Increasing numbers of people are using prescription drugs like Ritalin to boost alertness and brain power, say experts.

Up to a fifth of adults, including college students and shift workers, may be using cognitive enhancers, a poll of 1,400 by Nature journal suggests.

Neuropsychologist Professor Barbara Sahakian of Cambridge University said safety evidence is urgently needed.

Experts gather to debate this topic at a meeting in London on Monday evening.

The use of these cognitive enhancing drugs is spreading to younger and younger people. That’s a concern

Neuropsychologist Professor Barbara Sahakian

Professor Sahakian’s own work shows 17% of students in some US universities admit to using the stimulant Ritalin (methylphenidate) – a drug designed to treat hyperactive children – to maximise their learning power.

One in five of the 1,400 people who responded to the Nature survey said they had taken Ritalin, Provigil (modafinil) or beta-blockers for non-medical reasons. They used them to stimulate focus, concentration or memory.

Of that one in five, 62% had taken Ritalin and 44% Provigil – a drug normally prescribed to alleviating daytime tiredness in people suffering from the rare sleep disorder narcolepsy.

via BBC NEWS | Health | Brain boost drugs ‘growing trend’

Microsoft Plans $40 Billion Buyback — Microsoft on Monday announced that it would repurchase $40 billion worth of its own stock, and raise its quarterly dividend to 18% in an effort to spur investors into buying the company’s stock. That raises Microsoft’s dividend from 11 cents a share to 13 cents. The $40 billion buyback program will expire on Sept. 30, 2013. According to Reuters, the company recently completed a $40 billion stock repurchase program. It also said its board had issued debt financings “from time to time” of up to $6 billion. The company will use the proceeds from this for general corporate purposes.

Platform-A Gets Into The Ad Exchange Business With ‘BidPlace’ — While Yahoo’s Right Media and Google’s AdSense serve as the largest examples of online ad exchanges, AOL’s (NYSE: TWX) Platform-A wants them to make room for another one: later today, the Time Warner company will be introducing BidPlace, billed as a a self-service marketplace exchange which is set to launch during the first half of next year. In an interview with paidContent, Lynda Clarizio, Platform-A’s president, says that the exchange is being presented as a way for marketers to better manage their display campaigns. The announcement, coming on the second day of New York’s Advertising Week, also comes after months of industry reports showing that display advertising revenues have slowed considerably and the darkening economy has advertisers feeling less certain about the ad format. Clarizio says that BidPlace is not being created to allay such fears—though she seems to feel it should help. BidPlace has been in the works for some time, Clarizio says, emphasizing it is not a reaction to anything going on in the market right now or that recent warning that Time Warner gave last week about AOL possibly missing its revenue targets due to the ad slowdown.

Yahoo To Form Digital Advisory Council — Yahoo on Monday announced formation of a Digital Advisory Council made up of agency and advertising partners that it said will work together “to explore the continued evolution of digital media and online advertising.” More to the point, the effort is aimed at helping smooth adoption of Yahoo’s forthcoming display ad system and acceptance of its controversial search ad partnership with Google.

Microsoft Partners With CNBC On Mobile Ads — Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party display ad provider for the mobile Web site of CNBC, the companies announced Monday. The deal expands an online ad agreement Microsoft and the cable network reached last December and marks the software giant’s first mobile ad syndication deal in the U.S.

Ailing Newspapers: NY Sun Still Needs Cash; McClatchy CEO: ‘Too Early To Judge Knight-Ridder Buy’ — The New York Sun, the highbrow conservative daily in New York, needs cash now in order to survive. Just a couple of weeks ago, the company published a letter, saying that without fresh capital it would have to fold up shop. In an interview with NYT, editor and publisher Seth Lipsky says: “I haven’t raised all that I need, but I’ve raised a lot.” He added that avid readers have sent in checks of $100-$200, though that’s not going to cut it. He also seems pretty sure that Rupert Murdoch will not swoop in as a savior. The most likely rescue scenario at this point would be for a major, wealthy benefactor to step in with no illusions about getting a return on investment. Meanwhile McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) CEO Gary Pruitt made some surprising comments about the company’s 2006 acquisition of Knight-Ridder… In an interview with the Sacramento Bee, Pruitt said it was “too early to tell” whether it was a smart buy. Seeing as the company has already taken goodwill writedowns associated with the deal, and there’s no question that the overall business has deteriorated, this is a hard position to reconcile. He did add that “It’s hard to claim it’s a good deal when you see the stock performance,” so perhaps the earlier statement needs more context. Faced with a steep debt load, McClatchy made its second major employment cutback for the year, just last week.

