CNET: Learning new words may mean thinking new thoughts. “Philosophers, psychologists and linguists have debated the hurdle for years, wondering whether language somehow influences, or even restricts, our thoughts. How firmly are our minds stuck inside our vocabulary boxes?”
Hongkiat: 10 Best Free Mind Mapping Tools. “Here is a list of some of the best mind mapping apps for individual or collaborating brainstorming. Most of these tools are available cross platform and offer different features and functionalities.”
PC Magazine: The Best Mind Mapping Software. “If your teams and key creative workers are getting bogged down by an increasing workload of rote tasks or maybe simply swamped by too much information in this new world of interconnected Big Data then mind mapping software might be able to help. These solutions focus on helping workers ideate, innovate, and even, eventually, execute.”
NBC News: I stopped Googling everything, and this is what happened to my brain. “You’re talking about movies with friends and there’s this film you must tell them about. What was it called, that one about the thing, you know, with that actor, what’s his name? You grab your phone, get your answer and conversation proceeds uninterrupted. You solved the puzzle and all is well. But what about your brain? Is constantly feeding it the right answer —with your phone being a bottomless Pez dispenser of factoids — making it lazy? Does it eventually atrophy? Who needs an internal memory when we’ve got Siri?”
TechCrunch: Are algorithms hacking our thoughts? . “As Facebook shapes our access to information, Twitter dictates public opinion, and Tinder influences our dating decisions, the algorithms we’ve developed to help us navigate choice are now actively driving every aspect of our lives. But as we increasingly rely on them for everything from how we seek out news to how we relate to the people around us, have we automated the way we behave? Is human thinking beginning to mimic algorithmic processes? And is the Cambridge Analytica debacle a warning sign of what’s to come–and of happens when algorithms hack into our collective thoughts?”
The Register: DeepMind says it’s given AI an imagination. Let’s take a closer look at that. “Google’s AI boutique, DeepMind, known for dispelling human delusions of intellectual superiority by soundly beating the world’s top Go players with computer code, has found that instilling its software agents with something like imagination helps them learn better.”
From Medium: Cognitive bias cheat sheet, simplified. “Four months ago I attempted to synthesize Wikipedia’s crazy list of cognitive biases, and after banging my head against the wall for weeks, came up with this Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet which John Manoogian III beautifully organized into the above poster. It’s a 12-minute read, and I didn’t actually expect anyone to read it, but four months later it’s been viewed 700,000 times and recommended almost 5,000 times! Since then, I’ve started working on a book proposal (get on the email list!) around these topics, and wanted to start by creating an actual cheat sheet that doesn’t take so long to read. Here it is…”
The University of North Carolina is offering a new MOOC on critical reasoning. “Each week, the course will introduce a different discipline—chemistry, history, psychology, law, literature, and American studies—and students will learn from UNC-Chapel Hill professors about how critical thinking skills can be applied in these areas. Through a mixture of weekly video lectures, practice quizzes and readings, students will receive the foundational knowledge to think critically in each discipline. At the end of each week, they will write an essay reflecting on the skills they learned and the importance of thinking critically in each discipline.”
Is it like Pringles? Study finds that the more you Google, the more likely you are to keep Googling. “People who use the internet to retrieve information are more likely to use it again and less likely to use their memory, according to a study by UC Santa Cruz psychology professor Benjamin Storm. Published in the journal Memory, Storm finds the internet is changing the way people learn, remember, and solve problems.”
Fast Company: how to brainstorm like a Googler. “Here at Google, we don’t have a secret formula for innovation. But that doesn’t mean Googlers’ best ideas are ineffable mysteries. On the contrary, we’ve found they can be systematically coaxed into being and steadily improved upon. And so can yours.” Interesting reading, but I wiiiiiiiinced when I got to the Project Loon part.
Useful to me because I’m a language nerd (and language is ridiculously important in search) – a map of metaphors. “Experts have now created the world’s first online Metaphor Map, which contains more than 14,000 metaphorical connections sourced from 4m pieces of lexical data, some of which date back to 700AD.” Read the help guide.
