Brooders

I like some of Schneier’s observations, and Childhood Risks: Perception vs. Reality is one of them. These statistics he is quoting come from BBCs Analysis: Rearing children in captivity.

So the question is: Are we worried now (even though the risk might be less) only because we hear about isolated cases more?

From the BBC Article:

Walking to school

What has happened in the last 30 years or so?

The risk of abduction remains tiny. In Britain, there are now half as many children killed every year in road accidents as there were in 1922 – despite a more than 25-fold increase in traffic.

The article goes on to talk about fear of being abducted or worse.

So again, how much is fear versus reality?

With a broad sweep, I’ve documented some notes and articles I’ve seen over the last few years relating to Concentration, Multitasking, Destraction and Creativity. I originally started this article in January 2006, but finally got around to adding some articles I have found interesting over the last 18 months.

This year, over at the NY Times Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic. I think the key point from this is:

“Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

A few other articles of note I’ve found over the last few years

• People are Driven to distraction (in the office) Apparently “The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction.”
• Technological Distraction has already extended to cars. – GPS, complicated consoles, DVD players, phone kits, Multi stack CD players with LCD controls etc

In Productivity Measurement Part 2 @ Corante people working from home were 54% more productive, allegedly from less distractions. Although this was for Report writing and Documentation tasks. But, keeping train of thought is probably important in a lot of activities.

Getting things done with delete

In Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part II they talk about.

being[sic] ruthless about moving (or deleting) stuff that belongs someplace else.

I would also add, to someone else. There can be a lot of responsibility handballing with email. The cover your butt emails that CC everyone. There is no handover unless the parties agree there it ! Although it seems common that if I’ve sent you an email its now your problem. Also, because you can store and save email (even if you can’t find it later) there is a tendency not to delete.

New Psychological Conditions ? Continuous Partial Attention

A few articles relating to this newly coined attention issue, which relates to multitasking.

• Linda Stone at Supernova: Continuous Partial Attention
• David Coleman on Continuous Partial Attention
• Supernova 2005: Attention (OReilly Radar)

This continous scanning of sources, just seems to be overactive multitasking – which I don’t think get’s much done. Interesting though, and I still need to do more research.

When there is no downtime, no boredom = Less Creativity?

Interesting concept, that if we are constantly entertained (e.g. Ipod, in Car DVD, news and SMS on our Mobile Phone etc) that this might be signalling the The end of boredom.

Phew … these articles and ideas have been stewing in a “what do I do with these” sense for a while. They are related psychologically. I have seen many a people hooked on their Treo or Blackberry. I am not sure how much is pride and ego, thinking they are important and people are waiting on them to respond, or an addiction to fast flowing information (not sure on the quality to quantity ratio).

I am also starting to notice a trend on the Lifehack sites (like lifehacker.com and webworkerdaily.com) that going low-technology (i.e. Pen and Paper) might be a good todo list, and just might get you focused. I guess that we can easily have too many information streams .. and it’s hard to discern relevant quality information.

Found this interesting video via Information Aesthetics, asking questions about “what is trust?” and “what is trusted computing?”.

If you want a direct link, try Trusted Computing via Youtube

I don’t know much about Trusted Computing (@ Wikipedia), but this video is asking “is implicit trust a good thing?”

The Wikipedia Article describes the supporters and opponents:

Advocates of the technology (like the International Data Corporation, the Enterprise Strategy Group and Endpoint Technologies Associates) claimed that it will make computers safer, less prone to viruses and malware, and thus more reliable from an end-user perspective. Further, they state that Trusted Computing will allow computers and servers to offer improved computer security over that which is currently available.

Opponents (like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Software Foundation) believe that trust in the underlying companies is not deserved and that the technology puts too much power and control into the hands of those who design systems and software. They also believe that it potentially forces consumers to lose anonymity in their online interactions, as well as mandating technologies that many have no pressing need for. Finally, TC is seen as a possible enabler for future versions of document protection (mandatory access control) and copy protection (Digital Rights Management) – which are of value to corporate and other users in many markets and which to critics, raises concerns about undue censorship.

Not sure I have enough information to have an opinion yet .. need to do some more reading.