Obama on Tech
Most politicians wouldn’t bother with geek stuff — but only two days before the US Presidential election, Barack Obama comes out with an ad about his science and technology policy.
It’s composed of clips from a talk at Google, and the search giant even gets special mention. That’s not surprising, considering that Google CEO Eric Schmidt could well become America’s first CTO under the Obama administration. Click here to continue reading “Obama on Tech”…
Google Makes You Smarter
Nicholas Carr once wrote a long, long article claiming Google makes you stupid. Guess what? He was wrong. A new UCLA study says Google makes you smarter. No, it doesn’t just make you look smart in chat — it actually exercises your brain.
“There’s so much interest in exercising our minds as we age,” said the researcher, Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. “One result of this study is that these technologies are not all bad. They may be good in keeping our brains active.”
To study what brains look like when people are searching the Internet, Small recruited two groups of people: one that had minimal computer experience and another that was Web savvy.
Members of the technologically advanced group had more than twice the neural activation than their less experienced counterparts while searching online. Activity occurred in the region of the brain that controls decision-making and complex reasoning, according to Small’s study, which appears in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
Note that it’s the tech-savvy users who get the biggest brain boost from search. The study proves something else we’ve known all along: put a n00b in front of a computer, and he’s still a n00b.
