IdeaJam: Education Live Stream - Q&A

Students show and tell how technology and creativity can be combined to create an ideal learning environment that allows for a legacy in learning, led by top education consultant Alan November.


The opening discussion of this event was presented before an audience and was also broadcast on the Web so that educators from around the world could take part in the dialogue. The recordings of this live broadcast our now on the Web and available to all.
IdeaJam: Education Live Stream - Alan November's Introduction
IdeaJam: Education Live Stream - Q&A Part 1
IdeaJam: Education Live Stream - Eric Marcos' Class
IdeaJam: Education Live Stream - Skype Sessions
IdeaJam: Education Live Stream - Q&A Part 2

Teton Freedom Ride

Almost Spring 2011 from Andrew Whiteford on Vimeo.

Video of the Day by one of our favorite GoPro Fans Andrew Whiteford! Way to ROCK the riding, filming AND editing, Andrew! Be sure to check out his GoPro snow edits too!

Keynote speech: How will TABLET transform the landscape of ICT industry?

This video contains the keynote speech by Stephen Su, General director of IEK (Industrial Economics& Knowledge Center), at 2011 COMPUTEX TAIPEI pre-show press conference. The agenda went through 'Marketing Dynamics and Trends of Mobile Devices', 'Transition of Mobile Device Industry Ecosystem', and 'Tablet to Transform the Landscope of ICT Industry'.......

Sean Maloney on Moving Intel Faster & Growth in China

Sean Maloney is executive vice president of Intel Corporatio, responsible for architecting, developing, and marketing Intel's platform solutions for all computing segments including data centers, desktops, laptops, netbooks/nettops, handhelds, embedded devices, and consumer electronics. As co-general manager, Maloney is focused on business and operations.

Prior to his current role, Maloney served as chief sales and marketing officer. He has been with Intel since 1982.

Maloney began his Intel career in its European headquarters where he spent nine years, first as Intel UK's manager of applications engineering, then as country manager of Intel UK, and director of marketing for Intel Europe.

From 1992 to 1995, Maloney served as technical assistant to the chairman and chief executive of Intel, Dr. Andrew S. Grove.

In 1995, Maloney moved to Hong Kong to manage Intel's sales and marketing activities in Asia Pacific. In 1998 he returned to the United States to become head of Intel's worldwide sales organization. He was promoted to senior vice president in 1999 and executive vice president in 2001. He took over as head of Intel Communications Group (ICG) later that year and became co-manager with David Perlmutter of the Mobility Group in 2004. In July 2006 Maloney was appointed chief sales and marketing officer and co-general manager of the Intel Architecture Group since September 2009.

Maloney is a member of the board of Autodesk Inc. and Clearwire Corporation.

Jiepang,

THE COLLEGE CONSPIRACY

Alex Jones: NIA's COLLEGE CONSPIRACY 1/5


A 15 minutes intro :






Full version:





College Conspiracy is the most comprehensive documentary ever produced about higher education in the U.S. The film exposes the facts and truth about America's college education system. 'College Conspiracy' was produced over a six-month period by NIA's team of expert Austrian economists with the help of thousands of NIA members who contributed their ideas and personal stories for the film. NIA believes the U.S. college education system is a scam that turns vulnerable young Americans into debt slaves for life.

NIA tracks price inflation in all U.S. industries and there is no industry that has seen more consistent price inflation this decade than college education. After the burst of the Real Estate bubble, student loans are now the easiest loan to receive in the U.S., and total student loan debts now exceed credit card debts. The government gives out easy student loans to anybody, regardless of grades, credit history, what they are majoring in, and what their job prospects are. NIA believes it is illegal for the U.S. government to be in the student loan business because the U.S. constitution doesn't authorize it. Just like how the U.S. government created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make housing affordable, but instead drove housing prices through the roof; the U.S. government, by trying to make college more affordable, is accomplishing the exact opposite and driving tuition prices to astronomical levels that provide a negative return on investment.

The U.S. has been experiencing 5.15% annual college tuition inflation this decade. Despite this, 70.1% of high school graduates are now enrolling into college, a new all time record. 2/3 of college students are now graduating with an average of $24,000 in debt. There is nothing special about getting a college degree if everyone else has one, and it is certainly not worth getting $24,000 into debt to camouflage yourself into the crowd. NIA's President is friends with hundreds of CEOs of mid-sized corporations who tell him that someone who skipped college is a lot more likely to stand out amongst the hundreds of applicants who apply for each job available.

Hopscotch: the browser for the offline world

Hopscotch hooks your mobile phone to the physical world via QR codes. Here's a first look at how it works. http://www.usehopscotch.com/ has more.

A visit to On24, leading webcast company

As part of my goal to visit all tech companihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifes that make world-changing technology here I visit http://www.on24.com/ which makes webinar/webcast service for big enterprise companies. I learn about the business and see that they are building social software into their service through a developer SDK.

Disrupt Backstage Pass: Ashton Kutcher On Why He Invested In AirBnB

Hi. I'm Sarah Lacy backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt with Ashton Kutcher.

The guy in the hat.

The guy in the hat. So you were just onstage, and Charlie Rose did not get out of you what I'm about to get out of you.

He just didn't ask.

That one of your angel portfolio companies that no one knows about, very popular company, Air BnB.

Yeah.

When did you invest?


I've been working with them since about February. I'm an investor, but I'm also a strategic eally taking the brand international, which is really important for them right now because there are so many ex-US companies trying to chase what they are doing.

Right
And so that's kind of our primary focus right now is working on the UK and Germany and starting to build the company there. Now you're a very different Ashton Kutcher than the Ashton Kutcher who came to Tech Crunch 40 or Tech Crunch 50 or whatever we were calling it back then. First of all, you seemed more nervous to be in front of the techies then.

You seem very calm and self assured these days.

I'm still nervous. I probably just know better words now.

But you've also evolved more from Ashton Kutcher, entrepreneur, to Ashton Ashton Kutcher, entrepreneur and Angel investor. You have a portfolio of 12 companies, and really good companies, things like AirBnB, Skype, I don't know how many others I'm allowed to say or not. So how do you see that your role has really evolved in this ecosystem from a couple sort of silly, early companies that do so well to be attached to pretty big names now.

I think when I came here three years ago, I came with a media property. It wasn't really a tech company. It's the space that I knew, I knew how to create media units, right? That's what I was educated in and that's what I knew and that's what I've been doing for the last whatever five or six years.

And then when I came here, I saw this entire ecosystem of people and I just sort of became an apprentice and, like, sat next to some of the smartest people in the system and really just tried to suck information from them, learn from them. I just started reading a ton of stuff because I don't like to fail.

