Is The Internet Changing Our Memory?

A recent study by Columbia University professor, Dr Betsy Sparrow, suggests that we are relying less on our memory of a subject and more on our memory of where to find the subject matter. "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]." says Dr. Sparrow.


I'd argue that we've been doing this since we've been able to read and write. We may have faster access to information these days but prior to the internet there were libraries, filing cabinets, and subject matter experts. Don't you agree? Am I missing something here?


Source: bbc.co.uk

Eye-Fi Card Identifies Camera Thief

Every now and then one of these stories pops up and it always amazes or amuses me. In this case, reported by Reuters and picked up by the Globe and Mail, a New York couple who's digital camera gear went missing on vacation in Florida returned home to find the photos they had taken along with photos of two employees of the restaurant from which the camera had been left, ended up on their photo sharing website. Luckily for the rightful owners, the camera was equipped with an Eye-Fi Card who's purpose is to automatically upload pictures to a home computer or photo-sharing service as soon as the user is linked to a familiar wireless network. In this case the restaurant employees passed an unsecured wireless network (90 feet is about the range outdoors - 45 feet indoors), whose factory-installed setting matched those of the home system of the camera's owners. I'd venture to say that this would never happen to me as I promptly change my wireless settings out of the box, but in this case the camera was returned to it's proper place and the two restaurant employees found themselves looking for a new job.

Footnote: The Eye-Fi Explore comes with a geotagging and hotspot access for a year, would be thieves beware!

British Scientists Predict 500,000 GB mp3 Player

A report published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology suggests that 500,000 gigabytes of memory could be squeezed onto one square inch of flexible plastics. Prof Lee Cronin and Dr Malcolm Kadodwala chemists at Glasgow University "have developed a molecular switch which means that data storage can be dramatically increased without the need to increase the size of microchips" according to this article at Telegraph.co.uk. No mention is made of the potential for bringing this technology to market, seems as though it is all theoretical at the moment. Cool though if they can make it work!

Chimps out perform humans in memory test!

Researchers in Japan have proven that young chimpanzees do amazingly well at short term memory tests. In an experiment, sort of a brain age for chimps, the researchers found that a 5 year old chimp out performed 9 university students by a 2 to 1 margin. "Our study shows that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection, better than that of human adults," reported Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Sana Inoue in the Dec. 4 issue of the journal Current Biology. The chimps however did not fare so well at the beer bong competition. ;-)

The CBC has more here.