Answers.com Writes Off Brainboost Acquisition; Does Away With Direct Ad Sales — Last week, the troubled Answers.com filed an S-3 with SEC. In it, it disclosed that it has written off its acquisition of Brainboost Technology, the developer of the Brainboost Answer Engine (BAE) that it bought in December 2005 for about $4.56 million, $4.0 million of which was in cash. The reason? It says that its WikiAnswers site of user-gen questions is growing much faster, and both BAE and WikiAnswers are effectively focused on similar areas, answering complex natural language questions. “Conversely, during that period, Answers.com has generally declined each quarter….the success of user-generated questions and answers as compared to the technology-driven answers presented by the BAE, we made a strategic decision in the second quarter of 2008 to focus our efforts, in the realm of questions-and-answers, on user-generated questions and answers, and effectively abandoned our use of the BAE,” it says in the filing. As a result of abandoning its use of the BAE, the net book value of the BAE, as of May 25, 2008, in the amount of $3.138 million, was written off during the three months ended June 30, 2008, the company said.

Non esistono solo Google, Yahoo, Live (Microsoft) e Ask; ci sono altri motori (alcuni ancora in fase alpha o beta) che adottano nuove tecnologie o che propongono diverse modalità di ricerca e di visualizzazione dei risultati.

Clusty – (Info)

Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking.

Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters help you see your search results by topic so you can hone in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items.

Hakia – (Info)

built a much better system (called MAQ) to enable semantic analysis of Web pages, and “meaning-based” search. The information density in the MAQ system is significantly higher than that of a typical index table.

hakia’s proprietary method, which deploys full Ontological Semantics, gives the search engine human-like abilities to understand natural languages and detect meaning in text.

hakia deploys fuzzy logic (approximate reasoning) methods to allow flexibility so that the Ontological Semantics solution becomes feasible in a Web search application with stringent constraints.

hakia’s knowledge capacity evolves in time with each user interaction and by crawling over the Web. The intensity of Web page analyses increases each time a particular topic is questioned.

Lexxe – (Info)

Based on the nature of the queries, there are two types of search conducted by users. One is the key word-based search and the other is the Natural Language-based search. Lexxe allows both types of searches and applies cutting edge Natural Language technologies to them.

On the one hand, Natural Language queries offer a better information quality and intention by a user. Therefore, it can be used to retrieve better results, particularly short answers, because key words are often more ambiguous than Natural Language queries.

Brainboost – (Info)

Brainboost actually finds answers to your questions posed in plain English as opposed to directing you to pages that simply mention the questions.

Brainboost, Using the AnswerRank™ system, intelligently reads hundreds of web pages derived from search results and extracts just the short and concise answer to your question, saving you time.

Accona – (Info)

In una richiesta di cinque parole chiave l’intelligenza artificiale di Accoona consente all’utente di evidenziare una parola chiave e ordina i risultati della ricerca dando priorità alle pagine nelle quali il significato di quella parola chiave è più importante delle altre quattro. Inoltre, l’intelligenza artificiale di Accoona fonde le informazioni del Web con quelle del database delle imprese di Accoona in tempo reale. Ad esempio quando si è on line e si cerca di comprare un nuovo computer, si ottiene immediatamente una lista di tutti gli indirizzi URL di rivenditori di computer.

Rollyo – (Info)

Rollyo puts the power of search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines – with no programming required. All you have to do is pick the sites you want to search, and we’ll create a custom search engine for you.

You can explore and save searchrolls created by the community of Rollyo users and share your knowledge on a particular set of topics. You can even edit Searchrolls created by others.

Swicki – (Info)

A swicki is new kind of search engine that allows anyone to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about. Unlike other search engines, you and your community have total control over the results and it uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results. This search engine, or swicki, can be published on your site. Your swicki presents search results that you’re interested in, pulls in new relevant information as it is indexed, and organizes everything for you in a neat little customizable widget you can put on your web site or blog, complete with its very own buzz cloud that constantly updates to show you what are hot search terms in your community.

Kartoo – (Info)

Kartoo è un metamotore di ricerca che presenta i risultati sotto forma di mappe.

Snap – (Info)

Fast Visual Display of Results Previews

Se conoscete altri motori di ricerca che ritenete possano essere inseriti in questa lista, segnalateli mediante commenti.

Vedi anche: Powerset