My Heritage

Now that your inspired to track your family tree after attending the Leap into Family History session have a look @ my heritage and you can start to work on your personal family tree.

How easy is that.

Rhymetime 2009 starts off a busy month of March

Williamstown Library, 104 Ferguson St
Monday, 2 March 2009
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM

A four week program designed especially for children from birth to 18 months and their caregivers. Sessions include rhymes, finger plays, songs and short stories.

Rhymetime aims to develop young children’s listening and interactive skills and provides an opportunity for them to socialise.
We look forward to meeting you.

Monday, 2nd, 16th, 23rd , 30th March

No bookings required

LOCATION: Williamstown Library, 104 Ferguson St
CONTACT NAME: Children’s and Youth Team PHONE: 9932 4180
EMAIL: library@hobsonsbay.vic.gov.au

For more events for March click on the link to the calendar

Speaking of all things old - Leap into family history today

Leap into family history

Thursday, 26 February 2009

1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Calling all ethusiastic family historians! Join us for the launch of our new Family History Group, featuring Family History is Fun with Ann Dixon, a member of Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies who will show us an eclectic array of memorabilia from days gone by. Swap stories, tips and celebrate family history. Everyone is welcome, no genealogy experience is necessary and afternoon tea will be served.
Bookings required
LOCATION: Williamstown Library 104 Ferguson Street

CONTACT NAME: Local and Family History Librarian PHONE: 9932 4170

A visit to Agatha Christies Library?!

Mystery ends: Agatha Christie's country home opens

By JILL LAWLESS – 1 day ago

LONDON (AP) — The house has everything an Agatha Christie fan could want — except a body in the library.

The stuccoed Georgian villa where the writer spent her vacations is opening to the public for the first time beginning Saturday after a $7.8 million restoration. Visitors can see the bedroom where Christie slept, the dining room where she entertained, and the drawing room where she thrilled friends with readings from her latest whodunit.

Craftsmen worked for two years to restore the 18th-century home, Greenway, and the rooms are much as they were when Christie lived there, complete with books, papers, boxes of chocolates and bunches of flowers. Even the scratches on the bedroom door made by the family dog remain.

"It does feel very much in a time warp," Robyn Brown, who manages Greenway on behalf of the National Trust heritage group, said Tuesday.

That is exactly the way the trust likes it — the group preserves Britain's historic properties with a rigorous attention to detail. The cream paint in the bedroom and the mushroom-colored library walls are as close as possible to the shades chosen by Christie herself. The sofas and chairs come from her childhood home.

Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, said he hoped the renovation would let visitors "feel some of the magic and sense of place that I felt when my family and I spent so much time there in the 1950s and '60s."

Visitors can see Christie's bedroom, with its view of grounds sloping down to the River Dart, the formal dining room and a manuscript room full of Christie first editions.

During World War II, the house was requisitioned by the U.S. Navy amid preparations for D-Day. The home's restorers have retained a vivid frieze of wartime scenes painted on the library walls by Lt. Marshall Lee, a U.S. Coast Guard war artist.

There is also the drawing room, where friends and family would gather to hear Christie read from her latest manuscript and then try to guess whodunit. The trust said her husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, would usually awake from a doze to announce the name of the murderer.

Christie bought the house in Devon, 200 miles southwest of London, in 1938 and spent holidays there until 1959. She died in 1976, aged 85.

Her family donated Greenway to the National Trust nine years ago, but until now only its lush gardens full of fruit trees, flowers, ferns and even palm trees have been open to the public. The house remained off-limits until its occupants — the writer's daughter Rosalind and her husband — died in 2004 and 2005.

Greenway is a mystery-lovers' mecca, the country house that spawned a clutch of country-house thrillers. The National Trust said it is considering holding murder-mystery tours and Christie-themed events once the house has been open for a while.

Christie had deep roots in Devon, a region of beaches, dramatic river valleys, hills and stretches of wild moorland. She was born there in 1890, and 15 of her books have Devon settings, including "And Then There Were None," "Ordeal by Innocence" and "The Murder at Hazelmoor."

Greenway itself is the inspiration for the setting of "Dead Man's Folly," in which Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of a Girl Guide at a mystery writer's country home.

Brown says the trust also hopes Greenway will give visitors a glimpse of England in the 1950s, an era "when life was a little less complicated than it is now."

For Christie, the prolific author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, two autobiographies and eight romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, the house was also a retreat from the pressures of celebrity.

"I don't think she sat comfortably with her fame," Brown said. "Here at Greenway she was known as Mrs. Mallowan, and she was very ordinary. She would go to the village and just be Mrs. M."

For die-hard fans, one floor of the main house has been turned into a five-bedroom holiday apartment, available for $3,600 a week in high season. The trust also hopes to offer overnight guests a meal in the dining room where Christie once dined on hot lobster followed by blackberry ice cream.

"It's my dream," Brown said, "that on the last night of their stay, we will ring a gong in the hall and they will come down for drinks in the library and then have dinner in the dining room."

For Christie fans, what could be a greater thrill?

Koscioszko Live Cams

Theres been a K @ Koscioszko, I think thats a K T see if you can spot anyone you know in the crowd or live cams @ Thredbo,

I hear there were lots of librarians there?!

Dont know if they tried the mountain biking

Any grey water to spare for the tree in the street or park?

