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Tech support tricks of the trade
Tech support tricks of the trade. This one is very true. And I used to think computers just started working better when I was around…
Google Music Search and Google Home Page API
Google Music Search and the Home Page API. With the home page API, Google Base, and Blogger, looks like Google has bypassed conventional web hosting and become a Web 2.0 host.
Herbert Simon on Information
Quote by Herbert Simon on Information:
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
It sounds quite like the Scientific American article The Tyranny of Choice which says that after a point, more choice causes unhappiness. The satisfaction of picking the best choice is less, because the second best is almost as good. And you’re more likely to not pick the best — because there are so many choices — and will regret it more often.
Imitation is tougher than we thought
Research suggests that chimps learn differently from humans.
When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door. The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway.
… humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn’t understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate. Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing.