Tag Archives: NPR

Fox News Chairman says NPR Executives are Nazis, “of Course”

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Fox News, a News Corp subsidiary

Honestly, I am think that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and most at that network live in a reality that is different than mine.

I was just pointed to an interview with Howard Kurtz in which he said that President Obama “has a different belief system than most Americans” and that on his recent travels he “told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with.”  I don’t know if Ailes believes this or if it is part of the continuing campaign of the right to paint the President as so radically different from us that he is somehow threatening, but the statements are not simply wrong, they are absurd.

President Obama is a capitalist and he believes in our system of representative, Constitutional democracy.  He has given no indication otherwise.  He would not have risen in the party system were that not the case and he certainly would not have got elected to the highest office in the land, either.  The Presidents differences with the the opposition are differences of degree, not belief systems.

As for France and Germany telling him that his socialism is to far left, well that is ridiculous.  Germany, France and the United States do have differences on approaches necessary to stimulate their economies because in a global economy what is done in one country impacts the others, but the questions concern the means and scale of intervention and have nothing to do with ideology.  France and Germany are also democratic, capitalist states, but both are fundamentally more socialist in character then the US.  Both have and have had for some time, state funded systems of education, government owned rail systems, universal health care, strong labor movements, etc.

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Multitasking May Not Mean Higher Productivity

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Electronics and Multitasking I was listening to NPR on my way to the beach on Friday and I found myself wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly, “La, la, la, la…,” so disturbing was what I was hearing.

It was a segment on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday August 28 that dealt with a study of multitasking.  Apparently people who think they are great at multitasking are not.  Apparently they are not only not good at multitasking, but their cognitive abilities are impaired in other areas as well.  At least that is what Clifford Nass from Stanford University found in the research he described on NPR’s Science Friday.

So the three abilities we looked at were – the first is filtering: the ability to ignore irrelevant information and focus on relevant information. And I had thought, more than my other two colleagues, that that was a particular gift that high multitaskers had. But in fact, multitaskers are suckers for distraction and suckers for the irrelevant, and so the more irrelevant information they see, the more they’re attracted to it.

The second ability is the ability to manage your working memory, keep it neatly organized, be able to – the way I usually think about it is, imagine having very neat filing cabinets where you carefully and quickly place things in the right cabinet, and when you need the information, you immediately know which filing cabinet to go to. They’re actually much worse at that.
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And finally, the biggest surprise to the two other authors of the study, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, the biggest surprise was that they’re even slower and worse at switching from one task to another. You would’ve thought that, at the very least, would be the key gift of multitaskers, but they’re actually worse.

As if that weren’t bad enough there seems to be some evidence that multitasking impairs other types of thought more generally.

I think the reason it’s so frightening is we actually didn’t study people while they were multitasking. We studied people who were chronic multitaskers, and even when we did not ask them to do anything close to the level of multitasking they were doing, their cognitive processes were impaired. So basically, they are worse at most of the kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.

I don’t think of myself as particularly good at multitasking, but I do it a lot.  It seems like a necessity in today’s world.  So are we dumbing ourselves down?