[Reader: if you don't think Screens = Distraction, here's a test: how many times in the course of reading this article do you look away from the text? And how much information do you retain?]

TMI – Too Much Information – can be embarrassing. It can also be destructive.

That’s the conclusion reached by researchers in studies of media use. “We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” a neuroscientist is quoted by Matt Richtel in a major in in-depth article in the New York Times, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price. “While many people say multitasking makes them more productive,” Richtel writes, “research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress… Even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.”

These findings reinforce concerns we’ve expressed here (See The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction and More Evidence that Screens=Distraction) about potentially negative effects of screen-learning on young minds. Experiments demonstrate that children using computers were far more easily distracted and unable to retain information than their paper-reading counterparts.

Now, however, the same effects are manifesting themselves in adults. Richtel’s must-read examination of the impact of technology on mental processes, reveals that we consume 12 hours of media daily, compared to five hours fifty years ago. But it’s not just the amount of time we spend in front of a screen, it’s the quality of that time that is taking its toll on every aspect of daily life. Though the analogy of addiction has frequently been used to describe media technology fixation, the addiction is closer to food and sex than to drugs and alcohol, says a leading brain scientist, because too much of a good thing – food, sex, information – is inimical to health, safety, and human relationships. What Richtel calls information bursts “play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive”

Infatuation with computers, e-books and tablets can blind us to the downside of the technology, and it’s good that revelations such as those Richtel reports have begun to come out now when we need to achieve a balance between benefits and liabilities.

If you think these conclusions don’t apply to you, click here for a test.

Richard Curtis

You call it multitasking. Christine Pearson calls it rude.  Pearson, a business professor who lectures on the subject of incivility, is talking about texting during meetings.

“I define incivility as behavior, seemingly inconsequential to the doer, that others perceive as inconsiderate,” writes Pearson, co-author of a book about it, in the New York Times. “Electronic devices lead to more incivility because of their powerful ability to claim our attention — no matter where we are or what we’re doing. No one likes to be snubbed, of course, but the offense can take on a new edge when the winner is a machine.”

Pearson’s book is called The Cost of Bad Behavior. And just what exactly is the cost of this egregious behavior? For one thing, says Pearson, you may suffer the resentment of your colleagues who have to “pick up the slack caused by the wandering attention and diluted energies of their e-cruising colleagues.” Also, it’s a kind of insult to your fellow workers, who may feel that the unspoken message you’re communicating to them is, “You are less important to me than my cellphone/P.D.A./laptop/latest gizmo.”

Incivility can  redound to your own detriment, too.  “In my research, I’ve learned that when employees behave in an uncivil way, their colleagues may take retribution. They might withhold information — for example, by ‘forgetting’ to include the offender’s name on a final product. Or they might see to it that he or she ends up with a less desirable task next time. Or they might even refuse to work with the person again.” In other words, the ultimate cost of abusing texting privileges could be not just ostracism, but your very job.

But perhaps the most insidious effect of inappropriate texting is the dangerous self-delusion that multitasking increases your efficiency.  Not true, says Pearson, citing sociological evidence. “Neuroscientists tell us that dividing our attention between competing stimuli instead of handling tasks one at a time actually makes us less efficient,” she says.

This reinforces something we’ve said again and again about e-books: any task performed on a screen – such as reading – can be distracting and possibly even detrimental. “My own research shows that people are continually distracted when working with digital information,” says Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction. “They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly.”  (See The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction.)

The problem is particularly acute for young minds. Christine Pearson’s Sending a Message That You Don’t Care may be aimed at adults,  but it applies in spades to children. Another reason to curb your child’s texting habits -  as if you needed excuses.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Review Horizon, a consumer technology website, tells us that a new gen of E-ink is on the way. It boasts twice the contrast ratio of the current model. Devices using it will have a tougher screen, too.

Best news of all, a higher refresh speed will open the door to videos on the Kindle and other e-readers that use E-Ink. But for those who just want to read a book, higher refresh speeds mean faster page-turns. “Gone,” says Review Horizon, “will be the days when just a page turn would make you fall asleep.”

Read about it here, and check out the video demos.

RC

Ryan Tate of Gawker posted a sneak preview of an incredible photo retouching tool heading your way from Photoshop CS5. “The tool makes it easy to delete objects from a complex photo, without any trace they ever existed,” writes Tate.

