Is Google Making Us Stupid? "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.
Whozat? World's Virtual Library (80,000+ FREE eBooks, eTexts, On-Line Books, eDocuments) n Welcome! Over the last decade, a quiet revolution has been going on in the development of a large library of "digital" or "electronic" books. While there are still large gaps, a very substantial body of "Western" thought is available in the form of downloadable or on-line books. Most major writers, from Plato to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Proust, or John Le Carre, are accessible on the Internet. Subjects range from the highly scholarly to the contemporary and popular -- especially as more commercial publishers discover the virtues of "on-line" distribution. Here's some of what you will find: n Reference Books: More than 2000 Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Thesauri, Glossaries, Bibliographies, Chronologies, Timelines, Literary Histories, Biographies, Writing & Style Guides & Student Study aids. nnn Literature & Languages: About 12,000 basic texts in English & American Literature, ranging from Chaucer & other medieval texts to modern, contemporary Fiction & Literature.
The Web Library Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources The Web Library: Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources Online companion to the book. Frequently updated: last update 8-24-2009copyright Nick Tomaiuolo 2009 Indicates a site that is not discussed in the book. News! Featured: Google Books Magazine Search. Listen to Nick's podcast on searching Google Scholar These web pages are companions to the book The Web Library.
Owl's Cabinet of Wonders Search Engine Showdown The Users' Guide to Web Searching LibrarySpot.com: Encyclopedias, maps, online libraries, quotations, dictionaries & more. Mirage Bookmark Beautiful Bookmark Exhibition, History of Bookmarks The Online Books Page Global Peace Index – Vision of Humanity The results this year show that the level of global peacefulness deteriorated, with the average country score falling by 0.34 per cent. This is the ninth deterioration in peacefulness in the last twelve years, with 81 countries improving, and 80 recording deteriorations over the past year. The 2020 GPI reveals a world in which the conflicts and crises that emerged in the past decade have begun to abate, only to be replaced with a new wave of tension and uncertainty as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Iceland remains the most peaceful country in the world, a position it has held since 2008. Afghanistan is the least peaceful country in the world for the second year in a row, followed by Syria, Iraq, South Sudan and Yemen. Only two of the nine regions in the world became more peaceful over the past year. The world is now considerably less peaceful than it was at the inception of the index.