And then what I found from sitting down with them is, I would go through different people's investment portfolios and I would say "I like this one" and "I'm interested in that one" and "This makes sense to me", "I don't get this, but I understand this", "I think I could be helpful this company through an introduction to these people, because there are certain people in the media world that can be really, really influential to a company.

I can kind of get a return phone call from most people that I place a call to, and that can become really, really valuable. Like that level of introduction for people, when they're first starting out a company, can become extremely valuable. So some of my first investments were Skype, obviously, Foursquare, and I'm in investor Path and TinyChat.

And when I saw, I wasn't an angel investor in AirBnB but when I saw the power of that company, I actually saw it as one of the first companies that is so truly cutting edge in what it's doing taking social trust and manifesting that into commerce.

And some people would say online is eroding trust, so they're taking.


So they've actually managed through an integrity of a product and integrity of people to start to create social trust and transfer that into commerce. And if you go, it's like going to a restaurant and looking at tips on Foursquare or something like that. Or like now using Explore on Foursquare where you go and you, I want pizza, and it shows you, like, oh, these are six places that my friends have gone to, and I go, I have trust the fact that these people have the kind of taste that I would endorse, so thereby I'm gonna go to that place.

AirBnB is really doing that with the way that they're creating an ecosystem of trust. And now their new Facebook implementation does it even further, where I can see the places that my friends have stayed.

It's actually, its actually doing something in technology that is a social interaction that people may not have the trust to do without that level of social.

Right, it's solving the trust problem not just trying to not destroy it.

It's actually solving the trust problem, exactly, as opposed to destroying it. I mean, granted, you would say "I'm going to New York for the weekend. Do you have a friend whose place I could stay in?" Sure, maybe. But maybe they don't. But maybe you have a friend of a friend who's endorsed this place and you say to your friend, hey you know that girl, does she have good taste?

And where she would stay is my kind of place. Yeah, absolutely.

Right. It takes out all like sort of the inefficiencies of it.

It takes out the inefficiencies of it and actually lands you in a new commerce that I think is going to have extraordinary value.

Now I want to ask. You've just signed on to a very high profile, very demanding job, being the replacement on Two and a Half Men. You said on stage with Charlie acting is still your first love. Is Catalyst Media, your venture investments, everything you've done on the tech side, now going to suffer?

No. It's to get a benefit.

How?

I'm not going to end up on a set in Shreveport, Louisiana for three months working sixteen-hour days.

Predictability.

Yeah. So, I've worked this job before when I was on The 70s Show. I know what the schedule is and I know it really, really well and I built Catalyst while I was making that show. I built Catalyst, I made multiple movies, I produced Punk'd and starred in Punk'd as well. I was able to have about three different jobs while I was working on a sitcom.

And the great thing about sitcoms is that, absolutely brilliant, the schedule: you work about thirty hours a week. And you work for two weeks and then you get a week off. So, it's two weeks on, one week off, two weeks on, one week off.

That 's pretty sweet.

And then you have three months off in the summer, and three weeks off at Christmas, and a week off at Thanksgiving. So, the way the schedule works, one, it keeps me in and around my office instead of ending up in France shooting a movie. And secondly, there's an extraordinary amount of time around that.

And thirdly, it's just an absolutely brilliant job. I get to make people laugh for a living. I don't know if it gets better than that.

Wow, suddenly I'm envious. I thought I had a great job at TechCrunch. I think we work like 90 hours a week and I never get a vacation. Thank you so much for joining us Ashton. Always great to have you here.

Thank you.

Pleasure.

The Terror of the Japanese Tsunami

22nd folk music

that what i call it talent

Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song [Official Alternate Version]

Today I don’t feel like doing anything
I just wanna lay in my bed
Don’t feel like picking up my phone
So leave a message at the tone
Cus today I swear I'm not doing anything

I'm gonna kick my feet up and stare at the fan
Turn the Tvee on
Throw my hand in my pants
Nobodys gon’ tell me I cant

Ill be lying on the couch just chillin in my snuggie
Click to MTV so they can teach me how to dougie
Cus in my castle I'm the freakin man
Oh Oh

Yes I said it
I said it
I said it cus I can

Today I don’t feel like doing anything
I just wanna lay in my bed
Don’t feel like picking up my phone
So leave a message at the tone
Cus today I swear I'm not doing anything

Nothing at all
Ooh hoo ooh hoo
Hoo ooh ooh
Nothing at all

Ooh hoo ooh hoo
Hoo ooh ooh
Nothing at all

Let It Be on GarageBand for iPad with Guitar Solo

The Beatles "Let It Be" on GarageBand for iPad using full 8 tracks including vocals, piano, organ, bass, chorus and Guitar Solo.

Amy Poehler at Harvard College Class Day

“I’m truly, truly delighted to be here at Harvard,” comic actress Amy Poehler told the crowd of graduating seniors and their parents at Class Day on May 25. (Scroll down to view the video of her speech.) “I graduated from Boston College, which some call ‘The Harvard of Boston,’” she deadpanned. The star of the television comedy Parks and Recreation, who rose to prominence as a result of her work on Saturday Night Live opposite Tina Fey, treated her audience to a stream of jokes, assumed accents, and perfectly timed punchlines centered on Harvard’s reputation. But Poehler also had a serious message, based on her own experiences: “What I have discovered,” she said, “is this: You can’t do it alone.” The message was partly about humor, but also about humility. “As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life. No one is here today because they did it on their own…You’re all here today because someone gave you strength. Helped you. Held you in the palm of their hand. God, Allah, Buddha, Gaga—whomever you pray to.”

Poehler, while cautioning the class against pursuing a career in acting (there is “no room at the inn,” she said), shared some rules that she learned while studying improvisational acting in Chicago: “Listen. Say ‘yes.’ Live in the moment. Make sure you play with people who have your back. Make big choices early and often.”

“The answer to a lot of your life’s questions is often in someone else’s face,” she continued. “People’s faces will tell you amazing things. Like if they are angry, or nauseous, or asleep…Try to keep your mind open to possibilities and your mouth closed on matters that you don’t know about. Limit your ‘always’ and your ‘nevers.’ Continue to share your heart with people even if it has been broken.”

In a nod to the parents in the audience, Poehler implored the class to indulge them a little: “Less eye-rolling, please.”

“This is what I want to say,” she concluded. ” When you feel scared, hold someone’s hand and look into their eyes. And when you feel brave, do the same thing. You are all here because you are smart. And you are brave. And if you add kindness and the ability to change a tire, you almost make up the perfect person.”

