e-Marketing

Clara C Ft. Cathy Nguyen - Mistletoe by Justin Bieber

2012-02-14T23:15:00.001-08:00

The Jeremy Lin Phenomenon

2012-02-14T18:04:00.000-08:00

Watch The Jeremy Lin Phenomenon on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

SUMMARY
Jeremy Lin, a point guard for the New York Knicks and the first Chinese-American player in NBA history, is on a storybook run in his first four games as a starter. Ray Suarez and Jeff Yang of The Wall Street Journal explore how an unknown basketball player suddenly captured the attention of the NBA, the sports world and beyond.

Transcript

JEFFREY BROWN: Next, how an unknown basketball player suddenly captured the attention of the sports world and beyond.

Ray Suarez looks at the Jeremy Lin phenomenon.

RAY SUAREZ: Just a week ago, few fans knew his name or his face, but tonight when basketball point guard Jeremy Lin takes to the floor for the New York Knicks, all eyes will be on him.

A Harvard graduate and the first Chinese-American player in NBA history, the 23-year-old was cut by two other NBA teams before the Knicks picked him up and sat him on the bench. After moving to the starting lineup earlier this month, he scored more than points in his first four starts, 109, than any other NBA player since 1976. And fans around the world have been dazzled by plays like this one.

For more about the Lin phenomenon, we turn to Jeff Yang of The Wall Street Journal.

And, Jeff, the story was already implausible in 100 other ways, it seems, cut by his early teams, not scouted as a prospect in high school. But it's really the fact that he's Taiwanese-American that has gained a lot of the attention.

What is fascinating about his Asian-American background?

JEFF YANG, The Wall Street Journal: I think the thing that's fascinating obviously for Asian-Americans is that there really has never been anyone like him before, I mean, not just in basketball, but arguably in sports.

Organized sports is such a huge thing in America, such a big part of the fabric of our culture, and yet we've never had a player who wasn't just successful, but dominating in one of these sports before. And Jeremy comes along. He's somebody completely unheralded.

He's got a huge amount of talent, but has been effectively ignored. And, overnight, like a Cinderella story, he becomes the biggest news in all of New York and maybe all the world.

RAY SUAREZ: You mentioned that there's never been anyone like him before. What about Yao Ming? What's different about Jeremy Lin?

JEFF YANG: Well, obviously, there are two really big differences right off the bat.

The first is, Yao Ming was exceptionally physically gifted, but in a specific way. I mean, he was 7'6'' tall. And you can't, as they say, teach size. So he was somebody who came into the league already a superstar and with gifts that you honestly can't just create with hard work.

And, furthermore, he's Chinese. He's somebody, actually, a foreign player who's come to the United States, both with a certain reputation, but also with certain limitations. He -- English wasn't his first language. He wasn't culturally part of the fabric of the United States when he first came here.

And he was still hugely inspirational. But when you look at Jeremy, you're looking at somebody totally different. He's an all-American kid who is redefining the notion of what an all-American kid is. And that is a big part, I think, of what why Jeremy is such an exceptionally interesting story.

RAY SUAREZ: I've just plowed through several dozen articles on his sudden rise. And an interesting things pops up. He's constantly referred to as intelligent, or his court smarts make up for a lack of being physically imposing.

Now, is that kind of the flip side of the stereotypes that many minority players bridle under, that they are physically gifted? Now, being smart is a good stereotype, but it is -- is it a stereotype nonetheless?

JEFF YANG: Well, I mean, it doesn't hurt that the guy did go to a pretty good school. He went to Harvard University. So, it's not as if it's not accurate on some level.

I do think that, when you look at the way that his career has played out, where team after team and individual after individual has sort of underestimated his physical abilities, there probably is a little bit of that, a sense in which he's looked at as many maybe a smart player, but not somebody who can really run with the big boys.

And that is something that I think Asian-American athletes in general have gotten tagged with, this idea that they have to bring brains to the table, because they don't have the brawn or the raw talent. His brains and leadership have also played a big role. He's changed the nature of the team. He's gotten a lot of great shots and great looks for his teammates. They're playing better together than they ever have.

