Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes “Michael S. Rosenwald reports in the Washington Post that, according to cognitive neuroscientists, humans seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online at the expense of traditional deep reading circuitry… Maryanne Wolf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse’s challenging novel The Glass Bead Game. ‘I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it, ‘ says Wolf. ‘It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.’ The brain was not designed for reading and there are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. … Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. … Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade our ability to deal with other mediums. ‘We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scrolling and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you, ‘ says Andrew Dillon.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original post:
Online Skim Reading Is Taking Over the Human Brain
Daniel_Stuckey writes “The contacts on Zambada-Ortiz’s phone, which officials seized, would prove critical in pinpointing cartel stash houses strewn across Sinaloa state in mountainous northwest Mexico. Crucially, the episode would breathe new life into the joint US-Mexico dragnet that recently caught Chapo, who’d been at large for 13 years after famously escaping from Mexican prison in a laundry basket. Zambada-Ortiz’s capture and the data scraped from his phone led to more and more Sinaloa phones until a month ago, when Mexican authorities (moving on American intelligence work) successfully carried out a number of raids that scored a cache of weapons and the arrests of a few of Chapo’s senior henchmen. With each apprehension came another phone full of leads, ‘a new trove of information for officials to mine, ‘ as TIME reported. Then, sometime last week, Mexican commandos ‘traced a number stored in a seized cell phone to a stash house outside the provincial capital of Culiacan, where they believed Guzman was hiding, ‘ TIME added.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
jeditobe writes with a link to a talk (video recorded, with transcript) about a project we’ve been posting about for years: ambitious Windows-replacement ReactOS: “In this talk, Alex Ionescu, lead kernel developer for the ReactOS project since 2004 (and recently returning after a long hiatus) will talk about the project’s current state, having just passed revision 60000 in the SVN repository. Alex will also cover some of the project’s goals, the development and testing methodology being such a massive undertaking (an open source project to reimplement all of Windows from scratch!), partnership with other open source projects (MinGW, Wine, Haiku, etc…). Alex will talk both about the infrastructure side about running such a massive OS project (but without Linux’s corporate resources), as well as the day-to-day development challenges of a highly distributed team and the lack of Win32 internals knowledge that makes it hard to recruit. Finally, Alex will do a few demos of the OS, try out a few games and applications, Internet access, etc, and of course, show off a few blue screens of death.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
drxenos writes “A LaserDisc purchased on eBay was found to contain raw footage from Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi. From the article: ‘The origin of the LaserDisc isn’t entirely clear, but it was purchased for $699 off eBay, apparently once used to demonstrate Lucasfilm’s EditDroid station — one of the first digital film editing systems sold nearly 30 years ago. Ironically, George Lucas himself never used EditDroid to make a movie; the Star Wars clips were loaded simply to show off its capabilities to prospective buyers.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.