Poehler’s speech was preceded by a Harvard oration by Timothy J. Lambert ’11, a resident of Pforzheimer House from Massachusetts, who has written for the Harvard Crimson. Lambert spoke about love/hate relationships and Harvard.





Print
5.25.11

“I’m truly, truly delighted to be here at Harvard,” comic actress Amy Poehler told the crowd of graduating seniors and their parents at Class Day on May 25. (Scroll down to view the video of her speech.) “I graduated from Boston College, which some call ‘The Harvard of Boston,’” she deadpanned. The star of the television comedy Parks and Recreation, who rose to prominence as a result of her work on Saturday Night Live opposite Tina Fey, treated her audience to a stream of jokes, assumed accents, and perfectly timed punchlines centered on Harvard’s reputation. But Poehler also had a serious message, based on her own experiences: “What I have discovered,” she said, “is this: You can’t do it alone.” The message was partly about humor, but also about humility. “As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life. No one is here today because they did it on their own…You’re all here today because someone gave you strength. Helped you. Held you in the palm of their hand. God, Allah, Buddha, Gaga—whomever you pray to.”

Poehler, while cautioning the class against pursuing a career in acting (there is “no room at the inn,” she said), shared some rules that she learned while studying improvisational acting in Chicago: “Listen. Say ‘yes.’ Live in the moment. Make sure you play with people who have your back. Make big choices early and often.”

“The answer to a lot of your life’s questions is often in someone else’s face,” she continued. “People’s faces will tell you amazing things. Like if they are angry, or nauseous, or asleep…Try to keep your mind open to possibilities and your mouth closed on matters that you don’t know about. Limit your ‘always’ and your ‘nevers.’ Continue to share your heart with people even if it has been broken.”

In a nod to the parents in the audience, Poehler implored the class to indulge them a little: “Less eye-rolling, please.”

“This is what I want to say,” she concluded. ” When you feel scared, hold someone’s hand and look into their eyes. And when you feel brave, do the same thing. You are all here because you are smart. And you are brave. And if you add kindness and the ability to change a tire, you almost make up the perfect person.”

Poehler’s speech was preceded by a Harvard oration by Timothy J. Lambert ’11, a resident of Pforzheimer House from Massachusetts, who has written for the Harvard Crimson. Lambert spoke about love/hate relationships and Harvard.

Laura Jaramillo ’10-’11, also of Pforzheimer House, and from Colombia, gave the other Harvard oration. A government concentrator and the recipient of a 2011-2012 Rockefeller Fellowship which she plans to use for travel to France, she spoke about the sacrifice of her pet cow, Claramanta, to finance her early education.




Molly Fitzpatrick of Winthrop House and Scott Levin-Gesundheit of Mather House delivered the two humorous Ivy orations.








Harvard President Drew Faust's report to alumni (2011)




Kathleen J. Coulson's Harvard Senior English Address

The Great Plane: Behind the Webb

The Webb Space Telescope's eighteen separate mirror segments will be held in place by a graphite structure called a backplane. This one-of-a-kind piece needs to be thermally stable to -400 degrees Fahrenheit (204 degrees Celsius), and hold Webb's mirror segments steady to within one-ten thousandth the diameter of a human hair. Engineers at ATK in Magna, Utah, take us through the process of designing and creating the backplane.

This fearless downhill skater recorded the Maryhill Freeride event in Goldendale, Washington.

EcoMotors Chief Don Runkle: “Electric Vehicles Are Not ‘Zero Emissions’”

Next panel is a little bit outside your comfort zone, but I think it's really interesting. Can you please, the next panels that you can come on board. We've got Craig Bramscher, the CEO of Brammo, which is an electric vehicle company. Here is one of his electric vehicles, a motorcycle. And, Donald Runkle who is the CEO of EcoMotors, that 's creating a more efficient combustion engine.






This is probably like a 250 Honda or something like that, so real easy to ride, not too terribly fast, but fast enough to merge with traffic and everything. Okay, all your bikes, are they all plug in or do you need charger stations? Yeah. We've designed every bike so that it's any plug in a laptop, you can plug in the bike. Okay, fantastic. And, tell me a little about how you guys maintain that green environment minded credibility end to end. What do you put into the material analysis to make sure your batteries are green? Yeah, essentially we evaluate every vendor for their sustainability, so for........

300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds

Fossil fuels have powered human growth and ingenuity for centuries. Now that we're reaching the end of cheap and abundant oil and coal supplies, we're in for an exciting ride. While there's a real risk that we'll fall off a cliff, there's still time to control our transition to a post-carbon future.

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food

Life Is About Expressing Yourself

Singer: Tony (music teacher and composer)
Lyrics: Jane Chen (CEO of Seth Education Foundation)

Thank haven, thank earth
Thank the love from All That Is
Thank every tree and flower
Thank every butterfly and bird

Thank every living creature in the mountains
For caring the visitor that loves to linger around

Thank you for being the unsung companion of Seth
Thank the friend that offers himself/herself to this land

Starting today
By extending the spirit of All That Is
For all the travelers that seek spiritual rest
Selfless sharing the love and light

Pray to every god in the universe
Bless and guide everyone of us
Return to the temple of the inner divinity

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

Understanding The Financial Crisis--For Kids and Grownups

Having difficulty understanding the 2008 US Financial Crisis? Here's a short animated video that explains - visually!

Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes - What an eye-opener act!

http://blog.ted.com/2008/06/25/benjamin_zander/

TEDx Brussels 2010 - David Orban - Connects Every Thing

From the TEDx description of the talk: "David Orban connects every thing. After ten thousand years of accelerating techno-social evolution, the speed of change in machines is getting decoupled from that of humans, as we realize that we must grant them autonomy. As every thing gets connected, and the Internet Of Things builds itself, we will be free to be human, again! David Orban is an entrepreneur and visionary, an analyst of the global high technology landscape. He is Advisor and member of the Faculty of the Singularity University, and former Chairman, and a Director of Humanity+. He frequently speaks at conferences about the social impact of accelerating technological change, and of the Internet of Things.

David Cameron's 2011 World Economic Forum Keynote

World Economic Forum


Forum Annual Meeting participants. On the future of Europe, he said: "We are an open, trading continent. We have a proud record of invention. We’ve got advanced democratic values. But yes, we’ve got to recognize that Europe has to earn its way. The world doesn't owe us a living. So let's make the choice to do things differently, to fight for our prosperity."

Cameron outlined his vision of a new direction for the continent: a risk-taking investment culture, a Europe-wide patent scheme, tougher stress tests, killing off sovereign debt and removing crushing regulation are a formula for growth.