And we're hoping that it will only get better when the big stars actually come back off the disabled list.

RAY SUAREZ: He also seems to be having fun with it, though, isn't he, whether it's bowing to Carmelo Anthony or doing a little courtside ritual that involves opening books and pocketing glasses.

JEFF YANG: There's something about him that's almost infectious. He's playful. He's funny. He can be very serious and very solemn in some ways.

He's got a very strong Christian faith. But, at the same time, when people see him play, they see somebody who makes them remember the playground, makes them remember the pickup games they have played themselves. And that's -- that's amazing.

RAY SUAREZ: One black athlete tweeted that, if a black player did what Jeremy Lin has done over the past week-and-a-half, it just wouldn't make much of a splash.

But, interestingly, Ta-Nehisi Coates blogged on The Atlantic that it's true that, if he were black, this would probably be a smaller story, but, if he weren't talented, it would not be a story at all.

JEFF YANG: I absolutely agree with that.

I think that, in a way -- and the statement you're talking about was by Floyd Mayweather, who's a boxer. The notion that somehow he doesn't deserve the attention he's getting is ludicrous. The guy has done some amazing stuff. He's turned a team around. He's turned a season around. He's maybe saved his coach's job.

And he's certainly proven that he deserves to play on that field with anybody. The fact that he's Asian-American certainly makes him exceptional, unique and inspiring in a lot of ways, certainly for me, for people like me. But there's no question that his talent got him there and that his talent will keep him there.

RAY SUAREZ: Jeff Yang from The Wall Street Journal, thanks for joining us.

JEFF YANG: Thank you.

I'm not cool

Use a VPN everywhere

2012-02-14T17:29:00.000-08:00

OMG! 美语

2012-02-14T07:08:00.000-08:00

Dyslexie font designed to help dyslexics read, write

2012-02-13T19:52:00.000-08:00

Most of the 15 to 20 percent of people in the United States who have a language-based disability suffer from dyslexia, a condition that makes reading and comprehension difficult. Those who suffer from dyslexia often transpose or rotate letters (a b becomes a q; an n becomes and u), and they have difficulty differentiating letters that look similar, such as i and j. Those who suffer from severe dyslexia might even see the letters moving, or in three dimensions, as they try to read them. All of these factors greatly impede the speed and clarity with which they can read.

Jeremy Lin - Episode 1: A Day in the Life

2012-02-13T04:34:00.000-08:00

2012-02-11T17:54:00.003-08:00

2012-02-11T17:54:00.001-08:00

What is Jetpack?

2012-02-11T00:55:00.000-08:00

WHAT IS SYYN LABS?

2012-02-10T16:59:00.001-08:00

Syyn Labs Reel 2011 from Syyn Labs on Vimeo.

A haptic weather forecasting device

2012-02-10T16:49:00.000-08:00

Cryoscope from Robb Godshaw on Vimeo.

A haptic weather forecasting device

The Cryoscope shows the user exactly what to expect outside by haptically exhibiting exactly how cold or warm it is to be outside. The user simply touches an aluminum cube that has been heated or cooled to the appropriate temperature. The unit fetches weather data from the internet, and translates it to the cube physically, pumping heat in or out of the cube.

We Are All Weird

2012-02-09T22:30:00.000-08:00

Success Mag interview, 2012 from Seth Godin on Vimeo.

Squidoo founder, bestselling author and prolific blogger Seth Godin recently sat down with Success Magazine’s Darren Hardy to talk about his vision, the ideas in his latest book, We Are All Weird, the smart marketer of today, and how businesses become remarkable.

Children’s Creativity Museum

2012-02-09T19:35:00.005-08:00

At the Children’s Creativity Museum, we go beyond the conventional environment of play by inspiring kids to imagine, create and share in our multimedia environment. With every visit, kids walk away with a unique media or art project that reflects and celebrates their creativity.
All of our core studios and exhibits are facilitated by skilled artists and our C.I.T.Y. Guides who are guaranteed to spark your imagination as they guide you through the creative process. You will also notice our Creativity Critters throughout the museum. Explore our exhibits to find out more about their favorite activities.

