Mind Study

Computer programmers love whiteboards.  We can sketch out our ideas, plans and designs.  We can draw use cases, flowcharts and class diagrams.  When we’re done, all it takes is a swipe with an eraser or shirt sleeve, and the whiteboard is good as new.  A whiteboard gives developers an opportunity to drop the mouse, get up from our chair and stretch our legs.  We also enjoy the innate childhood pleasure of drawing on the walls.

So then why limit our ideas to just a 3×4-foot patch on the wall?  When we’re confined to the space of a typical whiteboard, our movements are constrained, and so our ideas may be limited as well.  If whiteboards are the snowy goodness of developer minds, then perhaps we should have whiteboards everywhere.

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According to a study by Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, watching television does not make babies smarter, and baby educational videos may not help either.

“Contrary to parents’ perceptions that TV viewing is beneficial to their children’s brain development, we found no evidence of cognitive benefit from watching TV during the first two years of life,” the study said.  Educational videos such as “Baby Einstein” have no benefits either.

Study co-author and pediatrician Dr. Michael Rich calls baby educational videos “just wasted time.  At the very best, they steal time from much more productive cognitive developmental activities,” he said.  “Ultimately, what it’s about is to make parents not feel guilty about an electronic baby sitter.”

This supports a similar finding published in the August issue of Pediatrics.  That study showed infants who watched the videos understood fewer words than those who did not watch them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV or videos for children under 2.

Story at CNN

In Ray Kurzweil’s amazing 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Kurzweil predicts that computing power will continue along the exponential track of Moore’s Law, such that by the year 2030, a $1,000 personal computer will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain.  At that point, computers will be capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own with no human assistance.  By scanning the compendium of knowledge on the Internet, some computers will “know” literally every single piece of public information generated by human beings (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every law and theorem).

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