is for good or bad."

In January Lady Greenfield controversially lost her job as director of the Royal Institution.

She spoke at the British Festival of Science at Aston University in Birmingham.

She said some ''very good things'' were emerging from information technology but added: "By the same token we have got to be very careful about what price we are paying."

Possible benefits of the technology included a higher IQ, better memory and faster processing of information.

On the other side of the equation, social networking sites might reduce empathy, said Lady Greenfield.

Using search engines to find facts may hinder the ability to learn, while computer games could "make us more reckless in our day-to-day lives".

"Rather than sleepwalking into this we should be the masters and not the slaves of technology and harnessing it in ways that we could do exciting and fulfilling things with," she added.

Lady Greenfield insisted that she was not scaremongering.

"We have anecdotal evidence from talking to parents," she said. "Every single parent I have spoken to so far is concerned.

"I have yet to find a parent who says, 'I am really pleased that my kid is spending so much time in front of the computer.'

"We need to take control of our own lives and society. If we don't, who else will?"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/8002921/Baroness-Susan-Greenfield-society-should-wake-up-to-harmful-effects-of-internet.html

Posted: 15-09-2010 08:54 Post subject:

Pah!

Ive yet to hear a parent say `I am pleased my kid is outside all the time`

Doesnt mean its a good thing.

The internets done me a world of good, taught me stuff, given me confidence and made friends

Posted: 17-07-2011 08:51 Post subject:

Internet's memory effects quantified in computer study
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Computers and the internet are changing the nature of our memory, research in the journal Science suggests.
Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers.
When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.

The researchers say the internet acts as a "transactive memory" that we depend upon to remember for us.
Lead author Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University said that transactive memory "is an idea that there are external memory sources - really storage places that exist in other people".
"There are people who are experts in certain things and we allow them to be, [to] make them responsible for certain kinds of information," she explained to BBC News.

Co-author of the paper Daniel Wegner, now at Harvard University, first proposed the transactive memory concept in a book chapter titled Cognitive Interdependence in Close Relationships, finding that long-term couples relied on each other to act as one another's memory banks.
"I really think the internet has become a form of this transactive memory, and I wanted to test it," said Dr Sparrow.

The first part of the team's research was to test whether subjects were "primed" to think about computers and the internet when presented with difficult questions. To do that, the team used what is known as a modified Stroop test.

The standard Stroop test measures how long it takes a participant to read a colour word when the word itself is a different colour - for example, the word "green" written in blue.
Reaction times increase when, instead of colour words, participants are asked to read words about topics they may already be thinking about.

In this way the team showed that, after presenting subjects with tough true/false questions, reaction times to internet-related terms were markedly longer, suggesting that when participants did not know the answer, they were already considering the idea of obtaining it using a computer.

A more telling experiment provided a stream of facts to participants, with half told to file them away in a number of "folders" on a computer, and half told that the facts would be erased.
When asked to remember the facts, those who knew the information would not be available later performed significantly better than those who filed the information away.
But those who expected the information would be available were remarkably good at remembering in which folder they had stored the information.
"This suggests that for the things we can find online, we tend keep it online as far as memory is concerned - we keep it externally stored," Dr Sparrow said.

She explained that the propensity of participants to remember the location of the information, rather than the information itself, is a sign that people are not becoming less able to remember things, but simply organising vast amounts of available information in a more accessible way.

"I don't think Google is making us stupid - we're just changing the way that we're remembering things... If you can find stuff online even while you're walking down the street these days, then the skill to have, the thing to remember, is where to go to find the information. It's just like it would be with people - the skill to have is to remember who to go see about [particular topics]."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14145045

Posted: 17-07-2011 12:37 Post subject:

internet only doing what librarians have been doing for years - knowing where to find stuff rather than trying to memorize stuff itself - which is becoming less important as information changes so quickly.

on a personal level though because I'm not keeping records of what I do and as we become more "paperless", time becomes more of a blur. I have difficulty placing events in a particular year unless I have some form of hard copy backup.

Posted: 17-07-2011 14:26 Post subject:

Posted: 01-09-2011 10:46 Post subject:

'No, we shouldn’t just Google it': John Walsh laments the death of the reference book
Sales of reference books are sinking fast as we turn online for the answers to life's big – and small – questions. But our civilisation would be infinitely poorer if Roget's, Brewer's and Fowler's go out of print, argues John Walsh
Thursday, 1 September 2011

Here come the new words, rolling and tumbling towards us in their shiny, multi-hued novelty like those thousands of coloured balls that cascaded down a street in that television commercial. These are the words that have just joined the language, and have been included in the 12th edition of The Chambers Dictionary, out this week.

[...]

Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years. The big, dusty, 2,000-page family dictionary has become surplus to requirements, as potential users have turned to the internet for their definitions. The figures for 2010 show that spending on dictionaries fell for the seventh consecutive year, to a record low of £9.2m. Single-language and bilingual dictionaries dropped 13 per cent. Other reference books, including atlases and home-learning titles, sank by 10 per cent. But as early as 2007 some publishers were predicting that paper dictionaries will die out completely, as the word-curious turn wholly online. And if they go the way of reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and camera film, we'll have lost a substantial source of intellectual delight: the reference shelf.

The reference shelf used to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist would be without: the books represented a small army of helpers in the fight to express oneself in writing or to understand obscure words or references in someone's work.

The volumes jostling for shelf space would be The Chambers Dictionary (or the Concise Oxford English), Roget's Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fowler's Modern English Usage, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Some of these may be unfamiliar to 21st-century readers; they were once considered essential.

Roget's Thesaurus was the work you consulted when the word you were looking for was on the tip of your tongue but refused to come out. At least you knew the flipping word was to be found somewhere in the pages of Roget. If you were writing an article about translation and you'd already used the word "translation" four times and were searching for a word that meant something like "translation", you looked up Roget and found "version, rendering, crib, paraphrase, précis, abridgement, adaptation, decoding, decipherment..." along with several other semi-synonyms.

Fowler's Modern English Usage, which first appeared in 1926, was the 20th century's most influential style guide for writers – its author, Henry Watson Fowler, was anti-pretension, anti-pedantry, suspicious of old-fashioned rules of grammar and impatient with archaic terms and fancy foreign words. He was a sleek and witty writer, and it sometimes felt morally beneficial to be in his company.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable dates back to 1870, when the Rev E Cobham Brewer set out to explain to a new generation of autodidacts – aspiring readers without a university education – the literary allusions or learned phrases they met when reading classic authors or Times leaders. If you were puzzled by a mention, in a Victorian novel, of "Phalaris's bull", Brewer would tell you about the hapless brass sculptor Perillos, who proposed a new torture method to Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum. He offered to cast a bronze bull with a door in its side; the victim would be locked in and roasted to death, while his wails and scream would issue from the bull's throat like a thrilling bovine bellow. The tyrant agreed to the commission – but said it should be tried out first on Perillos himself.

Don't you feel better for knowing that, for having it confirmed that you should never propose to a tyrant any scheme involving pain? Dipping into Brewer was always fun. Nowhere else would you be likely to stumble on the information that "hocus-pocus" – the word used by a magician to hoodwink his audience – is a satirical corruption of "hoc est corpus meum", the words said while the host is raised at the climax of the Catholic mass. Dipping into Fowler, you always came away knowing a lot more than when you opened it. There's a serendipitous joy in finding arcane information when turning the pages in search of something else.

Discovering the evolution of words is a constant pleasure. I once asked Magnus Magnusson, the late television quizmaster, if he'd managed to retain any of the million-odd pieces of information that had whizzed past him over the years on Mastermind. Very few, he said; but one was the derivation of the word "shibboleth". It means, of course, a slogan, catchphrase or "password" beloved of a certain group, sect or political party. He'd been delighted to find (in The Oxford English Dictionary) that it was the old Hebrew word for an ear of corn; and that, according to the Bible, during the war between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, it was used as a lethal password – Ephraimites pronounced it "skibboleth" rather than "shibboleth" and any hapless soldier who couldn't say it properly was promptly executed.

Again – how pleasing to know this. It's precisely the kind of detail you'll find in a dictionary – and only in a paper dictionary with words on pages. There's shibboleth, and its fascinating etymology, in the current OED, and in my 10th-edition Chambers. But if I look it up online, on www.dictionary.cambridge.org, I'm given only the definition.

Traditional dictionaries are being gradually overtaken by a number of shrill online sites. Press the "search" key and, four times out of five, you'll get a curt, one-line definition. If you're lucky, you'll be given several shades of meaning (www.thefreedictionary.com makes a fair stab at being semantically comprehensive) – but of that word only, with no sense of its derivation or associations. Ask for a definition of "declare" and you'll get seven definitions of "declare" – but no helpful peripheral nods to "declaration", "declarative" or "declaredly". When online, you are never encouraged to browse, or stray, or graze around the word-meadow above and below the definition you've sought.

Those who suspect that online dictionaries are, to an alarming extent, callow, partial, crass and academically threadbare enterprises should read a recent blog on www.dictionary.com, which reported that several words have been deemed "obsolete" by Collins lexicographers (they include "charabanc" and "aerodrome") and won't be used in future Collins print dictionaries. "An argument could be made that, if a word is rarely used or searched for, it may not matter if it is in the dictionary or not," the website ruminated. This argument has been seen before – in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where The Party deems that language has become too sprawling and unwieldy, and invents Newspeak to keep it under greater control. Instead of having 40 or 50 terms for "wicked" or "wrong", they say, let us agree to say "ungood" to mean all of them – and, if emphasis is needed, "doubleplusungood".

