Science Online

No mention of friendfeed, so what about writing a correspondence piece on this? It could be based on http://ff4s-paper.wikidot.com/start and perhaps also put the recent NIH grant for a "Facebook for Scientists" ( http://ff.im/beKk7 ) in perspective by providing an overview over existing tools along these lines and why they are not widely used. - Daniel Mietchen

I would actually prefer the Fb4Sci stuff in there, and the article would be more balanced if we were to name a few more services that offer microblogging (I listed some in the Organization part of the document). FF can then be described in two sentences as a particularly useful example because it provides hierarchies of threaded conversations in which the most current and the most popular entries compete for the top of attention. - Daniel Mietchen

“If the cells in our bodies had a little memory, think what we could do,” Endy said the next time we talked. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. “You have memory in your phone,” he explained. “Think of all the information it allows you to store. The phone and the technology on which it is based do not function inside cells. But if we could count to two hundred, using a system that was based on proteins and DNA and RNA—well, now, all of a sudden we would have a tool that gives us access to computing and memory that we just don’t have." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"In his new book, “Reading in the Brain,” neuroscientist S. Dehaene describes his quest to understand an astounding feat that most of us take for granted: translating marks on a page (or a screen) into language. (...) What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of possible cultural forms. (...)Through its cultural inventions, humanity constantly searched for specific niches in the brain, wherever there is a space of plasticity that can be exploited to “recycle” a brain area and put it to a novel use. Reading, mathematics, tool use, music, religious systems - all might be viewed as instances of cortical recycling.(...) the fact that young children are more competent than we think. Learning is not “the furnishing of the mind's white paper,” as John Locke said. Even for an activity as novel as reading, we do not learn from scratch, but by minimally changing our existing brain circuits, capitalizing on their pre-existing structure." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"In the case of reading, very concretely, as I explain in the book, we now have plenty of evidence that the whole-language approach has nothing to do with how our visual system recognizes written words – our brain never relies on the overall contours of words, rather it decomposes all of its letters and graphemes in parallel, subliminally and at a high speed, thus giving us an illusion... more... - Amira