If you’re a serious photographer who needs to touch up an errant shadow or inadvertent red-eye, it’s an absolute boon. But when you contemplate some of the less artistic applications created by the Content-Aware fill tool, your blood can turn to ice.

“The ramifications for Internet publishing are frightening,” Tate says. “It’s been possible to post Photoshopped images since the birth of the Web, of course, but until now you needed some modicum of experience to convincingly retouch pictures.” Now anyone can seamlessly drop into a photo – of a neo-Nazi rally for instance – the image of a person who was a continent away from the event. Conversely, you can remove an attendee at that rally from the picture and place him in the box seats of a baseball game.

If you think “seamless” is hyperbole, check out the video.

Be prepared for a mountain of mischief when bad guys discover the Content-Aware fill tool.

Richard Curtis

Are you as weary as we are of doomsayers sounding the death knell of print books? The latest comes via a blog on Huffington Post by Dan Agin, editor in chief of the online journal ScienceWeek. You would think that with a Ph.D. in biological psychology and three decades of lab research experience in neurobiology, Agin would be smarter than to make categorical statements like “Requiescant in pace, big print publishing.The run is finished.” Aside from his solecism (it’s Requiescat), he has buried print books and declared Game Over.

Agin has made the mistake that so many other Print-is-Deaders have done, condemning the medium when what we really hate is the system that supports it. We’ve said it many times but it bears reiteration: there is nothing wrong with printed books – just that the way they are distributed, which is appallingly stupid and wasteful. But does that mean print is finished? Not even close. However, Agin is entitled to his opinion and goodness knows there are a lot of people who share it.

What surprises us, though, is how willing this credentialed neurobiologist is to exalt Kindle and other e-readers when there is an impressive body of scientific evidence suggesting that reading on a screen may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Some researchers have suggested that readers – especially young ones – are easily distracted by e-books, fail to immerse themselves the way they do in print, and do not retain information as well as they do with words on paper. In a posting last fall called The Medium is the Screen. The Message is Distraction, we quoted Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience: “People read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent… Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.”

And Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain.” But “my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).”

Read Agin’s article, Kindle Armageddon: How the Publishing Industry Is Slitting Its Own Throat, and form your own opinion.

Richard Curtis

The New York Times‘s Nick Bilton and Brad Stone report the acquisition by Amazon of Touchco, a tiny New York startup that makes touchscreens boasting features superior to and cheaper than rivals including Apple’s iPad.

“Unlike those screens,”the Times reporters say, Touchco screens can “detect an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points.” They add that “Touchco’s technology uses resistors that are sensitive to different levels of pressure. It has said its screens can distinguish between the touch of a finger and the pressure of a pen or similar pointing device.”

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is full color, vital if you’re going to go head to head with Apple. They cite a financial expert as saying that “If touch screens were added to the Kindle or other Amazon devices, it would bring them up to date with the plethora of other screens consumers are becoming used to.”

Amazon will shift development from New York to its labs in Cupertino, California. Hmm. Where have we heard Cupertino before?

Details of the Touchco acquisition here.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Do twenty rumors add up to one truth? Maybe.

Like the blind men in the fable who try to infer the shape of an elephant by touching its body parts, countless Apple-watchers ranging from savvy geeks to clueless crackpots have been speculating on the nature of the iSlate tablet (including, by the way, the name itself). The difference is that the characters in the famous story actually had access to the elephant’s trunk, tail, ear and tusk, whereas the speculators haven’t even glimpsed the iSlate.

But a website called The Green Room has culled all the rumors and assembled them into an iSlate, or at least the tablet equivalent of the elephant. The composite they’ve constructed comes complete with callouts referring to each rumored component. It’s pictured left, but click here to see it full size and legibly. A fun feature is Green Room’s evaluation of the rumors ranging from highly likely to highly unlikely. Here are a few of those callouts with the URLs of the source of the gossip.

• 3D operating system navigation (very unlikely)
• Price around $1,000 (very likely)
• January 27 unveiling (very likely)
• 10” display (likely)
• Called iSlate (likely)
• Pixel Qi screen (very unlikely)
• OLED screen (unlikely)
• Multitouch version of iWork (likely)
• Interact with tablet using palms and fingers (likely)

The observation that interests us most is that the Pixel Qi screen is not a likely possibility. As we wrote recently (See Hybrids Work for Cars. Why Not for Screens?), Pixel Qi is a hybrid that alternates between battery-draining full color for applications like video, to battery-saving black and white for text reading. We had surmised that Pixel Qi might solve the problem of short battery life in the iSlate. But if The Green Room is right and Pixel Qi is a “very unlikely” feature of the iSlate – well, where does it leave us?

