Electric Josh

Multitasking
It turns out that refusing to concentrate on one task at a time is incredibly bad for your ability to get anything done at all, and may be addictive to boot. Oh no! I do this (we jerks call it multitasking to sound smart and avoid thinking) all the time, although not nearly as much as the people described in the article, who, due to their unwillingness to turn their electronics off, are (unintentionally?) made to sound like assholes.

So for those of you who, like me, constantly feel like you're getting very little done (at work nor in general), consider:

The ubiquity of technology in the lives of executives, other businesspeople and consumers has created a subculture of the Always On - and a brewing tension between productivity and freneticism. For all the efficiency gains that it seemingly provides, the constant stream of data can interrupt not just dinner and family time, but also meetings and creative time, and it can prove very tough to turn off.

Some people who are persistently wired say it is not uncommon for them to be sitting in a meeting and using a hand-held device to exchange instant messages surreptitiously - with someone in the same meeting. Others may be sitting at a desk and engaging in conversation on two phones, one at each ear. At social events, or in the grandstand at their children's soccer games, they read news feeds on mobile devices instead of chatting with actual human beings.

I'm not that bad, but posting regularly to this space probably doesn't help matters; nor does checking it. Good thing we periodically vanish for the weekend, eh?

Bummer. Link from boingboing.
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Review pending
Since every single one of this space's dedicated readers are diehard heavy metal fans, a review of the Metallica show is forthcoming. Metallica was decent, but in order to accurately describe the Limp Bizkit part of the show immediately preceding I need to find a word that means "self-parody" only much, much stronger. (Any German speakers out there?) Stay tuned, if you care to.
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GIA
Best MIT hack in a long time: Government Information Awareness. (Why isn't this on the MIT Hacks page?) Story in the Globe:

Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials.

The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials -- reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy.

"It's sort of a citizen's intelligence agency," said Chris Csikszentmihalyi, assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab.

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