[talks] 8pm tonight: What Does It Mean To Be Literate in the Age of Google?

[Adam Finkelstein]

This public lecture may be of interest:

http://lectures.princeton.edu/2012/daniel-m-russell/

What Does It Mean To Be Literate in the Age of Google?
Daniel M. Russell Über Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness, Google
February 28, 2012
Louis Clark Vanuxem Lecture

What does it mean to be literate at a time when you can search over
billions of texts in less than 300 milliseconds? Although you might
think that “literacy” is one of the great constants that transcends
the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially
over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and
understanding. Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it—knowing
how to frame a question, pose a query, how to interpret the texts that
you find, how to organize and use the information you discover, how to
understand your metacognition—these are all critical parts of being
literate as well. In this talk Russell review what literacy is today,
in the age of Google, and show how some very surprising and unexpected
skills will turn out to be critical in the years ahead.

Daniel M. Russell is the Über Tech Lead for Search Quality and User
Happiness for Google where he studies how people search for and
organize information. He earned his PhD in computer science at the
University of Rochester (NY), specializing in artificial intelligence
until he realized that magnifying and understanding human intelligence
was his real passion. Twenty years ago he foreswore AI in favor of HI,
and enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in
one day.  He has worked at Xerox PARC before it was PARC.com, was in
the Advanced Technology Group at Apple where he wrote the first 100
web pages for www.Apple.com using SimpleText. He has also worked at
IBM as a senior research scientist, and briefly at a startup that
developed tablet computers a few years before the iPad.