2012-02-09T19:20:00.000-08:00

Is your school seeing a mass influx of laptops, smartphones, tablets and other wireless devices?

Are you prepared for the invasion of the 4th "R"...wiReless?

While implementing a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) strategy allows school systems to provide one-to-one computing for students, reduced equipment costs and eliminating technology refresh capital, wireless networks are feeling an enormous strain, not to mention access control and additional management issues.

TEDxTaipei miniTalks - Jiun-Huei Proty Wu - 02

2012-02-09T01:53:00.000-08:00

Professor Jiun-Huei Proty Wu is a cosmologist teaching at National Taiwan University, jointly appointed by Academia Sinica and National Cheng-Chi University. Growing up in Taiwan, he developed a fighting spirit from the challenging experience of military service, an attitude he carried throughout his life. At 12 years of age, he built two telescopes using surplus wood and a PVC water pipe, hoping to prove the existence of the goddess of the moon. Two years later, while using these two telescopes to observe the universe, he successfully captured the astonishing moment when the Comet Halley passed, sparking his career in cosmology. At 28, he obtained his PhD in cosmology from the Relativity Group at Cambridge, led by Professor Stephen Hawking. After working at U.C. Berkeley and NASA, he returned to Taiwan and has been back for over a decade. He is currently the Project Scientist of the cosmological telescope, AMiBA, in Hawaii, and plans to build a time machine at the South Pole to search for the origins of the cosmos.

inDay Speaker Series with Scott Harrison

2012-02-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

Scott Harrison, founder and CEO of Charity Water, presents "Water Changes Everything" as LinkedIn's inDay speaker.

There are one billion people without clean water to drink. Can you imagine that? No bottled water. No special filter on the faucet. No water in the faucet. No faucet. Over the past five years, with the help of more than 200,000 donors worldwide, charity: water has funded 6,041 water projects in 19 developing countries. Those projects will provide over 2.5 million people with clean, safe drinking water.

More information at www.charitywater.org.

What Makes Apple Tick? Adam Lashinsky Tells the Inside Story

2012-02-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

A Textbook Case of iPad Fun With Studying

2012-02-07T19:24:00.001-08:00

Student invention may make road safer for bicyclists

2012-02-07T18:35:00.000-08:00

10-year-old student accidentally discovers explosive new molecule

2012-02-07T18:28:00.000-08:00

Despite being somewhat of a hollywood cliche, serendipitous scientific discoveries rarely ever happen. Just ask any scientist and that person will tell you about all the painstaking detail that goes into designing an experiment to hone in on specific probable outcomes. But when they do happen, heck, they make for pretty good stories. And when it’s a 10-year old girl accidentally discovering a potentially explosive molecule, it’s definitely worth me telling you about it.

The little prodigy in question is fifth grader Clara Lazen, whose class assignment was to build a molecule using one of those modeling kits with the colorful balls and plastic connectors. Many kids would probably throw together a little H2O and call it a day — but not Clara. She randomly pieced together a combination of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon atoms to create a molecule her chemistry teacher, Kenneth Boehr, had never seen before.

“I just saw that these go together more,” Clara told the Fox News local affiliate in Kansas City. “Like they fit more together. And they look better. And all the holes have to be filled in for it to be stable.”

iTunes U app demo by Jeff Robbin at Apple Education Event Jan. 19, 2012

2012-02-06T08:09:00.001-08:00

Personal Fondue Set

2012-02-04T07:12:00.000-08:00

Enjoy a delicious fondue snack whenever the hankering hits you with the 4-piece Personal Fondue Set.

Add your favorite dipping sauce to the 4-ounce stoneware bowl and light the included tealight candle to start the melting process. When ready, dip your favorite snacks (such as fruits, vegetables, bread, and cake) using the included stainless steel fondue fork.

Stoneware bowl, stoneware plate, and stainless steel fork are dishwasher safe.

Beyond Bricks and Clicks: Smart Phones and Smart Shopping

2012-02-03T19:34:00.000-08:00

Near Field Communications (NFC), Geo-location services, and augmented reality (AR) are disrupting the consumer shopping experience while increasing sales and margins for brick and mortar retailers.