Doctor's plea for trees

* Denise Gadd
* February 19, 2009 The Age

VICTORIA has lost 12 per cent of its trees during the drought, with up to 50 per cent under threat if it continues, a leading arboriculturist has warned.

Dr Greg Moore, a special guest at a water crisis symposium being held tonight in Melbourne, is concerned the economic, health and environmental values of trees are seriously underestimated.

Trees and urban vegetation have been assets for years and their benefits should not be taken for granted, he said.

A study of trees in South Australia showed they had a value of $200 each in shade and carbon sequestration, Mr Moore said. "If there are 70,000 public trees in Melbourne, that's $14 million worth of value to the city. I'm worried that if we don't understand these benefits it will be at our peril. Suddenly you'll find Melbourne is not the liveable city it was because our trees, green spaces and vegetation have been lost."

He said localised warming due to the increase in paved and dark-coloured surfaces reduced significantly when cities had adequate green belts.

This meant the appropriate use of resources was needed to maintain these assets, such as water, especially in a drought.

Mr Moore said most councils had acted quickly to protect their parks and gardens, even though they faced hostility from residents opposed to such a "waste" of water.

"Melburnians can be wonderfully self-righteous yet the councils have stood their ground. Turf too has had a terrible time and yet it's an effective ecosystem in its own right and good at holding carbon.

"I'm worried about our obsession with water, and it's a justified and reasonable obsession, but sometimes it blinds us to other components in this overall environmental equation. It's glib to the point of dangerous to say we've got problems with water but we're not going to look at these other elements."

While most of Melbourne's trees are shedding their leaves early to survive, other trees are being removed for high-density developments, he said.

"There are pockets dotted around Melbourne where housing density is so great that you can't plant a tree of any substantial size in gardens."

Mr Moore said Sir William Guilfoyle, the second director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, understood that his creation had a functioning role as the lungs of the city.

Many Melburnians, though, consider trees to be ornaments rather than environmental protectors, Mr Moore said.

The symposium is on at 6pm at BMW Edge, Federation Square. Free entry.

meet Steven Carroll, Miles Franklin Award Winner

Hobsons Bay Libraries is pleased to present a talk by Steven Carroll, the 2008 Miles Franklin Award winner and author of The Time We Have Taken as part of the State Library of Victoria's Summer Read program.

Steven grew up in Glenroy, went to La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in bands in the 1970s. After leaving the music scene he began writing as a playwright and became the theatre critic for The Sunday Age.

His novels The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed were both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2008 The Time We Have Taken won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book‚ South-East Asia and South Pacific region as well as the Miles Franklin Award.

Pre-event
6.00pm for a 70s Picnic on the lawn. Bring your friends and a picnic, settle down to enjoy 70s music, and classic 70s food ‘kabana and cheese’ from 6.00pm

Main event
7.21pm, Steven Carroll inside the Mechanics Institute

Bookings required, phone Williamstown Library or online at eventbrite- see link below
LOCATION: Williamstown Mechanics Institute, 5 Electra Street
CONTACT NAME: Libraries' Programs and Marketing Co-ordinator PHONE: 9932 4170
EMAIL: library@hobsonsbay.vic.gov.au
WEB: http://summerread26.eventbrite.com

Click on the link and register to attend , its free

About the popular Diary of Anne Frank

Rescuer of Anne Frank's diary is 100

* Amsterdam
* February 14, 2009


ANNE Frank called them "the Helpers". They provided food, books and good cheer while she and her family hid for two years from the Nazis in a tiny attic apartment.

Tomorrow, the last surviving helper, Miep Gies, celebrates her 100th birthday, saying she has won more accolades for helping the Frank family than she deserved — as if, she says, she tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.

"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote in an email to the Associated Press this week.

It was Mrs Gies who gathered up Anne's scattered papers and notebooks after the hiding place was raided in 1944. She locked them — unread — in a desk drawer to await the teenager's return.

Anne died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen seven months after her arrest. British and Canadian troops liberated the camp two weeks later.

Mrs Gies gave the collection to Anne's father Otto, the only survivor of the eight people who hid in the concealed attic of the canal-side warehouse.

He published it in 1947, and it was released in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl. Retitled The Diary of Anne Frank, it was the first book about the Holocaust to win popular appeal, and has sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.

As she looked forward to a quiet birthday with her son and three grandchildren, Mrs Gies paid tribute to the "unnamed heroes" who helped Dutch Jews escape the net during the five years of Nazi occupation.

"I would like to name one, my husband, Jan. He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard," she said.

Jan Gies, who was not one of the four office workers who supplied the Frank family with their daily needs, died in 1993.

Such people fought a lonely battle in the Netherlands. Historians say collaborators were many and anti-Nazi resistance was light. Of the prewar Jewish population of 140,000, some 107,000 were arrested and deported. The Red Cross says only 5200 of them survived the war.

After the war, Mrs Gies worked for Otto Frank as he compiled and edited the diary.

After Mr Frank's death in 1980, Mrs Gies continued to campaign against Holocaust deniers and to counter allegations that the diary was a forgery.

visit anne frank museum

Tomorrow.. b there!

Friends of Williamstown and Newport Libraries

are holding their monthly book sale @ Willy Library

Saturday, 14th February 10.00am -12.30pm

but with a BIG difference

all proceeds this weekend go to the bushfire appeal so come down and grab a bargain and help others


Saturday, 14th February 10.00am -12.30pm

News on Twitter

Join the Twitterati

February 12, 2009
LiveWire, The Age,

It's the latest next big thing on the internet and there's still time to get in on the ground floor. Nick Ross reports.