"Now is the time to go for a genuine Single Market," he said, pointing to commitments from leaders across Europe to open and free market reform.

How Technology Affects the Mind at Work

LiveShare: instant photo sharing from Cooliris

Making Music on an iPad with Garageband

In this video Hagop Tchaparian and Scott James show how you can make music on and iPad with Garageband and a few pieces of equipment from Apple and Guitar Center.






using iPad and iPad music applications such as digidrummer, iCanBass and JamPad







by applegirl

iPad Garageband - Guitar Jam Improvisation

梁祝小协 Butterfly Lover Violin Concerto 3/3

Peter Beinart in Conversation with Paul Krugman

Summary

Professor and journalist Peter Beinart talks with Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and a Nobel Laureate in Economics.




Peter Beinart in Conversation with Paul Krugman
The Graduate Center, CUNY

fiscal policy
Measures employed by governments to stabilize the economy, specifically by adjusting the levels and allocations of taxes and government expenditures. When the economy is sluggish, the government may cut taxes, leaving taxpayers with extra cash to spend and thereby increasing levels of consumption. An increase in public-works spending may likewise pump cash into the economy, having an expansionary effect. Conversely, a decrease in government spending or an increase in taxes tends to cause the economy to contract. Fiscal policy is often used in tandem with monetary policy. Until the 1930s, fiscal policy aimed at maintaining a balanced budget; since then it has been used “countercyclically,” as recommended by John Maynard Keynes, to offset the cycle of expansion and contraction in the economy. Fiscal policy is more effective at stimulating a flagging economy than at cooling an inflationary one, partly because spending cuts and tax increases are unpopular and partly because of the work of economic stabilizers. See also business cycle.



Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart is an American journalist and Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York. He is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast website. Beinart worked at The New Republic until 2006, for much of the time writing The New Republic's signature "TRB" column, which was reprinted in the New York Post and other major American newspapers.

From 2007 to 2009, Beinart was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Beinart is the author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals, and Only Liberals, Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, and The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at Princeton University, and an Op-Ed columnist for the Times. His numerous books include "The Great Unraveling," "The Conscience of a Liberal," and "The Return of Depression Economics," an updated edition of which was published in 2009. For his contributions to New Trade Theory, he received the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Keynote Interview with Clarium Capital's Peter Thiel FREE PREVIEW

03 min 26 sec

The Economist

iPad Camera Kit Secrets... Microphone Magic

iPad camera connection kit, sold to quickly and easily import photos and videos from your camera, iphone and ipod has some undocumented secret features. It turns out that you can connect high quality studio USB microphones, and is also fully compatible with the iMic device for even NON-USB mics and audio input from mixing boards etc. Suddenly your "Magical" Apple Tablet becomes a Field recorder & a Podcast recording, production and upload studio!

Alesis iO Dock

Introduce your entire music studio to your iPad. iO Dock is the world's first professional audio interface for iPad.

Happy Toy Machine Allows You To Build Your Own Plush Toys

The TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley audience choice winner today is Happy Toy Machine, which allows you to design and create plush toys online.

The site allows adults and children to customize their plush toys by colors, size, body parts, shape, type, build and more. When you are satisfied with your design, you can actually have your creation built and sent you. It’s sort of like the Build-A-Bear on steroids.

Price ranges from $30 to $50, which is comparable to Build-A-Bear’s prices. The startup says the design element of the site is designed specially so that children can interact with the site and be able to design toys on their own.

In the future, the company would like to partner with video games or other entertainment properties to leverage Happy Toy Machine’s platform.

Unionville Lacrosse 2011

Celebrities and brands take control of their Twitter accounts with Twylah, first look

Aaron Koblin: Artfully visualizing our humanity

About this talk

Artist Aaron Koblin takes vast amounts of data -- and at times vast numbers of people -- and weaves them into stunning visualizations. From elegant lines tracing airline flights to landscapes of cell phone data, from a Johnny Cash video assembled from crowd-sourced drawings to the "Wilderness Downtown" video that customizes for the user, his works brilliantly explore how modern technology can make us more human.

Toyota announces new Prius V and I take a look at geeky toys inside

Got a smartphone? Soon it'll be connected to your car and Toyota shows just how in its new Prius V

Takadu - Smart water Grid

Whole Brain

Research and do it yourself

Livescribe Releases Connect, Puts Ink In The Cloud

Livescribe smartpens allow you to record and send the ink you draw or write on paper. They also record the surrounding audio so you can sync the audio with the drawings, something that’s great for students, reporters, and anyone who goes to meetings regularly. For a while, they had little apps that could run on the pen including a very cool piano app that allowed you to draw a piano and then play it on the page.

Now, however, they’ve added an interesting new feature: Livescribe Connect, a system that allows you to send entire pages to multiple recipients including Twitter users, Facebook, Google Docs, and various other cloud services. We got a quick hands on and were able to talk to the company about future plans.

How does Connect work? Well, you draw or write something and then draw an underscore. You then write a one or two word command (“Twitter,” “email joe@joe.com”) and then select a portion of the page or a set of pages. Then, when you sync the pen via USB those pages automatically go to the people or accounts in question.

The major concern is that the Pulse pen isn’t wireless yet so the utility is somewhat limited. However, it looks like a wireless pen is in the offing and the features and dead-simple interface make up for some of those shortcomings.

Erick and I hung out with the Pulsonian Commander, Jim Marggraff, on Fly Or Die a few weeks ago and got to talk about the new product.

Get an E-Autograph on Your E-Book

HTC Flyer review

Maker Faire 2011

ARM: The Democratization of the CPU

D@CES - Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

AsiaD Set for October in Hong Kong–Here’s the Mossberg-Swisher Guided Video Tour

As BoomTown noted in January, the D: All Things Digital conference–after an initial foray into smaller, niche Dive events–has been mulling going global next.
So, my longtime partner in digital crimes, Walt Mossberg, and I–along with D biz honcho Lia Lorenzano–headed to China in January to visit some possible locations for our first AsiaD.
And now it’s official: We’ll be doing an event October 19 to 21 in Hong Kong.
While we are still working out all the location logistics, Walt and I are already hard at work with our Dow Jones partners there to bring the magical mystery tech tour that D has been here to the audience there.
It will be a pan-Asian event, bringing in speakers and demos from all over the region, as well as inviting some key U.S. digital players to be interviewed in what is clearly one of the most important markets going forward.
We’d welcome any feedback, of course, as well as suggestions.
And we’ll keep you updated to our progress too. As with big D, which is set to take place May 31 to June 2 (and has been long sold out), we’ll be posting reports and videos of AsiaD.
Until we can say more, here is a video of moments from the visit Walt and I had there, including a helicopter tour of the vertical city, delicious dumplings and, of course, a whole lot of tech:

Gotta Share! The Musical & others

For our latest mission, a musical breaks out at the GEL Conference in New York. A speaker is suddenly interrupted by a man who refuses to turn off his cell phone. This is the fourth in our series of Spontaneous Musical projects.

