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Interesting read regarding the game Portal being used in a freshman humanities course, alongside classics like Gilgamesh and readings about Aristotle.

"Museum of the City of New York -- New York, NY HD 51480, Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open sourced Ontologies and Crowd sourced Workers Lacy Schutz, Project Director Outright: $50,000 To support: The development of methods and tools to facilitate the description of digitized primary sources by combining "crowdsourcing" tactics with linked open data and semantic Web technologies."

Interesting list of grant awards in the humanities. The quoted one above jumped out at me, but there are plenty of other good ideas in there. I'd be interested to see what others think.

This kind of visualization not scalable yet, but will it be soon? "Thanks to increasingly cheap, fast and efficient computing power, scientific simulations are now a crucial tool for researchers who want to ask once impractical scientific questions or generate data that laboratory experiments can't. "The human eye can pick out patterns in simulations that are are otherwise hard to describe, and they can do it better than any computer," said visualization scientist Joseph Insley of Argonne National Laboratory ."Plus, with the incredible amount of data gathered these days, it's difficult to analyze it any other way."

Good article. You know CHAT (the learning theory), right? I like it because it considers our tools and environment as part of how we (collectively) learn. Our cell phones and laptops and Google are part of the equation. So yes, Allan's brain may remember less at a given time, but Allan+iPhone+Google remembers many orders of magnitude more and with much more accuracy.

We talked about this quite a bit in our Disruptive Technologies course with Cole and Scott in terms of distributed intelligence, which is similar to what you're saying in that the tools we use are extensions of our minds. Maybe it's because I'm a SciFi geek and have read so many post-apocalyptic books, or perhaps it's just that I know technology too well to trust it, but my biggest fear about what this research is suggesting is that, should our technology disappear, we'll all turn into gibbering idiots because half our mind has been turned off, literally. Realistically, I know that the human brain is much more plastic and our memory would reconfigure itself eventually. And the benefits of extending ourselves like this probably outweigh the risks. But it still gives you pause for thought..

Right now, our dependence on instant gratification knowledge isn't too bad, I'm sure we'd have a feeling of disconnection and lots of frustration. I'd consider buying a set of encyclopedias again. I worry more about a scenario like running out of fuel without energy alternatives. The human race is so dependent on fuel for food production and transportation that we'd run into a starvation issue very quickly. We've lost our survival skills and there are just too many of us.

"But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity. " "Genuine Empathy" is the one that really concerns me, and I see it in how my nieces, and others, use facebook. The FB birthday thing comes to mind...now people get as many "Happy birthday!" notes as they have friends...but are the well-wishers even thinking about my birthday? Probably not, it's just FB reminding them "Hey, it's bart's bday" and now the norm is to stop by and say "happy birthday" without even thinking about it. The end of the article has a nice quote from a novel as well: "The generation that had information, but no context. "

This is a well written piece. The author does a great job at tugging on our emotions. However, I believe he possesses only a superficial understanding of the medium.

Government response to social media during social unrest is paranoic. Or not? Tough ethical question for everyone not living under a rock.