MY FACEBOOK page is feeling a touch neglected. So many friends and acquaintances have joined that the tsunami of information updates, requests and notifications has become rather unmanageable and even a little daunting.

Twitter has been going for a few years now and is experiencing an explosion in popularity akin to Facebook. If you're already familiar with Facebook, then Twitter is a "status update only" version of that: easily digestible, bite-size blogs that are limited to 140 characters and track what people are doing, reading, viewing and talking about throughout the day. You can't post pictures but you can link to them via twitpics.com, and much of the most interesting content is gleaned from posted weblinks.

Some news organisations believe it's the fastest way of gleaning news. The first anyone heard of US Airways Flight 1549 ditching in the Hudson River was when Janis Krums, on one of the nearby ships, took a picture on an iPhone and posted it on Twitpics. "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy" went the "tweet".

In the early days of the website MySpace, celebrities and bands wrote their own MySpace pages. However, as popularity and complexity grew, pretty soon they were all being farmed out to agents. Few celebrities embraced Facebookstrangers, but Twitter is new again.

British author and performer Stephen Fry is a major Twitter advocate, to the point where he has become a willing, unofficial spokesman. He also responds to his followers although he says it's getting trickier as the numbers grow.

He freely admits that much of what he writes should be of little interest, but it's more of an open diary and many of his "on set" filming posts are intriguing. Not so long ago he celebrated having 50,000 followers. Less than a fortnight later it was 100,000 (it's probably much higher now). Only Barack Obama has more followers (a quarter of a million at the time of writing).

The minimal effort involved in tweeting, tied with the potentially huge rewards from having a massive attentive audience on your virtual doorstep, can be invaluable when it comes to doing something like writing a book or calling on people to vote. Reliance on PR and publicists diminishes as personalities can remain in the spotlight, or take a break from it at their leisure, and yet always return to a potentially huge targeted audience.

Basketballer Shaquille O'Neal recently tweeted, "Don't believe crappy websites such as mediatakeout.com. If it doesn't come from me verbally or twitter wise, disregard. The horse has spoken" (sic). We think he's taking it seriously.

Australian twitterers lag behind in adoption. At the time of writing only Tourism Queensland had scraped together 1000 followers. Sky News was the largest media organisation with fewer than 500 followers, while The Age was the largest newspaper at 250. KevinRuddPM has a presence with almost 6000 followers, but updates are posted by an aide rather than the man himself.

Many businesses will try to block it, as with other social networking sites, but there are few better ways of keeping in touch with customers, colleagues and clients. The absence of pictures and videos (and the newness of the whole thing) will hopefully let it slip under the radar of anxious network administrators.

Things will doubtless change as popularity grows, and it's a given that many will choose to abuse its power by spamming and selling products. While existing Twitter aficionados might disagree about its future, Twitter is still at the ground floor and about to grow into something massive.

WickiWilly for a day

Playing with Wikis today and found this good link to keep in mind for handy hints to improve your Wiki

http://pbwikicentral.pbwiki.com/PBwikiTips

and we all know that webwilly's fav wiki is wikipedia

Back to being WebWilly tomorrow.

BIG BOOK SALE all proceeds to the bushfire appeal

Friends of Williamstown and Newport Libraries

are holding their monthly book sale @ Willy Library

Saturday, 14th February 10.00am -12.30pm

but with a BIG difference

all proceeds this weekend go to the bushfire appeal so come down and grab a bargain and help others


Saturday, 14th February 10.00am -12.30pm

How green are we prepared to be?

Fires the deadly inevitability of climate change

* Freya Mathews
* February 10, 2009

Freya Mathews is a research fellow in the philosophy department at La Trobe University.

The disaster challenges the Government to accept evident truths.

IT IS only a couple of years since scientists first told us we could expect a whole new order of fires in south-eastern Australia, fires of such ferocity they would simply engulf the towns in their path. And here they are.

The fires we saw on Saturday were not "once in a thousand years" or even "once in a hundred years" events, as our political leaders keep repeating. They were the face of climate change in our part of the world.

These fires are simply the result of the new conditions that climate change has introduced here: raised temperatures, giving us hotter days than we have ever experienced before combined with lower rainfall giving us a drier landscape. Let's stop using the word "drought", with its implication that dry weather is the exception. The desiccation of the landscape here is the new reality. It is now our climate.

Perhaps we can adapt to this new climate by completely rethinking and reprioritising our fire defence.

But can we adapt to it if it gets worse? It was only by chance that a cool change came through on Saturday. What if the pattern of the heatwave that occurred in the last week of January had been repeated? If instead of the cool change on Saturday evening we had had three or four days of above 40 degree temperatures? How much of our state, how many of our towns and outer suburbs, would have been engulfed?

People are comparing last Saturday to Ash Wednesday and Black Friday.

But this misses the point. We should be comparing these fires to the vast and devastating fires of 2002-03, which swept through 2 million hectares of forest in the south-east and raged uncontrollably for weeks.

They have been quickly forgotten because, being mainly in parks, they did not involve major loss of human life or property.