Guitar playing - Sungha Jung

About The Center for Public Integrity

The mission of the Center for Public Integrity is to produce original investigative journalism about significant public issues to make institutional power more transparent and accountable. To pursue its mission, the Center:

Generates high-quality, accessible investigative reports, databases, and contextual analysis on issues of public importance.
Disseminates work to journalists, policymakers, scholars, and citizens using a combination of digital, electronic, and print media.
Educates, engages, and empowers citizens with the tools and skills they need to hold governments and other institutions accountable.
Organizes and supports investigative journalists around the world who apply the Center’s values, mission, and standards to cross-border projects.
Remains independent by building a strong and sustainable financial base of support, including a community of committed individuals and foundations.

Nuclear fire protection: A critic's view

Nuclear power critic Paul Gunter, with the reactor oversight project Beyond Nuclear, discusses his views on fire protection at nuclear power facilities. He argues that new fire rules are merely a paper solution to a long-standing problem of unsafe reactors, and thus will not protect the public health and safety.






Nuclear industry official Alexander Marion, a vice president with the Nuclear Energy Institute, discusses new fire protection rules for U.S. reactors. New rules will enable the industry and regulators to predict and estimate risks based on available information and respond accordingly.

The Harlem Rens

Lower Porcupine Rim Singletrack - May 2011

Lower Porcupine Rim Singletrack - May 2011 from Jared Anderton on Vimeo.

AT&T Screwing Apple Customers… Again

Hot startupTwilio: infrastructure for developers to build telephony apps in the cloud

Twilio is white hot. It's a new kind of company: one that provides APIs to other companies so they can build new apps on top of their infrastructure. Here I meet with the CEO to learn more about this interesting company.

REAL Facial Recognition For iPhone & iPod Touch With RecognizeMe - iOS Vlog 408

Transvideo: using video to aid product launch

More and more companies are using short videos (typically under 90 seconds) that they can post on their web sites to introduce their products or services. Transvideo Studios, along with its in house creative team called Picturelab, has been making videos for 30 years and is behind the videos for many of the most well known tech companies in Silicon Valley.

"We've been doing videos for tech companies in Silicon Valley for a really long time, and we've had a studio and sound stage since 1981," explains Rico Andrade, Executive Producer for Transvideo Studios. "One of the things that's been a part of the business has been doing videos that talk about what the company does, and especially with the increase in the number of videos that you see online and the cost of making the videos and hosting them, more and more tech companies started seeing the return in creating a simple video that explains what they do."

When Transvideo takes on a new client, it tries to learn everything possible about the company and its product, from value proposition to competitors to target customers. This information helps set the tone for the video and guide the story being told.

"We're a full production house," explains David Sabin, Producer and Post Production Supervisor for Transvideo, "so we take it from concept (we do all the writing) to design all the way through to distribution. A project generally starts with a client coming to us, and we learn as much as we can about that particular product—we do our homework and find out what the client needs and come at it from a perspective of what a customer might want out of this as well."

From there, Transvideo will submit concepts and style frames, which, after approval from the client, will be used to create story boards for the clients to review in conjunction with the script Transvideo is drafting. Finally, they complete the animation work and start submitting first cuts of the video.

Going through the process of settling on a story and creating the video can have benefits for the client apart from the video itself. "Frequently the questions that we ask of our clients help them focus their own marketing," says Sabin, "and I have to say that art directors at these different companies love us, because we bring to them ideas and perspectives that they perhaps haven't thought of before."

Your personalized video companion - Plizy

Lazy Man's Lasagna

Jack Scalfani shows you how to make Lazy Man's Lasagna. Be sure to subscribe to this channel and see Jack's new channel:

Braised Red Cabbage - German

Jack Scalfani gets some German going with this simple side dish.
Here is the recipe:

Ingredients:
3 1/2 lb red cabbage (1 medium head), quartered, cored, and thinly sliced crosswise
4 bacon slices, chopped
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 large sweet onions, thinly sliced
1/2 cup white-wine vinegar
3 tablespoons packed brown sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper

preparation

Rinse cabbage under cold water, then drain (do not pat dry).

Cook bacon in an 8-quart heavy pot over moderately low heat, stirring, until crisp, about 3 minutes. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon, reserving it for another use. Add butter to bacon fat, then increase heat to moderate and cook onions, stirring, until golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Stir in cabbage, vinegar, brown sugar, salt, and pepper and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally, until tender, about 1 1/4 hours.

Rethinking camera design

Concept Camera: The WVIL from Artefact on Vimeo.

Elliot Krane: The mystery of chronic pain

About this talk

We think of pain as a symptom, but there are cases where the nervous system develops feedback loops and pain becomes a terrifying disease in itself. Starting with the story of a girl whose sprained wrist turned into a nightmare, Elliot Krane talks about the complex mystery of chronic pain, and reviews the facts we're just learning about how it works and how to treat it.

FACEBOOK COO SANDBERG: The Women Of My Generation Blew It, So Equality Is Up To You, Graduates