Putting interested buyers in front of relevant shelves at local stores is a huge monetizable opportunity for mobile platforms. 400,000 new Android devices are enabled each day, 60-70M phones are shipping with NFC this year alone and 15% of Tier 1 retailers are integrating mobile e-commerce platforms. Come discover how start ups in mobile are making shopping a whole lot smarter...read more at: http://www.vlab.org/article.html?aid=415

Moderator and Panel:

Aaron Emigh, CTO and Co-Founder, Shopkick, Inc. (Presenter)
Nitzan Shaer, Managing Director and Founder of High Start Group (Moderator)
Bob Borchers, General Partner, Opus Capital
Ben Hedrington, Director of Web Strategy, Best Buy Co. Inc
Matt Weathers, VP Product, ShopSavvy

David Agus

2012-02-03T01:16:00.001-08:00

Systemic Thinking About Cancer
Dr. David Agus discusses thinking systemically about cancer and other things

Vitamin C and the Limeys
Sal and Dr. David Agus talk about the history of Scurvy and Vitamin C

Inflammation
Dr. David Agus talks about inflammation (while Sal repeatedly misspells it with one "m")

The Muppets Attack Fox News

2012-02-02T06:52:00.001-08:00

Temperatures plummet as Europe's big freeze spread

2012-02-02T06:48:00.001-08:00

Tony Hsieh's new $350 million startup

2012-02-01T22:31:00.001-08:00

Bjarke Ingels: Hedonistic sustainability

2012-02-01T20:29:00.000-08:00

ABOUT THIS TALK

Bjarke Ingels' architecture is luxurious, sustainable and community-driven. At TEDxEast he shows us his playful designs, from a factory chimney that blows smoke rings to a ski slope built atop a waste processing plant.

Mick Mountz: The hidden world of box-packing

2012-02-01T20:09:00.000-08:00

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Mick Mountz is the founder and CEO of Kiva Systems, a company dedicated to finding high tech solutions that make inventory fulfillment fast, cheap and efficient.

ABOUT THIS TALK

We make millions of online purchases daily, but who (or what) actually puts our items into packages? At TEDxBoston, Mick Mountz weaves a fascinating tale out of a seemingly boring subject: online ordering, its challenges -- and the surprisingly high-tech solutions.

Video: Watch this Samsung flexible tablet PC unfold

2012-02-01T19:10:00.001-08:00

Flying People Spotted Over New York City…Film At Nine

2012-01-30T19:50:00.000-08:00

flying humans in the sky

Puzzlejuice

2012-01-29T19:09:00.000-08:00

Puzzlejuice Launch Trailer from Asher Vollmer on Vimeo.

Portal 2 - This Is Aperture

2012-01-29T18:59:00.000-08:00

Julian Baggini: Is there a real you?

2012-01-29T18:38:00.000-08:00

ABOUT THIS TALK

What makes you, you? Is it how you think of yourself, how others think of you, or something else entirely? At TEDxYouth@Manchester, Julian Baggini draws from philosophy and neuroscience to give a surprising answer.

3D Printer Makes Customized Cookies

2012-01-26T19:38:00.000-08:00

Added: January 23, 2012
The researchers at Cornell University have been cooking up a new appliance for your home - a 3D food printer. They've been experimenting with all kinds of goo, including cheese, cookie dough and liquid turkey.

Double Dribble: a Motion Math game for the iPhone

2012-01-26T19:11:00.001-08:00

Double Dribble: a Motion Math game for the iPhone from Jacob Klein on Vimeo.

