Pope Benedict gave a qualified blessing to social networking on Monday, praising its potential but warning that online friendships are no substitute for real human contact. The 83-year-old pontiff, who does not have his own Facebook account, set out his views in a message with a weighty title that would easily fit into a tweet: “Truth, proclamation and authenticity of life in the digital age”.

He said the possibilities of new media and social networks offered “a great opportunity,” but warned of the risks of depersonalisation, alienation, self-indulgence, and the dangers of having more virtual friends than real ones.

“It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives,” Benedict said in the message for the Catholic Church’s World Day of Communications.

He urged users of social networks to ask themselves “Who is my ‘neighbour’ in this new world?” and avoid the danger of always being available online but being “less present to those whom we encounter in our everyday life“.

via The Globe and Mail.

On July 11th, 2010, Tom Gerhardt and I had an idea for an iPhone accessory: a tripod mount that doubled as a stand. Five months later, customers began to receive our product, the Glif, in the mail. This turnaround, from idea to market in five months by two guys with no retail or manufacturing experience, signifies a shift in the way products are made and sold — a shift only made possible in the last couple years. The best compliment anyone could give us about the Glif project is that it inspired them to take their creative idea to fruition. The purpose of this piece is two-fold: to give an inside look at our creative process, and to offer guidance and inspiration for those who have their own ideas they’d like to see brought to reality.

via IThe Russians Used a Pencil.

On an 18-hour flight from California to Singapore a few years ago, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, had little time for small talk with a colleague. Glued to his business class seat, Mr. Cook had his nose in spreadsheets, preparing for a thorough review of Apple’s Asian operations. Apple has benefited from the complementary skills of Timothy D. Cook, left, the chief operating officer, and Steven P. Jobs.

The two landed at 6 a.m., took time to shower and headed into a meeting with Apple’s local executives. Twelve hours later, and well past dinnertime, the local executives were ready to call it quits.

“They were absolutely exhausted,” said Michael Janes, the Apple executive who accompanied Mr. Cook. “Tim was not. He was ready to jump to the next slide and the next slide after that. He is absolutely relentless.”

That relentlessness could be indispensable in the months ahead, because Mr. Cook may be tested as never before. He has been charged with running Apple’s day-to-day operations while his boss, Steven P. Jobs, the company’s visionary chief executive, is on medical leave.

via NYTimes.com.

Steve Jobs in 1985:

I helped shepherd Apple from a garage to a billion-and-a-half-dollar company. I'm probably not the best person in the world to shepherd it to a five- or ten-billion-dollar company, which I think is probably its destiny.

via Newsweek.

Hundreds of millions of people around the globe are already devoting larger and larger chunks of time to this alternate reality. Collectively, we spend three billion hours a week gaming. In the United States, where there are 183 million active gamers, videogames took in about $15.5 billion last year. And though a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than five million "extreme" gamers in the U.S. who play an average of 45 hours a week. To put this in perspective, the number of hours that gamers world-wide have spent playing "World of Warcraft" alone adds up to 5.93 million years.

via WSJ.com.

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques. The research, published online Thursday in the journal Science, found that students who read a passage, then took a test asking them to recall what they had read, retained about 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who used two other methods.

One of those methods — repeatedly studying the material — is familiar to legions of students who cram before exams. The other — having students draw detailed diagrams documenting what they are learning — is prized by many teachers because it forces students to make connections among facts.

These other methods not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.

In the experiments, the students were asked to predict how much they would remember a week after using one of the methods to learn the material. Those who took the test after reading the passage predicted they would remember less than the other students predicted — but the results were just the opposite.

“I think that learning is all about retrieving, all about reconstructing our knowledge,” said the lead author, Jeffrey Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University. “I think that we’re tapping into something fundamental about how the mind works when we talk about retrieval.”

via NYTimes.com.

Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence is the top story in today’s newspapers. The Wall Street Journal says his brief and poignant memo raises “uncertainty over his health and the future of the world’s most valuable technology company.” These two questions—Jobs’s health and Apple’s health—are the focus of almost all the coverage today. But I’m interested in the health of our culture, and what will happen to it when not if Steve Jobs departs the stage for the last time.

As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a ruthless and demanding leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.

In the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology. In October 2001, with the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month where unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—and technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.

via Culture Making.