Sandberg gave this commencement address at Barnard yesterday. In it, she says today's young women need to close the ambition gap before they can close the achievement gap. Otherwise, they'll blow it like Sandberg's generation has.]
Thank you, President Spar. Members of the board of trustees, esteemed members of the faculty, proud parents, squirming siblings, devoted friends: congratulations to all of you. But especially, congratulations to the magnificent Barnard Class of 2011.
Looking at you all here fills me with great joy, in part because my college roommate, a member of your faculty, Caroline Weber, is here. Carrie, it means so much to me to be at your school, and in part because I work in Silicon Valley, let’s just say I’m not usually in a room with this many women. For the wonderful men who are here today, if you feel a little uncomfortable, we’re really glad you’re here, and no line for the men’s room. It’s worth it.
I graduated from college exactly 20 years ago. And as I am reminded every single day where I work, that makes me really old. Mark Zuckerberg, our founder and my boss, said to me the other day, “Sheryl, when do midlife crises happen? When you’re 30?” Not a good day at the office. But I am old enough to know that most of our lives are filled with days we do not remember. Today is not one of them. You may not remember one word I say. You may not even remember who your graduation speaker is, although for the record, Sheryl with an S. You won’t remember that it was raining and we had to move inside. But you will remember what matters, which is how you feel as you sit here, as you walk across the stage, as you start the next phase of your life.
Today is a day of celebration, a day to celebrate all the hard work that got you to this place where you can sit, kind of sweltering in that gown. Today is a day of thanks, a day to thank all the people that helped you get here, the people who nurtured you and taught you, who held your hand, who dried your tears. Today is a day of reflection. Excuse me, a little laryngitis.
As you leave Barnard today, you leave not just with an education, but you take your place amongst the fortunate. Some of you came here from families where education was expected and emphasized. Others of you had to overcome far more obstacles to get here, and today you become the very first member of your family to graduate from college. What an amazing accomplishment. But no matter where you started, as of today you are all privileged. You are privileged in the most important sense of the word, which is that you have almost boundless opportunity in front of you. So, the question is, what are you going to do with it? What will you do with this education you worked so hard to achieve? What in the world needs to change, and what part do you plan on playing in changing it?
Pulitzer Prize winners Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof visited this campus last year and they spoke about their critically important book, Half the Sky.
In that book, they assert that the fundamental moral challenge of the 19th century was slavery; of the 20th century, it was totalitarianism; and for our century, it is oppression of girls and women around the world. Their book is a call to arms, to give women all over the world, women who are exactly like us except for the circumstances into which they were born, basic human rights.
Compared to these women, we are lucky. In America, as in the entire developed world, we are equals under the law. But the promise of equality is not equality. As we sit here looking at this magnificent blue-robed class, we have to admit something that’s sad but true: men run the world. Of 190 heads of state, nine are women. Of all the parliaments around the world, 13% of those seats are held by women. Corporate America top jobs, 15% are women; numbers which have not moved at all in the past nine years. Nine years. Of full professors around the United States, only 24% are women.
I recognize that this is a vast improvement from generations in the past. When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her. But what is so sad—it doesn’t just make me feel old, it makes me truly sad—is that it’s very clear that my generation is not going to change this problem. Women became 50% of the college graduates in this country in 1981, 30 years ago. Thirty years is plenty of time for those graduates to have gotten to the top of their industries, but we are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table.
So today, we turn to you. You are the promise for a more equal world. You are our hope. I truly believe that only when we get real equality in our governments, in our businesses, in our companies and our universities, will we start to solve this generation’s central moral problem, which is gender equality. We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.
So my hope for all of you here, for every single one of you, is that you’re going to walk across the stage and get your diploma. You’re going to go out tonight or maybe all summer and celebrate. You deserve it. And then you’re going to lean way into your career. You’re going to find something you love doing, and you’re going to do it with gusto. You’re going to pick your field and you’re going to ride it all the way to the top.
So, what advice can I give you to help you achieve this goal? The first thing is I encourage you to think big. Studies show very clearly that in our country, in the college-educated part of the population, men are more ambitious than women. They’re more ambitious the day they graduate from college; they remain more ambitious every step along their career path. We will never close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap. But if all young women start to lean in, we can close the ambition gap right here, right now, if every single one of you leans in. Leadership belongs to those who take it. Leadership starts with you.
The next step is you’re going to have to believe in yourself potentially more than you do today. Studies also show that compared to men, women underestimate their performance. If you ask men and women questions about completely objective criteria such as GPAs or sales goals, men get it wrong slightly high; women get it wrong slightly low. More importantly, if you ask men why they succeeded, men attribute that success to themselves; and women, they attribute it to other factors like working harder, help from others. Ask a woman why she did well on something, and she’ll say, “I got lucky. All of these great people helped me. I worked really hard.” Ask a man and he’ll say or think, “What a dumb question. I’m awesome.” So women need to take a page from men and own their own success.
That’s much easier to say than to do. I know this from my own experience. All along the way, I’ve had all of those moments, not just some of the time; I would say most of the time, where I haven’t felt that I owned my success. I got into college and thought about how much my parents helped me on my essays. I went to the Treasury Department because I was lucky to take the right professor’s class who took me to Treasury. Google, I boarded a rocket ship that took me up with everyone else.
Even to this day, I have those moments. I have those moments all the time, probably far more than you can imagine I would. I know I need to make the adjustments. I know I need to believe in myself and raise my hand, because I’m sitting next to some guy and he thinks he’s awesome. So, to all of you, if you remember nothing else today, remember this: You are awesome. I’m not suggesting you be boastful. No one likes that in men or women. But I am suggesting that believing in yourself is the first necessary step to coming even close to achieving your potential.
You should also know that there are external forces out there that are holding you back from really owning your success. Studies have shown—and yes, I kind of like studies—that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. This means that as men get more successful and powerful, both men and women like them better. As women get more powerful and successful, everyone, including women, likes them less.
I’ve experienced this firsthand. When I first joined Facebook, there was a well-read blog out in the Valley that devoted some incredibly serious pixels to trashing me. Anonymous sources called me a liar, two-faced, about to ruin Facebook forever. I cried some when I was alone, I lost a bunch of sleep. Then I told myself it didn’t matter. Then everyone else told me it didn’t matter, which just reminded me of one thing: they were reading it too. I fantasized about all kinds of rejoinders, but in the end, my best and only response was just to do my job and do it well. When Facebook’s performance improved, the trash talk went away.
Do I believe I was judged more harshly because of my double-Xs? Yes. Do I think this will happen to me again in my career? Sure. I told myself that next time I’m not going to let it bother me, I won’t cry. I’m not sure that’s true. But I know I’ll get through it. I know that the truth comes out in the end, and I know how to keep my head down and just keep working.
If you think big, if you own your own success, if you lead, it won’t just have external costs, but it may cause you some personal sacrifice. Men make far fewer compromises than women to balance professional success and personal fulfillment. That’s because the majority of housework and childcare still falls to women. If a heterosexual couple work full time, the man will do—the woman, sorry—the woman will do two times the amount of housework and three times the amount of childcare that her husband will do. From my mother’s generation to mine, we have made far more progress making the workforce even than we have making the home even, and the latter is hurting the former very dramatically. So it’s a bit counterintuitive, but the most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is. If you pick someone who’s willing to share the burdens and the joys of your personal life, you’re going to go further. A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world.
I have a six-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. I want more choices for both of them. I want my son to have the choice to be a full partner not just at work, but at home; and I want my daughter to have a choice to do either. But if she chooses work, to be well-liked for what she accomplishes. We can’t wait for the term “work/life balance” to be something that’s not just discussed at women’s conferences.
Of course not everyone wants to jump into the workforce and rise to the top. Life is going to bring many twists and turns, and each of us, each of you, have to forge your own path. I have deep respect for my friends who make different choices than I do, who choose the really hard job of raising children full time, who choose to go part time, or who choose to pursue more nontraditional goals. These are choices that you may make some day, and these are fine choices.
But until that day, do everything you can to make sure that when that day comes, you even have a choice to make. Because what I have seen most clearly in my 20 years in the workforce is this: Women almost never make one decision to leave the workforce. It doesn’t happen that way. They make small little decisions along the way that eventually lead them there. Maybe it’s the last year of med school when they say, I’ll take a slightly less interesting specialty because I’m going to want more balance one day. Maybe it’s the fifth year in a law firm when they say, I’m not even sure I should go for partner, because I know I’m going to want kids eventually.
These women don’t even have relationships, and already they’re finding balance, balance for responsibilities they don’t yet have. And from that moment, they start quietly leaning back. The problem is, often they don’t even realize it. Everyone I know who has voluntarily left a child at home and come back to the workforce—and let’s face it, it’s not an option for most people. But for people in this audience, many of you are going to have this choice. Everyone who makes that choice will tell you the exact same thing: You’re only going to do it if your job is compelling.
If several years ago you stopped challenging yourself, you’re going to be bored. If you work for some guy who you used to sit next to, and really, he should be working for you, you’re going to feel undervalued, and you won’t come back. So, my heartfelt message to all of you is, and start thinking about this now, do not leave before you leave. Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there until the day you have to make a decision, and then make a decision. That’s the only way, when that day comes, you’ll even have a decision to make.
What about the rat race in the first place? Is it worthwhile? Or are you just buying into someone else’s definition of success? Only you can decide that, and you’ll have to decide it over and over and over. But if you think it’s a rat race, before you drop out, take a deep breath. Maybe you picked the wrong job. Try again. And then try again. Try until you find something that stirs your passion, a job that matters to you and matters to others. It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness.
At Facebook we have a very broad mission. We don’t just want you to post all your pictures of tonight up there and use Facebook to keep in touch, even though we want that, so do a lot of that. We want to connect the whole world. We want to make the whole world more open and more transparent. The one thing I’ve learned working with great entrepreneurs—Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google—that if you want to make a difference, you better think big and dream big, right from day one.
We try at Facebook to keep all of our employees thinking big all day. We have these posters in red we put around the walls. One says, “Fortune favors the bold.” Another says, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” That question echoes Barnard alum Anna Quindlen, who said that she majored in unafraid. Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face—and there will be barriers—be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold, and I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try.
You’re going to walk off this stage today and you’re going to start your adult life. Start out by aiming high. Like everyone here, I have great hopes for the members of this graduating class. I hope you find true meaning, contentment and passion in your life. I hope that you navigate the hard times and you come out with greater strength and resolve. I hope that whatever balance you seek, you find it with your eyes wide open. And I hope that you—yes, you—each and every one of you have the ambition to run the world, because this world needs you to run it. Women all around the world are counting on you. I’m counting on you.
I know that’s a big challenge and responsibility, a really daunting task, but you can do it. You can do it if you lean in. So go home tonight and ask yourselves, “What would I do if I weren’t afraid?” And then go do it. Congratulations, 2011.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-coo-sandberg-the-women-of-my-generation-blew-it-so-equality-is-up-to-you-graduates-2011-5#ixzz1MmdxaBSN

