or the brain, for that matter. In this case, the sensible, anti-pseudoscience guy has the wrong position, for the same reason, as the other wrong person. 5 points extra credit for listing each scientific, theoretical, conceptual, or practical confusion the motivates this discussion.

From Singularity Hub (thx Lally)

This is sort of interesting: New Kindle Audio Feature causes a stir (WSJ) Kindle 2 is smaller than the first version of the product.The new device also features a five-way navigation element, faster wireless service for downloading books and the ability to wirelessly sync between Kindles and cellphones. Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature that reads text aloud with a computer-generated voice. “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.” An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won’t confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider. Is reading a book a derivative work? How can we even make sense of ‘derivative works’ when dealing with digital technologies?

– Egon, “Ghostbusters” I recently wrote up a very long comment in response to this post on LiteraryGulag. It screwed up the formatting of my comment, so I am reproducing it here for posterity. Let’s see if we can’t get Sheets to show up and respond! I find the recent lamenting over the death of traditional newspapers to be a curious phenomenon. I suppose people wailed and moaned over the death of radio, and I vaguely remember similar chicken little articles as cable (and particularly cable news) began to steal viewers from network television. Newspapers enjoyed a monopoly over the kitchen table during these media transitions for a few basic reasons: the news was reliable, portable, and incredibly user friendly. More than any other alternative, the newspaper allowed readers to extract the information they wanted, and to skim or ignore the rest. The internet radically increases the portability and user-friendliness of media, and of news media in particular. I scan RSS feeds on my phone on the bus ride to work, and my girlfriend is infatuated with aggregator services like Newser and The Daily Beast that can digest and colsolidate massive amounts of information from all over the net into easily assimiliated bites. There may be some sacrifice of depth in favor of a breadth of knowledge, though articles of interest will get singled out and saved for more in depth review at a more convienent time. This behavior in particular is sorely absent from your attempt to villainize the internet and hold it responsible for the death of journalism. The moral you draw from studies about apparent “changes” in reader behavior are terribly misleading in this regard. Exploring the web is precisely a process of filtering and sorting, of determining what is important and worth paying attention to, what […]

New Study Shows Time Spent Online Important for Teen Development Results from the most extensive U.S. study on teens and their use of digital media show that America’s youth are developing important social and technical skills online – often in ways adults do not understand or value. “It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time online – that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”

Creationists declare war over the brain Basically, the Intelligent Design crowd is turning their sights towards neuroscience and philosophy of mind, resolute in the mission to revive Cartesian dualism with the goal of “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies”. Because, you know, they have already finished proving evolution wrong and they need something to occupy them until the second coming. However, look at the bright side. The evolution/creationism debate has spawned an entire cottage industry within academic philosophy to popularize contemporary thought and bring the basic arguments for evolution into the mainstream. I mean, Hume destroyed creationism as a plausible theory 200 years ago, but while this is common knowledge among professional philosophers it had never quite trickled down to the public, so the culture wasn’t already inoculated against these kinds of malicious memes. I suspect the same will happen for the contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience, which is lightyears ahead of the pseudo-Freudian psychology that most people use to explain human behavior. The popular discourse could use some serious updating, and the best way to do it is for a bunch of dualist whackjobs to make a stink and to get roundly shut down in the public square.

This is our future. Robot watch via Dvice

From Engadget: New York Representative Pete King is hoping that the US will soon have a law requiring that all cameraphones make a noise when they snap a picture as well. To that end, King has re-introduced the so-called “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act,” which was actually first introduced in 2007 but went nowhere at the time. The bill, as the name not-so-subtly suggests, aims to prevent folks from taking cameraphone pictures without others people’s knowledge by forcing the phones to make a sound that’s “audible within a reasonable radius” and not able to be disabled. More from Ars\, which includes this stat: a recent survey of over a thousand teenagers and young adults (13 through 26) revealed that a fifth of the teens queried have posted a digital photo or video of themselves in their complete or partial birthday suits on the Internet. A third of the latter group have done the same.