And if you want to see where democratic lexicography is heading online, check out the Urban Dictionary (at www.urbandictionary.com). It will acquaint you with more sexual terms than you dreamt existed, will amaze you with the ironclad illiteracy and vulgarity of the contributors, and will make your head spin with its vast lexicon of racist abuse (such as the thousand-odd phrases containing the word "nigger"). Shocked

It's put together by online users for the edification of others. Rolling Eyes

And they sure aren't going to listen to the chaps from the Chambers and Oxford lexicographical departments deliberating about whether some of the words should be admitted to the English language some day. Online, they're here already...

It's easy to feel a nostalgic throb for the old reference library on your desk. As the dictionary market steadily declines, and sales of thesauruses plummet by a shocking 24 per cent, the very word "thesaurus" has never sounded more like a dinosaur. But we should not be downhearted. We could be seeing the start of something, rather than the end. I predict a retro-revolution in writers' vocabularies. Faced with the internet's fascination with street language and lack of interest in old words, I can see us taking a perverse delight in embracing stridently Baroque, efflorescent English words from the lexicon of Dickens, Milton, Dr Johnson, Shakespeare himself, until our paragraphs are full of "slubberdegullion" and "tatterdemalion", "dundreary" and "mulligrubs", "snoozle" and "wallydrag". We will drive readers mad with inkhorn terminology. We will send them rushing to old-fashioned dictionaries to learn what on earth is meant by "absquatulate" and "jobbernowl". We shall not rest until every Independent reader is saying to him or herself, "I wonder what 'humdudgeon' means. I must just go and look it up..." Twisted Evil

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/no-we-shouldnrsquot-just-google-it-john-walsh-laments-the-death-of-the-reference-book-2347173.html

Posted: 01-09-2011 11:43 Post subject:

"Aerodrome" is certainly no obsolete in any sense!

Posted: 01-09-2011 13:05 Post subject:

With regard to the dictionary issues ... One needs to bear in mind that dictionary compilers / owners are still 'territorializing' their content. There are intellectual property restrictions that must be observed, and some primary sources only provide their full data to registered subscribers.

This means that the more reputable online dictionary enterprises are limited to reliance on older and / or second-tier lexicographical data (e.g., a century-old Merriam Webster publication; obscure secondary dictionaries for which copyright protections have expired) as the basis for their online offerings.

Authoritative lexical content is still 'out there', and it's still being compiled and updated. However, just because more and more people are operating online doesn't mean the organizations already invested in their 'hard data' are giving it away.

Posted: 01-09-2011 13:43 Post subject:

Speaking of UrbanDictionary ....

Posted: 01-09-2011 14:10 Post subject:

Brewer is available online, of course, in an old edition it is true. But then my cheap hardback reprint is of the 1894 enlarged edition - funny how the thin paper from the 1980s is yellowing nicely and looks almost antique.

There is at least one online dictionary that searches the web for usage examples - certainly an interesting idea, even if it is too indiscriminate to be as helpful as it thinks it is being. If it "thinks" at all.

I do think the technology makes people lazier and it reduces the peripheral reading we take in as we browse old volumes. It's quite a common suspicion among bookworms that our brains have been colonized by spores of a strange fungus which gives us an appetite for yet more print and distracts us with the reward of golden hallucinations. Fine bindings, old typefaces, bound-in catalogues and supplements are more than incidentals - they are the invitations to a way of life and the promise of further pleasures to come.

Lifting down dusty volumes from the shelves of real libraries, turning up index after index as we search for an elusive passage is pleasant labour as long as deadlines are not pressing and we have the leisure to follow interesting by-ways.

I have to say that my most recent project would have been impossible that way. My texts were scattered in hundreds of volumes of the kind that are suddenly searchable in variable OCR files on Gutenberg, Archive etc. It was a journey of discovery but I am well aware that it took the end of a golden thread to lead me into the labyrinth and guide me through it.

Dead matter has to be illuminated by the imagination and this is the faculty we are not cultivating in so-called Digital Natives. A task that would have taken a lifetime can now be reasonably covered in three or four months but, as these projects multiply, we may wonder who in the future will read them. Cool

edit: 11:12 pm. labyri[n]th corrected

Posted: 01-09-2011 14:30 Post subject:

Posted: 01-09-2011 17:53 Post subject:

Reference libraries have been closing down for some time, originally killed off by the prices publishers were charging for their books. In my old area of SW London there were 3 reference libraries in 1965, by the time I left in the late 80s only 1 survived as a separate entity. Simply couldn't afford to buy 3 copies of everything needed for a proper ref service.

There's also the problem of currency (up-to-date-ness). On-line info (assuming you can find it, verify it's what you want and not an obsolete version ) is usually more useful now than printed ref books for contemporary information. However there's still a use for historical ref books where the info is rarely updated eg a run of Janes Fighting Ships or All the Worlds Aircraft will always be of interest, and is unlikely ever to be digitalised.

Posted: 01-09-2011 21:26 Post subject:

And reference books are so direfully expensive

Posted: 01-09-2011 23:08 Post subject: