Less Screen Time

We are becoming increasingly addicted to our phone services and other communication services. So much so that it is intruding on our lives and connections with other people. March 7th was the National Day of Unplugging. A time when we can reconnect with the world around us and take a break from the mobile applications and candy crushing. One of the things that you can do is turn off notifications. Does checking a single notification turn into a half-hour of phone browsing? There are various mobile applications, such as QualityTime for Android and Moment for iOS, that monitor your phone usage and inform you just how many hours a day you're spending looking at a screen. Try to set up phone-free periods during the day. Schedule them when you're busy doing something else, in order to make the break a bit easier. I mean do you really need your phone at the dinner table, in the bathroom or while you are watching a movie. Just something to think about.

Virtual Reality: Coming Soon

That is, if you are one of the lucky people that do not get nauseous when using one of the headsets. The public’s wait for virtual reality is nearing an end. In recent days, several of the most prominent companies making headsets offered rough timetables for consumer versions of their products, ending the guessing game about when virtual reality would get its first real test. Software development professionals are also getting very anxious about it coming out because it can open up a whole new area of development and creating content. The most closely watched of those companies, Oculus VR, which is owned by Facebook, said it expected to begin widely selling a product before the end of the year. Oculus has teamed up with Samsung on the product, a headset that uses a mobile phone as a screen. Either way, I am really excited about the virtual reality sets coming out and what they will entail. What are your thoughts?

Increasing Human Intelligence

To conduct the study, published in the March-April 2015 issue of the journal Intelligence, the researchers looked at 64 years of IQ score data for more than 200,000 people living in 48 countries. Overall, they found that global IQ scores have risen by an average of 20 points since 1950. Of course, this data does not show the whole picture. First of all, it is important to note that the IQ tests cannot be standardized because of the differences in cultural backgrounds. Things might be misunderstood and therefore considered wrong because the translation might be inaccurate. Some researchers connect it to the fact that the developing countries are providing better health and education and that is improving living standards. It is thought that the higher IQ is due to the increased living standards. There has been evidence to support the effect but no clear underlying cause. One of the way to approach it differently is to use cloud services and big data. The data then could be analyzed for trends that might not have been apparent before. So are we getting smarter? The answer lies somewhere in the grey area where all the important answers are.