Heart Stop Beating | Jeremiah Zagar

2012-01-26T01:53:00.001-08:00

Heart Stop Beating | Jeremiah Zagar from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

The Landfill | Jessica Edwards & Gary Hustwit

2012-01-26T01:32:00.000-08:00

The Landfill | Jessica Edwards & Gary Hustwit from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Newtown Creek Digester Eggs: The Art of Human Waste | David Leitner

2012-01-26T01:29:00.001-08:00

Newtown Creek Digester Eggs: The Art of Human Waste | David Leitner from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Hilary's Straws | Phil Cox

2012-01-26T01:26:00.000-08:00

Hilary's Straws | Phil Cox from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Meet Mr. Toilet | Jessica Yu

2012-01-26T01:24:00.001-08:00

Meet Mr. Toilet | Jessica Yu from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

MUSIC LESSONS

2012-01-20T05:42:00.000-08:00

MUSIC LESSONS
Originally aired 06.05.1998

What's frustrating about music lessons, what's miraculous about them, and what they actually teach us. This show was recorded in front of a live audience at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, with help from KQED-FM, during the '98 Public Radio Conference in San Francisco.

NEW BEGINNINGS

2012-01-20T05:41:00.000-08:00

NEW BEGINNINGS
Originally aired 11.17.1995

Our program's very first broadcast.

COMEDIANS OF CHRISTMAS COMEDY SPECIAL

2012-01-20T05:39:00.000-08:00

COMEDIANS OF CHRISTMAS COMEDY SPECIAL
Originally aired 12.17.2010
The holidays are stressful so we booked a seasonal pick-me-up: an hour of comedy. Including comedians Wyatt Cenac, Mike Birbiglia, Julian McCullough, Jenny Slate, Gabe Liedman and Edith Zimmerman. Musical guests: Dave Hill and Doug Gillard.

KID LOGIC

2012-01-20T05:37:00.001-08:00

KID LOGIC
Originally aired 06.22.2001

Stories of kids using perfectly logical arguments, and arriving at perfectly wrong conclusions.

WHAT I LEARNED FROM TELEVISION

2012-01-20T05:36:00.001-08:00

WHAT I LEARNED FROM TELEVISION
Originally aired 03.16.2007

Stories recorded during our 2007 live tour. Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Dan Savage, and other favorite contributors went on the road with us to New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles; and performed brand-new stories in front of sold-out audiences.

HUMAN RESOURCES

2012-01-20T05:34:00.000-08:00

HUMAN RESOURCES
Originally aired 02.29.2008

The true story of little-known rooms in the New York City Board of Education building. Teachers are told to report there instead of their classrooms. No reason is usually given.

ADULT CHILDREN

2012-01-20T05:32:00.000-08:00

ADULT CHILDREN
Originally aired 05.03.1996

Stories of the difficult relationships between parents and their grown children, including two long stories from Sandra Tsing Loh about her father.

HOW TO TALK TO KIDS

2012-01-20T05:12:00.000-08:00

HOW TO TALK TO KIDS
Originally aired 10.05.2007

Stories of adults taking very different approaches to communicating with children.

COMEDIANS OF CHRISTMAS COMEDY SPECIAL

2012-01-20T04:56:00.000-08:00

422:
COMEDIANS OF CHRISTMAS COMEDY SPECIAL
Originally aired 12.17.2010
The holidays are stressful so we booked a seasonal pick-me-up: an hour of comedy. Including comedians Wyatt Cenac, Mike Birbiglia, Julian McCullough, Jenny Slate, Gabe Liedman and Edith Zimmerman. Musical guests: Dave Hill and Doug Gillard.

HOW TO CREATE A JOB

2012-01-20T04:55:00.000-08:00

HOW TO CREATE A JOB
Originally aired 05.13.2011

It seems like every politician has a plan for putting people back to work. But we and the Planet Money team couldn’t help but wonder…how do you create a job? Can politicians truly create many jobs? Is it possible the whole thing is just well-intentioned hot air?

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

2012-01-20T00:49:00.001-08:00

420:
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
Originally aired 11.19.2010

It’s amazing just how much drama can take place in the mini-universe of a neighborhood. This week we bring you stories of neighbors watching out for each other, for better and worse, including a story from CBC's WireTap.

MR. DAISEY AND THE APPLE FACTORY

2012-01-20T00:47:00.000-08:00

MR. DAISEY AND THE APPLE FACTORY
Originally aired 01.06.2012

Mike Daisey was a self-described "worshipper in the cult of Mac." Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: Who makes all my crap? He traveled to China to find out.