But it is to this fire regime, the new fire regime of climate change, rather than to the regimes of 1983 or 1939, that the present fires belong.

Saturday showed us the terrifying and desolating face of climate change.

The heat was devastating in its effects even without the fire.

In the fruit bat colony at Bellbird on the Yarra, hundreds of bats died as they had during the heat wave a week earlier.

Wildlife carers reported many incidents of heat stress and death among native animals generally.

This means, of course, that out in the bush, unreported, vast numbers of animals were suffering.

We can all see the trees and other plants dying in our gardens and parks. Our local fauna and flora are not adapted to these extremes.

With wildfire, this heat death becomes a holocaust, for people and for animals and plants. Yet we are only halfway through summer. How many more lethal episodes of extreme heat will we have to endure in the coming weeks, let alone the coming years?

Meanwhile, the Federal Government is wondering how to inject stimulus money into the economy, how to get rid of the surplus accumulated over years of boom times.

It is planning simply to give much of it away, as hand-outs. It has made the usual little token allocations to climate change mitigation, allocations that will in no way deflect the coming holocaust.

The Prime Minister weeps on television at the tragedy of Saturday's events. He looks around uncomprehendingly, unable to find words, unable to find meaning.

But there are words. There is meaning. This is climate change. This is what the scientists told us would happen. All the climatic events of the past 10 years have been leading inexorably to this.

Yet this is just the beginning, the beginning of something that will truly, if unaddressed, overwhelm us.

As the events of Saturday showed, the consequences of climate change will make the financial crisis look like a garden party.

But there is a synchronicity here that must not be missed. The extraordinary economic measures for which the financial crisis is calling provide a perfect opportunity to fund the energy revolution for which the crisis of climate change is calling.

If the Government does not seize this opportunity, if it persists in its self-serving refusal to name the truths of climate change, then the terrifying world into which we were plunged, momentarily, on Saturday, will become the world that we will have to inhabit.

Is technology eating our brains?

If the key to human intelligence lies beyond the first page of a Google search, or in the last paragraph of a lengthy newspaper article, will we ever find it?


This is the last few words @ the end of this article I hope they inspire you to read it through

Is technology eating our brains?

* Peter Munro
* February 7, 2009


THERE was a time when technology sought to save us from daily drudgery. Labour-saving devices such as automatic washing machines, dishwashers, the drive-through carwash and electric drill made lives easier by saving us from sweating out mundane tasks. Machines made us free to waste as much time as we pleased, and we did.

A classic advertisement in the early 1900s for a hand-operated washer boasted that it could "transform Blue Monday into a bright and happy day" — saving women (and it was always women) time, labour, nerves and strength. Today's technologies, though, seem dedicated to a pursuit higher than happiness, even. Google can connect us to a source — any source — within a fraction of a second, while mobile phones mean the world is more portable, accessible and simultaneously more demanding. But in the course of making our lives more convenient, have these technologies also made us more stupid?

Modern marvels are less labour-savers than brain-savers. Mobile phones remember your partner's number, your parents' and even your own — so you don't have to. Technology is equally adept at recalling birthdays and anniversaries of relatives and close friends. You don't need to think about the path to their homes, because Google or GPS does it for you. Take a taxi in Melbourne and you soon discover that navigation, that most adventurous of learned human skills, has been outsourced to a console on the dashboard.

Arguably, these are piddling concerns. Why bother the brain with dross when technology can pick up the slack? But deeper thought, too, seems to be skipping away in a ready stream of information. Some argue our unique capacity for original thought, innovation and imagination is being stultified by the spread of new technology.

Author Nicholas Carr, writing in The Atlantic last year, worried someone, or something, had tinkered with his brain, remapping the circuits and reprogramming his memory. The influence of the internet meant he was not thinking the way he used to. Once he could immerse himself in a book and spend hours strolling through prose. "Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text."

"Is Google making us stupid?" he asked. But the answer was already staring at him through the computer screen. "What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he wrote. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet-ski."

I skim, therefore I am. Robert Fitzgerald, associate dean in the faculty of education at the University of Canberra, says there is indeed a "dumb side" to technology. "My children are immensely good at jumping on Google and finding things, but I wonder to what extent these are productive searches and to what extent they are hit-and-miss," he says.

American media critic Neil Postman once asked if we had known the impact the motor vehicle would have on life, would we have embraced it so thoroughly. Fitzgerald says it's time we asked the same question of computers. "If you look at very early computer applications, particularly in the area of education, they were about simple cognitive skills such as addition, subtraction and memory devices. There was a sense of relieving us from some of the more simple but tedious tasks of intellectual function.

"But now we need to recognise some of those routine, tedious tasks are quite fundamental to higher-level tasks. Having calculators in schools certainly allows children to calculate more quickly, but if they don't have an understanding of the equation, if they don't have the capacity to establish the answer, then they're at the mercy of technology. If it is faulty, they will never know the answer is wrong."

Indeed, Google was proved fallible only last weekend, when a system error meant links to all search results were flagged with the warning: "This site may harm your computer." Tellingly, the internet behemoth initially tried to blame the mishap on human error — but not its own.

If not making us stupid, as such, Google seems to be making us intellectually lazy. Its search engine attracts several hundred million queries a day, but relatively few users venture beyond the first page of results. It is enough to take what comes first and fastest, scan through an article and move on. If you slow down while skimming across the water, you sink.

