Google Your Way To Better Brain Health

UCLA find that in older adults, googling and surfing the internet stimulates and may actually improve brain health. "The researchers noted that compared with reading, the Internet’s wealth of choices requires that people make decisions about what to click on, an activity that engages important cognitive circuits in the brain." Full story here.

Newly Unveiled Search Engine Wolfram Alpha Challenges Google

Try the new search engine at wolframalpha.com.

Read the review about how it stacks up versus google here.

New Search Engine, Wolfram Alpha, Takes Us Closer To Intelligent Search Engine

On May 18th Stephen Wolfram will release the search engine Wolfram Alpha. The program, which is already getting use in the scientific community, employs sophisticated algorithms to answer questions like how high is Mt Everest, what is the fish production in Italy, and what was the weather in London on the day John F Kennedy was killed.

Although not ready to replace traditional search engines like google, Wolfram Alpha shows the potential power 'understanding' searchers questions by utilizing artificial intelligence techniques. (full story here).

Singularity University Will Open Backed By Google, Nasa

Ray Kurzweil, the iconoclastic author of The Singularity is Near, will head a new school of future studies located in NASA buildings in California. A nine week course will cost $25,000 and cover courses on nanotechnology, artificial technology, and biotechnology. Full article here.

What Good Is Memorization In The Age Of Google?

The younger sister of a good friend of mine recently enrolled at Princeton. She has said that "in the future knowledge won't be valued as much as the ability to access information." So what role does memorization play today? Should students still have to memorize dates and poetic passages? Not according to writer and businessman Don Tapscott. In the Telegraph, Tapscott opines that in the age of wikipedia and google, schoolteachers must adjust their to curricula to teach concepts and methods of thinking. Sounds good, but what exactly is lost when we outsource memorization? Are we loosing a necessary developmental brain process? Could the ability to retain information, somehow improve our ability to have creative thought or fruitful analysis? Does the brain exercise of memorization improve other aspects of cognition? Or, does outsourcing laborious memorization free up our cognitive load and allow us to dedicate more brain power to the really exciting stuff...like conceptual, technological, and creative breakthroughs?

Gmail Spices Up Your Inbox With Weird New Skins

Google takes a page out of myspace's playbook.

Google Searches Help Track Disease Outbreaks

The New York Times reports that new tracking tools from "Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
Try out web search tracking for yourself at google.com/trends.

Google Floats Plans For Wave Powered Data Center

Google's continued dominance of online search and advertising depends largely on it's ability to store and utilize MASSIVE amounts of data. The servers that house this data are notorious energy guzzlers (1.5% of all US energy goes to data centers by some estimates). It's not suprising then, that google has gotten into alternative energy.
Recently, the internet titan has unveiled plans to house their data centers miles offshore, on floating barges. The benefits includes virtually free real estate, natural wave and wind energy, and ocean waters to cool the servers.
In reading about this ambitious plan I can't shake the image of the google barge tossed around in a 100-year Pacific storm, getting pounded by a rogue wave and sinking like a rock. It makes you reevaluate the percieved permanence of the digital world. The "internet cloud" often seems intangible, floating, and divorced from the material world. But in reality our virtual lives are very dependent on the real-life, physical servers that make them possible. I have heard rumors of patents for indestructible, self-repairing (waterproof?) server systems...which is encouraging, especially if they're bobbing around in the Pacific.

Today, Google Smarter; Tomorrow, Upload The Entire Internet To Your Brain

Some helpful tips for smarter searching, courtesy of Wired (more on uploading the internet to your brain soon).

Get good sources. Add "site:edu" or "site:gov" to limit your search to school or government domains. To target specific sites, type, say, "neutrino site:Harvard.edu."

Convert currency and units. Easy: "12 parsecs in light years" or "12 dollars in euros," for example.

Check your stocks. Take a deep breath, then enter a ticker symbol to see a real-time quote.

Narrow by file type. To find PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets, or books scanned into PDFs, add "filetype:ppt" (or any other extension) to your query.

Search ranges. Use two periods between two numbers, like "Wii $200..$300."

Expect flight delays. Type in the airline, then your flight number.

Define yourself. To get the definition for a word, just type the word define: followed by the word. Include the colon and space.

Beme: The End Of Theory?

Google is conquering the online world without any use for theories about why people click where they click. Say goodbye to theories, say hello to massive amounts of data, applied mathematics, and the ability to tract behavior with unprecedented fidelity. As this Wired article contends, the trend of prediction-without-theory has the potential to permeate the sciences, replacing the time-honored scientific method.

So get ready for the United States of Google, right? Not so fast. As Philip Anderson explains in this Seed article, the nature of emergence ("which says that when a system becomes large and complex enough, its constituents self-organize into arrangements that one could never deduce a priori, even though the laws of physics are obeyed") prevents even the Google processors from cracking the most mysterious questions of science (like the emergence of consciousness). So what tools should we use when dealing with emergence? Theory and the time-honored tools of the scientific method.