Adventures in Summer Learning

School may be out, but learning is still in. In Adventures in Summer Learning, you'll meet parents, teachers, and researchers in Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Boston who are discovering the best ways to keep kids engaged with learning during the long summer break — and avoid the 'summer slump.' The research is clear that children who don't read during the summer can lose up to three months of reading progress and that loss has a cumulative, long-term effect. Adventures in Summer Learning offers practical suggestions for parents about how to create a literacy-rich summer, as well as profiles of effective formal programs for at-risk youth and children with learning disabilities.

Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 4: Magnets (and 'Why?' questions...)

Physicist Richard Feynman explains to a non-scientist just how difficult it is to answer certain questions in lay terms! A classic example of Feynman's clarity of thought, powers of explanation and intellectual honesty - and his refusal to 'cheat' with misleading analogies...
From the BBC TV series 'Fun to Imagine'(1983). You can now watch higher quality versions of some of these episodes at www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/

Leonard Susskind: My friend Richard Feynman

About this talk

What's it like to be pals with a genius? Onstage at TEDxCaltech, physicist Leonard Susskind spins a few stories about his friendship with the legendary Richard Feynman, discussing his unconventional approach to problems both serious and ... less so.


I decided when I was asked to do this that what I really wanted to talk about was my friend Richard Feynman. I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. And I'm going to tell you the Richard Feynman that I knew. I'm sure there are other people here who could tell you about the Richard Feynman they knew, and it would probably be a different Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman was a very complex man. He was a man of many, many parts. He was, of course, foremost a very, very, very great scientist. He was an actor. You saw him act. I also had the good fortune to be in those lectures, up in the balcony. They were fantastic. He was a philosopher; he was a drum player; he was a teacher par excellence. Richard Feynman was also a showman, an enormous showman. He was brash, irreverent -- he was full of macho, a kind of macho one-upsmanship. He loved intellectual battle. He had a gargantuan ego. But the man had somehow a lot of room at the bottom. And what I mean by that is a lot of room, in my case -- I can't speak for anybody else -- but in my case, a lot of room for another big ego. Well, not as big as his, but fairly big. I always felt good with Dick Feynman.

It was always fun to be with him. He always made me feel smart. How can somebody like that make you feel smart? Somehow he did. He made me feel smart. He made me feel he was smart. He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem whatever. And in fact, we did sometimes do physics together. We never published a paper together, but we did have a lot of fun. He loved to win. With these little macho games we would sometimes play -- and he didn't only play them with me, he played them with all sorts of people -- he would almost always win. But when he didn't win, when he lost, he would laugh and seem to have just as much fun as if he had won.

I remember once he told me a story about a joke that the students played on him. They took him -- I think it was for his birthday -- they took him for lunch. They took him for lunch to a sandwich place in Pasadena. It may still exist; I don't know. Celebrity sandwiches was their thing. You could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich. You could get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich. The students went there in advance, and they arranged that they would all order Feynman sandwiches. One after another, they came in and ordered Feynman sandwiches. Feynman loved this story. He told me this story, and he was really happy and laughing. When he finished the story, I said to him, "Dick, I wonder what would be the difference between a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich." And without skipping a beat at all, he said, "Well, they'd be about the same. The only difference is a Susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham," ham, as in bad actor. (Laughter) Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said, "Yeah, but a lot less baloney."