American psychologist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, argues we are becoming "mere decoders of information" obtained online, rather than interpreters. Technology might lead us two ways, she says. Children might become so accustomed to immediate, on-screen information they fail to probe for deeper levels of insight, imagination and knowledge. Or the need to multitask and prioritise vast pools of information could see them develop equally, if not more valuable, skills.

Stephanie Trigg, professor of English literature at the University of Melbourne, says technology has helped her students become more adept at finding and extracting information for study. "I think technology is making us more savvy at working out what we need from various websites, but the downside is it's starting to affect students' capacity to read long works of fiction. You have to train yourself to read at different speeds for different purposes," she says. "But I don't think their mental faculties are affected by the constant temptation to check their mobile phones. I don't think technology is making us stupid; maybe it's producing a different form of attention and concentration where you become more clever at working out what you need and reading between the lines. You get better and faster at processing information."

A study by Dublin's Trinity College in 2007 found a quarter of Britons don't know their home phone number, while only a third can recall more than three birthdays of their immediate family. Six out of 10 claimed they suffered "information overload", but more than half admitted they used the same password across different bank accounts. Recall was worse among the younger set. Only 40 per cent of those aged under 30 could remember the birthdays of close relatives, against 87 per cent of those aged over 50.

Of course, this doesn't denote stupidity. We now need to have these numbers and dates committed to memory as much as we need to know, in the developed world at least, how to use a hand-operated washer. We have outsourced parts of our memory, letting the machines do the thinking for us. And some argue releasing our brains of such small fry might free us to ponder weightier matters.

Professor Sue Trinidad, dean of teaching and learning at Curtin University of Technology, says technologies such as computer games are preparing children for success in the 21st century. "Digital natives" are developing special skills to sift through information quickly and use scanning to effectively pick out what's important to them, she writes by email. "These digital natives are in a 3D, multifunctional, fast, instant, mobile world where you want it now and get it now."

In this world, spending time or grey matter memorising phone numbers and birthdates might be more hindrance than help. But Nicholas Carr, for one, argues something much more significant is being lost in the rush of technology. "I argue that what the net might be doing is rewiring the neural circuitry of our brains in a way that diminishes our capacity for concentration, reflection and contemplation," he writes on his blog, Rough Type. "The net is sapping us of a form of thinking — concentrated, linear, relaxed, reflective, deep — that I see as central to human identity."

WHAT is technology doing to our minds? Professor Christos Pantelis, scientific director of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre at the University of Melbourne, says the brain is forever changing and being moulded, "but whether it's rewiring itself based on technological advances, we don't know".

He studies changes in the structure and function of the adolescent brain, which is particularly malleable in those areas involved in problem-solving, planning and flexible thinking. "The brain is changing during adolescence and early adulthood in very specific ways, up to about the age of 25. That means there is the potential to modify the way the brain is maturing during this critical phase of development, and you might hypothesise that what we do, and how we interact with the world, will have a direct effect on that," he says.

"From my perspective, I would have thought technology helps to extend our abilities. It helps us to look at things in different ways, and in that regard I would have considered technological advances are actually a plus and assist us in all our endeavours. But you could also argue the other way; that training our mind to remember things is also a good thing and if we're not doing that so much maybe we're missing out somewhere. It's a good hypothesis to test: in what ways will the next generation exposed to these technologies see their brain changed by them?"

What little study exists in this area is inconclusive. Scientists at University College London have found people demonstrate "a form of skimming activity" when using the internet for research. More than half of e-journal users in the study, published last year, viewed no more than three pages of an article or book before "bouncing" to another site. Almost two-thirds of users never returned to a source they had visited. Little time was spent evaluating information for relevance, accuracy or authority. The researchers warned of the emergence of a whole new form of reading behaviour, whereby users "power browsed" through titles, content pages and abstracts.

But a separate study, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry last year, instead suggested internet searches enhance brain power. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, scanned the brains of 24 volunteers aged 55-76, half of whom had no prior internet search experience, while they were online or reading a book. During online searches, the brains of those who reported using the internet regularly showed increased stimulation, particularly in those regions associated with complex reasoning and decision-making. Within five days, the internet novices showed the same increase in activity in their frontal lobes.

The study was led by neuroscientist Gary Small, a professor at UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behaviour, and author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. He argues that as the brain shifts towards, and is energised by, new technological skills, it simultaneously drifts away from fundamental social skills. The cognitive gains made by younger generations in adapting to and processing new technologies come at the cost of such age-old social skills as reading facial expressions and body language.

"Our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss, subtle, non-verbal messages," he writes. "The dramatic conclusion would be we're drifting into an autistic society, but that would be overshooting."

To where, then, might we be drifting? The dark imaginings of science fiction may offer some guide. Nicholas Carr cites Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that scene where astronaut Dave Bowman coolly disconnects the memory circuits that control the artificial "brain" of malfunctioning supercomputer HAL. The humans act with almost "robot-like efficiency", while it is the machine that expresses anguish and loss. "That's the essence of Kubrick's dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence," Carr argues.

Robert Fitzgerald, from the University of Canberra, instead alludes to Ridley Scott's Alien trilogy. In a scene in the sequel, Lieutenant Ellen Ripley dons a mechanical "exosuit" to fight her alien foe — spitting out that memorable line, "Get away from her, you bitch!"