KID POLITICS

2012-01-20T00:46:00.001-08:00

BROADCAST:
JAN-13-12

KID POLITICS
What if, say, the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada in 1983 had been decided, not by Ronald Reagan, but by a bunch of middle-schoolers? And what if every rule at your high school had been determined, not by teachers and administrators, but entirely by teenagers? This week, stories about whether, when it comes to governing, kids do any better than grown-ups.

Five new ways to present your resume

2012-01-18T17:51:00.001-08:00

I personally see only advantages in this system

2012-01-18T17:21:00.000-08:00

Labguru

Labguru - Dr. Anat Ben Zvi - Testimonial from BioData Ltd on Vimeo.

Quartz

Quartzy Intro: Rosalind Franklin and Einstein show the benefits of using Quartzy!! from Adam Regelmann on Vimeo.

Colwiz

An everyday tool for the scientist

2012-01-18T17:16:00.001-08:00

Labguru - Dr. Eli Lewis - Testimonial from BioData Ltd on Vimeo.

Keen On…. Adam Lashinsky: How Apple Really Works (TCTV)

2012-01-18T17:01:00.000-08:00

人才無國界時代，台灣如何勝出？

2012-01-17T18:12:00.001-08:00

children

2012-01-17T17:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embeddehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifd&v=f0vlrTVC2tQ

Onward to the edge...........

2012-01-17T17:27:00.001-08:00

Behold, maybe the only FDR versus werewolves film in history

2012-01-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

And now, for something completely different. Well, not that different from Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but pretty outlandish in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it's the next Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS?

In any case, here's the preview for FDR: American Badass! This film promises lycanthrope versions of Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini. Also, Kevin Sorbo plays Abe Lincoln, and Ethan from Lost is hanging out. The release date has yet to be announced, but a sweep of the Independent Spirit Awards is a lock.

Listen to an Auto-Tuned David Attenborough and Bill Nye croon about evolution

2012-01-17T17:19:00.000-08:00

http://io9.com/5876618/listen-to-an-auto+tuned-david-attenborough-and-bill-nye-croon-about-evolutionhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The latest Symphony of Science track is out, and it is a doozy. Listen to David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins and Bill Nye get their rave on for evolution. Who knew synths intermingled with amoebas on the Tree of Life? Hat tip to Krakenstein2!

2012-01-17T17:17:00.000-08:00

http://littlebrotherlive.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/protest-songs/

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f5M_Ttstbgs

PROTECT IP / SOPA Act Breaks the Internet

2012-01-17T17:08:00.001-08:00

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

The video above discusses the Senate version of the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). In the Senate the bill is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). SOPA has gotten more attention than PIPA because it was moving faster in the legislative process. But PIPA is just as dangerous, and now it is moving faster.
PIPA would give the government new powers to block Americans' access websites that corporations don't like. The bill lets corporations and the US government censor entire websites and cut sites off from advertising, payments and donations.
This legislation will stifle free speech and innovation, and even threaten popular web services like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
The bill is scheduled for a test vote in the Senate on Jan. 24th: We need to act now to let our lawmakers know just how terrible it is. Will you fill out the form above to ask your lawmakers to oppose the legislation and support a filibuster?

SOPA "explained" by The Guardian

Float or Sink - Cool Science Experiment

2012-01-17T02:25:00.000-08:00

The Power of Sulfuric Acid - Cool Science Demo

2012-01-17T02:15:00.001-08:00

Tablecloth Trick - Cool Science Experiment

2012-01-17T01:53:00.001-08:00

Jennifer Aniston on Ellen

2012-01-17T01:50:00.000-08:00

Headz Up

2012-01-17T00:57:00.001-08:00

Ooma CEO Eric Stang Shows Off The New HD2 VoIP Handset

2012-01-17T00:40:00.001-08:00

MLK: Why I Am Opposed to The War in Vietnam - 1967

2012-01-16T18:39:00.000-08:00

Video: Watch this Samsung flexible tablet PC unfold

2012-01-16T17:18:00.000-08:00

The Making Of Morris: Part 1 (The Power of Story)

