The Internet may be getting too big. Your first reaction to that should be to think I’m an idiot. It’s OK, I’m used to it. How can an information source be too big? How can there be too many books in the library, or too many movies, or too many music CDs? (more…)

Many people think learning requires intense study and focus. But a study in today’s journal Nature seems to show that’s not true.

“You don’t have to pay attention to something to learn it,” lead researcher Takeo Watanabe, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston University, says the study shows. “In fact, you don’t even have to perceive it.” (more…)

As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.

Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007–about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.
A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field.

As we enter a new decade with its fresh agendas and challenges, it feels more important than ever to know who we can trust to keep us well-informed. Bombarded with information by all kinds of new and traditional media, how are we to evaluate the available evidence, let alone decide which way we will vote?

Since one of the major media industry stories of the year has been the extended verbal assault initiated by Rupert Murdoch against Google News and other content aggregators for their “wholesale misappropriation” and “theft” of news stories from his newspaper sites, perhaps it’s time to evaluate how much leverage Murdoch and other media execs have in their battle against the search giant.

The article, “Death by Information Overload,” describes some of the ways information overload may be causing you harm: increased stress, impaired cognition, “information addiction.”

US intelligence officials, under pressure to better track terrorist threats, are hampered by their own vast bureaucracy and an overwhelming flow of information, analysts say.

President Barack Obama “has now discovered that he’s inherited an intelligence community in the United States which is bloated, bureaucratic and even with the best of intentions has become so large it finds it very hard to put together the pieces,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, told AFP.

Ever feel like you need a break from work just to get your work done? You’re not alone. Information workers, who comprise about 63% of the U.S. work force, are each bombarded with 1.6 gigabytes of information on average every day through emails, reports, blogs, text messages, calls and more, according to preliminary data from a report coming later this year, an update of the 2003 “How Much Information?” report.