"For me, that exosuit is sort of symbolic for the way technology can expand our human capacities," Fitzgerald says.

"But I suspect what we've got at the moment are very small fragments of that exosuit, with nothing really fully functioning or connected yet. We're really in the very early days in terms of the development of new internet technologies. While we have seen quite remarkable developments in the rates of blog use or wikis, I suspect five years down the track we will not recognise those technologies we're currently using — they'll be more intuitive, more integrated, more intelligent."

But will we be more intelligent as well?

Our intelligence ultimately might reveal itself in the smarts of those same technologies, which have the capacity either to increase the sum of deep intelligence or leave us skating on the surface. But here's a sobering thought: if the key to human intelligence lies beyond the first page of a Google search, or in the last paragraph of a lengthy newspaper article, will we ever find it?

The Age

Facebook turns 5

Asher Moses, The Age
February 5, 2009 - 3:44PM

Facebook celebrates its fifth birthday this week and the company has much to crow about, as new figures reveal the social network has twice as many monthly users in Australia as its nearest competitor, MySpace.

According to web traffic monitor Nielsen Online, Facebook attracted 4,682,000 unique visitors in December, compared with just 2,362,000 for MySpace. Furthermore, each Facebook user viewed 381 pages on Facebook but MySpace users looked at only 252 pages.

The figures show Australians appear to be deserting MySpace for Facebook, which started as a Harvard dorm room project in 2004 and has had an astronomical rise in Australia since first bypassing MySpace in April last year.

Meanwhile, MySpace's monthly traffic has been moving in a downward trajectory, with usage down 21 per cent compared with December 2007.

In Britain, the BBC reports, Facebook has 17 million users or three times as many as MySpace. Globally, ComScore released figures late last month showing 222 million people visited Facebook in December, versus 125 million for MySpace.

Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp, which owns MySpace, will surely be eating his words now after last year dismissing Facebook as the "flavour of the month" and little more than a directory.

MySpace spokesman Darain Faraz refused to comment on the figures.

In a blog post marking Facebook's fifth birthday, founder Mark Zuckerberg, 24, said he was "humbled" that so many people were using the site to "engage and understand the world around them".

"The culture of the internet has also changed pretty dramatically over the past five years," he said.

"Before, most people wouldn't consider sharing their real identities online. But Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves."

To say thanks, Facebook, through its Gift Shop, is offering users a free "Thank You" gift card, which can be passed on to friends and appears on their profile page. Usually, members are able to buy gifts to place on their friends' profile pages including birthday cakes, drinks and flowers.

Facebook also published a series of images showing the evolution of profile page designs from 2004 to today.

It revealed that the average user had 120 friends on the site and more than 850 million photos were uploaded each month. Every day, 15 million users update their status to tell their friends what they are up to.

The challenge now for Facebook is to convert that momentum and its 150 million global active users into revenue. Last year, it generated only an estimated $US300 million in revenue, while MySpace, which has diversified into more of an entertainment site, was expected to book close to $US1 billion.

MySpace has loaded the site up with ads while Facebook has taken a more cautious approach out of fear it might annoy users, who are suspicious of marketing messages being placed in between their communications with friends.

Facebook users in particular have been reluctant to accept new forms of highly lucrative, targeted advertising based on personal information provided to the site as this is seen as an invasion of privacy.

Another problem with trying to earn money from social networks is that brands can advertise on the site for free by creating applications, starting up their own pages and running competitions. For instance, Burger King recently offered a free Whopper to people who deleted 10 friends in what it dubbed a "Whopper sacrifice" promotion, but Facebook did not earn a cent.

Got to love Google Earth ?!

Stephen Hutcheon
February 3, 2009 - 5:46AM The Age

View Ocean in Google Earth


Google has launched what is touted as being one of the most comprehensive 3D maps of the ocean floor in a major upgrade to its free Google Earth program rolled out earlier today.

Using bathymetric data obtained from some of the world's leading marine and oceanographic research institutes, Google has been able to build a realistic terrain map of that part of the Earth's surface covered by its oceans and seas.

Called Ocean in Google Earth, the feature complements the existing 3D maps of the Earth and the heavens housed in Google Earth, a program which allows users to zoom in and out of specific locations on a tapestry of panoramic images that have been woven together.

The core data for this new feature typically comes from sonar soundings which are then rendered into contoured visualisations of what lies beneath.

This will include continental shelves, undersea mountains, volcanoes, trenches, ridges and other hitherto hidden geographical features.

Much of what will come up on the new feature is a fuzzy expanse of featureless terrain this will be augmented with some 20 content layers of much higher resolution imagery, video and general data.

Google says the material will include detailed content about such places as the Great Barrier Reef as well as of dive and surf sites around Australia.


Content for this "Explore the Ocean" layer was developed in conjunction with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

David Bellwood, professor of Marine Biology and the Director of the Centre for Coral Reef Biodiversity at James Cook University in Queensland, said in a telephone interview that the feature was more than just "providing pretty pictures" - it was a serving of solid scientific research.

"The great thing about this site is that it will be inclusive," he said, inviting the public to explore the sub-sea environment.

"Everyone can make observations and at this stage every bit helps."

He said most of the data was only two years old and were "vignettes and highlights of the research we are doing".

Google, he said, was giving marine scientists a platform to present and share their data in a way that would put that research into a meaningful context.

Professor Bellwood likened the experience to "snooping around in your neighbour's back garden without them knowing you're there".

To see the new data, users will have to download the latest version of Google Earth, which was released this morning.

The update also includes Mars 3D, featuring high-resolution images of the closest planet to Earth and Touring, a tool which allows users to create and share narrated tours in Google Earth.

Electronically Yours on WebWillys Hit List

OK so you can keep up to date Ive added
Electronically Yours to Web Willys Hit list
so you can check on the latest events and news.

Each month when the new edition is released Ill update the link

Enjoy

Coming soon to a screen near you

February 2, 2009 The Age
Radio announcers will no longer be faceless as technology brings them closer to audiences, reveals Lia Timson.
As you read this, two rigging teams are perched high above Australia's capital cities, rushing to have five digital radio antennas installed and operational for the grand premiere of digital radio in Australia on May 1.
Digital radio will allow conventional FM and AM stations to slowly shift their operations to the digital spectrum (like the television industry is doing) to modernise, improve quality and free analog spectrum capacity for other uses.
Digital radio promises to serve up CD-quality sound, pause and rewind functions and new stations, since existing licensees will be able to use their allocated broadcasting capacity to launch programs for different audience tastes.
Several stations in Sydney and Melbourne have been taking part in a trial of DAB+ (Digital Audio Broadcasting Plus - the technology adopted by Australia) over the past few years.
It is the most advanced of all digital radio standards, some of which are now in use in Europe and Britain.
DAB+ allows text and pictures to be transmitted along with sound.
This gives stations the option to broadcast weather, traffic and other community announcements, as well as names of songs, artists and websites links (a feature that will be promoted heavily to the station's advertisers). Some units will have a colour LCD screen. These will be able to receive static pictures (such as band and radio announcer's photos) but not moving video, as this is prevented by the digital radio legislation in Australia.
Commercial Radio Australia, the body that has been trialling DAB+ on behalf of commercial and public broadcasters, estimates there are about 40 million radio receivers in Australian homes, cars and workplaces.
It admits it will take a long time for people to replace them with digital radio units but, nevertheless, the process is in motion.
When looking to upgrade your radio, you will need to keep a few basics in mind.
The first is to ask what you want the unit to do - most will come with a number of features (such as MP3 capability, for example) but some of the features may not be used as often, so why pay for them?
In-car units will also start to appear on the market later this year - some manufacturers already supply them ex-factory overseas.
We tried four new devices, including some prototypes: two DAB+ radios, one DAB+ and internet radio combined and one Wi-Fi internet-only radio to test the digital service and compare it with what's already available via the internet on PCs.
THE CONTENDERS
PURE EVOKE FLOW
Rating 4.5 out of 5
www.pure.com
This is the unit we were hoping for. It's a DAB+ radio, an FM radio and a Wi-Fi internet radio. The sound quality is superb on both DAB+ and internet stations. We liked this classic radio look and it brings internet radio out of the office and into the lounge or kitchen. We also liked the option to tune into our favourite local FM stations on DAB+ (thus with much better sound quality). Setting up the Wi-Fi radio is fiddly. It requires the usual wireless network access steps (it has a simple wizard to guide you) but then demands online registration at the Pure website, a warranty registration and two separate confirmation and activation emails for a registration code that needs to be entered on the device itself.
MiROAMER INTERNET RADIO INFUSION II UNIT
Rating 3
www.miroamer.com
This is not a digital radio but a small device that allows radio listening via the internet, away from the computer. It requires a broadband connection and Wi-Fi network, or access to an internet hotspot. It takes some time to set up but we loved the variety of stations, being able to listen to overseas as well as local ones, and the sound quality was surprisingly good. The unit is intuitive and easy to use. It's not too taxing on download quota and has a built-in FM tuner and alarm clock.
PURE ONE CLASSIC - DAB+ DIGITAL AND FM RADIO
Rating 4 out of 5
www.pure.com
We like the crystal-clear sounds of most stations and that the unit displays the stations by name. The scrolling text is slow but some of the information on weather and traffic is appreciated. There is screeching on a couple of stations with lower signal strength but this can be attributed to the trial. The sound quality is better in digital mode than in FM. The plug-ins for iPod and mini-discs are useful.
iRIVER ENHANCED DIGITAL RADIO + TV MULTIMEDIA PLAYER
Rating 3 out of 5
www.iriver.com
The small form factor, clicking screen (click on the edges to change stations and select menu options) and sound quality are all good. Screeching on the same stations as per above. This unit is an MP3, photo and video player but in Australia it will not receive television over the airwaves. We like the colour images, including pictures of radio announcers, and love knowing which song and artist is playing.
VERDICT
If you like fiddling with technology, the Pure Evoke Flow is the digital radio for you. It's full of features, great on sound quality but likely to be pricey (and it doesn't have colour pictures). If all you want is a replacement for an old receiver for the garage or the kitchen, the Pure One Classic will look good on the bench and will give you much better sound quality than your old device.

Sorry folks some of this is a bit of an add for products but its interesting to check out the links.

How green is your footprint?

The Age February 2, 2009

We know it's important to recycle and save water, but what about the nuts and bolts of environmentally friendly life? Metro consulted some experts with the dumb eco-questions that many are afraid to ask.

