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In business, everyone keeps confusing information with knowledge. They're different. Even the dictionary says so: Information: Facts provided or learned about something or someone. Knowledge: Information and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Information is ones and zeros. It's raw data, or a list of facts. It's instructions on filling out a business license, or the instructions Google provides when you sign up for Adwords. The obvious stuff. You can often acquire information for free: Go to the Associated Press for raw, un-analyzed news. Or read a 'how to' on building your own car. Knowledge is something else entirely. It's what you get when you combine information with _analysis_ and _experience_. Knowledge is information distilled down to actions. It can and should cost you money, or time, or something else. If you want real analysis of the news you just grabbed from the Associated Press, for example, you might go to the New York Times and pay (at least after 10 views). To learn AdWords tricks that can actually help you profit, you'll buy a book, pay for a seminar or hire a consultant.

AMHERST, Mass. - As computer scientists this year celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the mathematical genius Alan Turing, who set out the basis for digital computing in the 1930s to anticipate the electronic age, they still quest after a machine as adaptable and intelligent as the human brain. Now, computer scientist Hava Siegelmann of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an expert in neural networks, has taken Turing's work to its next logical step. She is translating her 1993 discovery of what she has dubbed "Super-Turing" computation into an adaptable computational system that learns and evolves, using input from the environment in a way much more like our brains do than classic Turing-type computers. She and her post-doctoral research colleague Jeremie Cabessa report on the advance in the current issue of Neural Computation. "This model is inspired by the brain," she says. "It is a mathematical formulation of the brain's neural networks with their adaptive abilities." The authors show that when the model is installed in an environment offering constant sensory stimuli like the real world, and when all stimulus-response pairs are considered over the machine's lifetime, the Super Turing model yields an exponentially greater repertoire of behaviors than the classical computer or Turing model. They demonstrate that the Super-Turing model is superior for human-like tasks and learning.

Somewhere around the early 1990s, MRIs-the technique of magnetic resonance imaging-tiptoed out of the pall of cancer wards into the sunnier campuses of universities, and forged a melange among the departments of psychology, neuroscience, management and economics. The result of this academic straddle is a literary niche called pop neuroscience, into which science writer Jonah Lehrer's newest offering, Imagine: How Creativity Works, neatly slots itself.

A ZURB fan recently passed along a nifty video after reading our recent post about the importance of iteration. Just to recap, we said that to get an aha moment, you have to get there incrementally, through iteration. In other words, there are no shortcuts to an aha moment. The video features bestselling author and journalist Jonah Lehrer, who writes mostly about psychology and neuroscience. Here he's taking about aha moments and how they don't happen by focusing too much on the problem.

What is creativity? Where does it come from? The workings of the creative mind have been subjected to intense scrutiny over the past 25 years by an army of researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology and neuroscience. But no one has a better overview of this mysterious mental process than Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, author of the new book Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford; 336 pages). He's working on a version for the lay reader, due out in 2007 from Basic Books. In an interview with Francine Russo, Sawyer shares some of his findings and suggests ways in which we can enhance our creativity not just in art, science or business but in everyday life.

There is a big danger in judging things we don't really understand by how they appear. Unless you are really "in the loop," be wary of things that you see or things others tell you. Remember the old adage "Believe half of what you say, a third of what you see, and none of what you hear."

Managing Information Overload is without doubt one of the most important skills an individual can develop today.  With the massive increase in information availability, and with it bombarding us every day, we see people and organisations struggling to maintain their performance as they get weighed down.

For me my tweets and emails are streaming in. This causes several problems. 1. It gets harder to discern what actually is important. 2. It adds stress to your life. You feel like a rat that always needs to push the button for another pellet. 3. It makes it harder to deal with people around you like family and friends. After all, there's another tweet to read, another email to answer, another Quora question to ponder. 4. It makes taking the time to really ponder questions like these more difficult. 5. Sleep often is lost due to always trying to "keep up." 6. Health suffers because you aren't paying attention to that, or exercising, instead you are paying attention to the stream of info aimed at you.

In any industry, the need to manage your brand's community is pressing. Companies have invested significant resources into building community on social networks, but as Facebook and other social media sites continue to block access to your user data, smart marketers and business leaders are realizing that the real value of social engagement is found on their own web properties and applications. Gamification offers a means of applying the benefits of social engagement directly to your properties. It is a proven business strategy that enables businesses to influence the behaviors of your entire community, and exceed your user-driven business objectives.

What is critical thinking? According to my favorite critical thinking text, it is disciplined thinking that is governed by clear intellectual standards. This involves identifying and analyzing arguments and truth claims, discovering and overcoming prejudices and biases, developing your own reasons and arguments in favor of what you believe, considering objections to your beliefs, and making rational choices about what to do based on your beliefs.

"NEXT UP: MACHINES THAT UNDERSTAND YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU CARE ABOUT, ANTICIPATE YOUR BEHAVIOR AND EMOTIONS, ABSORB YOUR SOCIAL GRAPH, INTERPRET YOUR INTENTIONS, AND MAKE LIFE, UM, "EASIER.""