With a lot of questions, is where. They’ll be answered on January 27th – unless Apple has simply hired an auditorium to announce it’s installing new toilets in the executive washroom.

Okay, do you think you know the answers? If you do, Gizmodo is offering a free Apple tablet to whoever guesses the most features on the device (including the name). Here are the contest rules:

Fill out the survey before the Apple event, and whoever gets closest to having all the answers right is eligible to win a free Apple tablet—whatever it ends up being called—courtesy of us.

• If the final feature is not exactly like one of the answers we provided, we will pick the closest answer. If the feature is not in the answers, that question will be void, but the rest of the questions will still be valid towards winning.

• There is a reasonable chance that many people will get the correct answers. In the event that there are, all of those who made the cut will go into a drawing, from which we’ll pick a winner at random.

Richard Curtis
iSlate background image created by Fotoboer, graphic © 2010 tgr network.

Are you still flipping channels with a clicker? Running a game with a joystick? That is so 2009! This is the year you’ll be making like Tom Cruise in Minority Report and manipulating your screen with a wave of a hand – or a foot.

“Stand in front of a TV armed with a gesture technology camera,” writes Ashlee Vance in the New York Times, “and you can turn on the set with a soft punch into the air. Flipping through channels requires a twist of the hand, and raising the volume occurs with an upward pat. If there is a photo on the screen, you can enlarge it by holding your hands in the air and spreading them apart and shrink it by bringing your hands back together as you would do with your fingers on a cellphone touch screen.”

Read about every couch jockey’s dream in Giving Electronic Commands With Body Language, and check out the performance in the demo below.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

One of the hit tech wonders of the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a schizophrenic screen called the Pixel Qi that may solve some major problems for e-book manufacturers. Foremost among those problems is how to extend battery life in the forthcoming power-gobbling generation of tablets.

The principle is simple enough. “The gray-and-white E Ink displays on devices like the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook do not have color and cannot show video,” writes the New York Times‘s Brad Stone. “Computers can, but text is difficult to read in full sunlight on laptop displays, which also hog battery power and can strain the eyes when reading for long periods.”

Like a hybrid car that alternates between gas and battery power, the Pixel Qi maximizes energy efficiency. Earlier this week we wondered whether the soon-to-be-announced Apple iSlate might be a battery-drainer. Could Pixel Qi be the remedy?

Read One Screen to Read It All and judge. But if the iSlate doesn’t use Pixel Qi, don’t be surprise if others do. A half-dozen manufacturers “were showing devices with Pixel Qi’s screen behind the scenes at the show and preparing to sell them later this year,” says Stone.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

We recently gushed over exciting advances in touchscreen technology, particularly one developed by N-trig, which is providing Microsoft with the interface for next year’s release of Windows 7. You’ll be able to perform the same gestures on it that made the iPhone famous, such as fingertip scrolling and pinching, only you’ll be able to do them with both hands. Certainly sounds like the summit of screen engineering. Unless your name is R. Clayton Miller and you’ve developed a screen interface that will make Windows 7 look like Etch-a-Sketch.

Miller has analyzed such bedrock assumptions of computers as the mouse and the windowed desktop and found them seriously wanting. Utilizing the latest technological advances, he has created an approach so radically and refreshingly new that every time you place your hands on a screen from now on you’ll think about Miller’s 10/GUI. The “10″ is for ten fingers. The “GUI” is for Graphical User Interface – the place where the user meets the road.

In Miller’s words:

“Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted.That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry is now at a crossroads: New technologies promise higher-bandwidth interaction, but have yet to find a truly viable implementation.

10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way.

The mouse and the windowed desktop are perhaps the two greatest innovations in the history of human-computer interaction. But like all innovations, they are best seen as part of a continuum rather than a terminus.

The mouse and the window led us out of the confines of the keyboard and the text prompt to the world of graphical and spatial possibility we enjoy today. But there’s no reason to stop there.”

Not only does Miller not stop there, he hurtles past today’s screen technology like a stoned teenager running a stop sign.

View the video demo below, then visit the 10/GUI website.

Richard Curtis