Does it use more energy to switch the light on and off every time I enter and leave a room, or to leave it on all evening?Sustainability Victoria advises turning lights off if you're going to be out of the room for longer than the typical television ad break. Kelly Wickham, project manager for energy supply, and John Osborne, project manager for renewables and distributed energy, say that although the life of the bulb is reduced by switching on and off frequently, the remaining life of the bulb (plus time it's switched off) is greater than if it's not switched off at all. Phew! To be clear, Osborne says: "If you're going to be out of the room for more than a few minutes, yes, switch the light off."

Does my leftover pizza box (or soft drink can, or tomato sauce bottle) need to be spotless for it to be recyclable?This depends on the recycling process used.

"We did a tour of Visy, the processing plant in Springvale," Wickham says. "The process engineer told us there that things just need to be 'well eaten and well drunk'. If it's 95 per cent clean, then they'll process it. It gets washed down during the process itself, so rinsing and wasting water is pretty unnecessary."

What's the most fuel-efficient way to drive?

RACV general manager of public policy Brian Negus stresses that smoother driving uses less petrol.

"The most fuel-efficient way to drive is to make sure you accelerate gently, don't rev the engine and avoid large changes in the speed at which you travel," he says, pointing to extensive green tips on the RACV website (under the My Car tab). These include keeping your car serviced and well maintained to minimise emissions and leaks, keeping tyres well inflated and aligned, and avoiding heavy traffic where possible.

To minimise wind resistance, the RACV recommends removing roof racks and other attachments when they are not being used and closing the windows when travelling at higher speeds. You should also remove unnecessary weight from the car boot. So keep those golf clubs and prams in the garage.

The site also provides a guide to choosing a greener car and an online Car Eco-meter.

What's worse, the carbon dioxide put out by a petrol-fuelled car or the environmental effects of hybrid-car batteries?Even the experts are stumped on this one. "The jury is still out," Negus says.

"It is clear (on a daily operational basis) that the carbon dioxide from a traditionally fuelled car is worse for the environment than the hybrid. The qualifier is that you do need to take into account the recycling of batteries. We are still in a fairly embryonic stage with battery technology."

He says advances are likely to have been made by the time the current crop of hybrid batteries wear out over the next decade.

Wickham says what's needed is a "whole life cycle analysis — from the materials extracted from the ground to the car put together, transported used and disposed of".

A recent New Scientist article on this topic said the UK-based Environmental Transport Association put the most efficient conventionally powered vehicles as slightly kinder to the environment than hybrids, but pointed out that the current hybrid technology won't evolve without consumer investment.

If I'm stuck in traffic, do I use more petrol turning my car on and off repeatedly or leaving it running?You may save a bit of petrol, but the wear and tear from turning your car off and on will do more harm than good, Osborne says. Plus emissions at start-up are heavier than during idling.

Negus says it depends on how bad the traffic is and how long you are stopped. "However, stopping is not something we'd recommend, as it's a significant safety issue. But if you're waiting for someone outside a shop (for longer than a few minutes) and you've pulled out of traffic, you should turn the car off."

Can I put window envelopes in the paper recycling?Processors have advised that window envelopes are not a problem.

If I turn my appliances off but don't unplug them, will they still use some electricity?Many items draw energy even when switched off, the experts advise. Called "phantom loads", they draw power for internal batteries, clocks or some other standby requirement.

"If it's got a red (standby) light, then it's still drawing power and even more if it's got a remote control," Osborne says. "The remote control is powered all the time so it can sense the signal sent by the remote when you want to switch on the unit. As well as the little LED shining, there's a sensor and aerial inside the unit that's waiting to receive your signal to switch it on."

So look for light and feel for warmth.

What is the greenest way to barbecue?

That depends on the fuel. Wood might be "greener" if the carbon cycle is closed by an equivalent amount of timber being grown to replace it. LPG, while clean, is still a fossil fuel and non-renewable. Sustainability Victoria's experts say the ultimate solution is now available: the solar barbecue.

"Solar barbecues do work," Osborne says. "Of course, you need a sunny day to do it."

Another tip is to use real dishes or bamboo plates made from renewable sources, instead of paper plates.

The website idealbite.com advises that gas barbecues produce about half as much carbon dioxide as charcoal grills and about a third as much as electric grills.

What's best, paper or plastic packaging?"Paper is better if we're planting trees to make up for what we use," Wickham says. "If we're taking more timber out of the system than we're putting back, then plastic might come out ahead."

Paper can be recycled seven times, but plastic can be used more times than that, he notes. But plastics do come from hydrocarbons. Paper does not and can be part of the solution when managed properly.

What's the best single thing we can do to live greener lives?Osborne says switching off is the way to go.

"Turn off everything that uses electricity," he says simply. "You get about 1.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt hour you use. With gas, for the same amount of energy, you'll get about one-quarter the amount of carbon dioxide."

Wickham agrees, but as "a mad cyclist", he advocates driving less. "I think one of the great messages that people are missing out on is the great link between sustainability and health. The more sustainably we live, the more healthy we are likely to be."

The 2009 Premier's Sustainability Awards are now open.

To enter or for more information, visit the website www.sustainabilityawards.vic.gov.au

OK so this "mad cyclist" is off on a 10km ride,now.

Congrats on the launch of Electronically yours

Electronically yours the e newsletter for Hobsons Bay libraries is now available . If you didnt received yours register today by clicking on the subscribe.

How easy is that to be up to date on all the latest programs and news @ your library