A year of television = 2000 Wikipedias

My colleague Jason Tester pointed out (ultimately via Boing Boing) a post by Clay Shirky that helps answer a question that often comes up about collaborative media. As Jason put it, "Often when I give talks illustrated with examples like Wikipedia, delicious, Flickr, etc, to largely non-tech audiences (HR for example) someone will ask 'Where do people find the time?' or the less thoughtful 'Is this just about nerds in basements?'"

Clay points out two things. First, that a lot of time that goes into writing blogs, adding content to wikis, mashing things up on Google Earth, etc., is taken from other activities like television-watching. He notes that Americans watch something like 200 billion hours of television a year.

That's an amazing amount of time, and when you can take little bits of your time and spend them on projects that other people can also spend little bits of time on, it adds up pretty quickly.

The coming debate about brain enhancement

The New York Times recently had a pretty decent article about debates over brain enhancement in academia:

an era of doping may be looming in academia, and it has ignited a debate about policy and ethics that in some ways echoes the national controversy over performance enhancement accusations against elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.