(Laughter)

The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney. What Feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense -- phoniness, false sophistication, jargon. I remember sometime during the 80s, the mid-80s, Dick and I and Sidney Coleman, we met a couple of times up in San Francisco at some very rich guy's house -- up in San Francisco for dinner. And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers. These guys were philosophers of mind. Their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness. And they were full of all kinds of jargon. I'm trying to remember the words -- "monism," "dualism," categories all over the place. I didn't know what those things meant, neither did Dick -- neither did Sydney for that matter.

And what did we talk about? Well, what do you talk about when you talk about minds? One thing, this one obvious thing to talk about -- can a machine become a mind? Can you build a machine that thinks like a human being, that is conscious? We sat around and we talked about this -- we of course never resolved it. But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-iphizing. It's a scientific question after all. And this was a very, very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman. Feynman let them have it -- both barrels, right between the eyes. It was brutal, it was funny -- ooh, it was funny. But it was really brutal. He really popped their balloon.

But the amazing thing was -- Feynman had to leave a little early. He wasn't feeling too well, so he left a little bit early. And Sidney and I were left there with the two philosophers. And the amazing thing is these guys were flying. They were so happy. They had met the great man; they had been instructed by the great man; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud; and it was something special. I realized there was something just extraordinary about Feynman, even when he did what he did.

Dick, he was my friend. I did call him Dick. Dick and I did have a little bit of a rapport. I think it may have been a special rapport that he and I had. We liked each other; we liked the same kind of things. I also liked the kind of intellectual macho games. Sometimes I would win, mostly he would win, but we both enjoyed them. And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality. I don't think he was right. I think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves. But he was convinced of this. And he was curious. The man was incredibly curious. And he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection.

And one day we were walking. We were in France. We were in La Zouche. We were up in the mountains, 1976. We were up in the mountains, and Feynman said to me, he said, "Leonardo." The reason he called me Leonardo is because we were in Europe and he was practicing his French. And he said, "Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or to you father when you were a kid?" And I said, "Well, my real hero was my father. He was a working man, had a fifth grade education. He was a master mechanic, and he taught me how to use tools. He taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things. He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem. He didn't call it the hypotenuse, he called it the shortcut distance." And Feynman's eyes just opened up. He went off like a light bulb. And he said he had had basically the exact same relationship with his father. In fact, he had been convinced at one time that, to be a good physicist, that it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father. I apologize for the sexist conversation here, but this is the way it really happened.

He said that he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary -- the necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist. Being Dick, he, of course, wanted to check this. He wanted to go out and do an experiment. So, well he did. He went out and did an experiment. He asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists, "Was it your mom or your pop that influenced you?" And to a man -- they were all men -- to a man, every single one of them said, "My mother." (Laughter) There went that theory down the trashcan of history. But he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with my father as he had with his father. And for some time, he was convinced that this was the reason we got along so well. I don't know. Maybe. Who knows?

But let me tell you a little bit about Feynman the physicist. Feynman's style -- no, style is not the right word. Style makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn or the suit he was wearing. There's something much deeper than that, but I can't think of another word for it. Feynman's scientific style was always to look for the simplest, most elementary solution to a problem that was possible. If it wasn't possible, you had to use something fancier. But no doubt part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could. But he also deeply believed, he truly believed, that if you couldn't explain something simply you didn't understand it. In the 1950s, people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked.

There was a theory. It was due to a Russian mathematical physicist, and it was a complicated theory. I'll tell you what that theory was soon enough. It was a terribly complicated theory full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth. And it sort of worked, but it didn't work very well. The only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very, very far apart. The helium atoms had to be very far apart. And unfortunately, the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other.

Feynman decided, as a sort of amateur helium physicist, that he would try to figure it out. He had an idea, a very clear idea. He would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like. He would try to visualize it, guided by a small number of simple principles. The small number of simple principles were very, very simple. The first one was that, when helium atoms touch each other, they repel. The implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero, it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other. The other fact is that the ground state, the lowest energy state of a quantum system, the wave function is always very smooth -- has the minimum number of wiggles.

So he sat down -- and I imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil -- and he tried to write down, and did write down, the simplest function that he could think of which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between. He wrote down a simple thing. It was so simple, in fact, that I suspect a really smart high school student, who didn't even have calculus, could understand what he wrote down. The thing was that that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium and then some.

I've always wondered whether the professionals, the real professional helium physicists, were just a little bit embarrassed by this. They had their super-powerful technique, and they couldn't do as well. Incidentally, I'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was. It was the technique of Feynman diagrams.

(Laughter)

He did it again in 1968. In 1968, in my own university -- I wasn't there at the time -- but in 1968, they were exploring the structure of the proton. The proton is obviously made of a whole bunch of little particles. This was more or less known. And the way to analyze it was, of course, Feynman diagrams. That's what Feynman diagrams were constructed for -- to understand particles. The experiments that were going on were very simple. You simply take the proton, and you hit it really sharply with an electron. This was the thing the Feynman diagrams were for. The only problem was that Feynman diagrams are complicated. They're difficult integrals. If you could do all of them, you would have a very precise theory. But you couldn't; they were just too complicated. People were trying to do them. You could do a one loop diagram. Don't worry about one loop. One loop, two loops -- maybe you could do a three loop diagram, but beyond that you couldn't do anything.

Feynman said, "Forget all of that. Just think of the proton as an assemblage of little particles -- a swarm of little particles." He called them partons. He called them partons. He said, "Just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast." Because they're moving real fast, relativity says the internal motions go very slow. The electron hits it suddenly. It's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton. What do you see? You see a frozen bunch of partons. They don't move, and because they don't move during the course of the experiment, you don't have to worry about how they're moving. You don't have to worry about the forces between them. You just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons. This was the key to analyzing these experiments. Extremely effective, it really did -- somebody said the word revolution is a bad word. I suppose it is, so I won't say revolution -- but it certainly evolved very, very deeply our understanding of the proton, and of particles beyond that.

Well, I had some more that I was going to tell you about my connection with Feynman, what he was like, but I see I have exactly half a minute. So I think I'll just finish up by saying I actually don't think Feynman would have liked this event. I think he would have said, "I don't need this." But how should we honor Feynman? How should we really honor Feynman? I think the answer is we should honor Feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can.

Thank you.

(Applause)