2012-01-15T19:27:00.000-08:00

The Making Of Morris: Part 1 (The Power of Story) from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore Trailer from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

MOONBOT studios Office Tour from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore iPad App Trailer from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Making Of The Numberlys

2012-01-15T19:15:00.001-08:00

The Making Of The Numberlys "G" for GAMES from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Making Of Morris: Part 8 (Pop Goes The Weasel) from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Making Of The Numberlys "A" for ART. from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

How To Draw A Moonbot from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Making Of The Numberlys "H" for HARMONIZING THE MOONBOTS from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Making Of The Numberlys "F" for FOUR & FIVE from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Making Of The Numberlys "E" for EDITING THE NUMBERLYS. from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

The Making Of The Numberlys "D" for DUPLICATE. from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

A Day in the Life at Moonbot Studios from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/29048841

Liquid-piston-driven concept watch

2012-01-15T17:26:00.001-08:00

Tyler Cowen: Be suspicious of stories

2012-01-14T21:14:00.000-08:00

ABOUT THIS TALK

Like all of us, economist Tyler Cowen loves a good story. But in this intriguing talk from TEDxMidAtlantic, he asks us to step away from thinking of our lives -- and our messy, complicated irrational world -- in terms of a simple narrative.

Award-winning teen-age science in action

2012-01-14T20:33:00.000-08:00

ABOUT THIS TALK

In 2011 three young women swept the top prizes of the first Google Science Fair. At TEDxWomen Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose and Naomi Shah described their extraordinary projects-- and their route to a passion for science.

Lauren Hodge: If you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option, which would you choose, grilled or fried chicken? Now most people would answer grilled, and it's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories. However, grilled chicken poses a hidden danger. The hidden danger is heterocyclic amines -- specifically phenomethylimidazopyridine, or PhIP -- (laughter) which is the immunogenic or carcinogenic compound.

A carcinogen is any substance or agent that causes abnormal growth of cells, which can also cause them to metastasize or spread. They are also organic compounds in which one or more of the hydrogens in ammonia is replaced with a more complex group. Studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines. However, no studies exist yet that show how or why. These here are five different organizations that classify carcinogens. And as you can see, none of the organizations consider the compounds to be safe, which justifies the need to decrease them in our diet.

Now you might wonder how a 13 year-old girl could come up with this idea. And I was led to it through a series of events. I first learned about it through a lawsuit I read about in my doctor's office -- (Laughter) which was between the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine and seven different fast food restaurants. They weren't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken, but they were sued because of California's Proposition 65, which stated that if there's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning.

So I was very surprised about this. And I was wondering why nobody knew more about this dangerous grilled chicken, which doesn't seem very harmful. But then one night, my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner, and I noticed that the edges of the chicken, which had been marinated in lemon juice, turned white. And later in biology class, I learned that it's due to a process called denaturing, which is where the proteins will change shape and lose their ability to chemically function. So I combined these two ideas and I formulated a hypothesis, saying that, could possibly the carcinogens be decreased due to a marinade and could it be due to the differences in PH?

So my idea was born, and I had the project set up and a hypothesis, so what was my next step? Well obviously I had to find a lab to work at because I didn't have the equipment in my school. I thought this would be easy, but I emailed about 200 different people within a five-hour radius of where I lived, and I got one positive response that said that they could work with me. Most of the others either never responded back, said they didn't have the time or didn't have the equipment and couldn't help me. So it was a big commitment to drive to the lab to work multiple times. However, it was a great opportunity to work in a real lab -- so I could finally start my project.

The first stage was completed at home, which consisted of marinating the chicken, grilling the chicken, amassing it and preparing it to be transported to the lab. The second stage was completed at the Penn State University main campus lab, which is where I extracted the chemicals, changed the PH so I could run it through the equipment and separated the compounds I needed from the rest of the chicken. The final stages, when I ran the samples through a high-pressure liquid chromatography mass spectrometer, which separated the compounds and analyzed the chemicals and told me exactly how much carcinogens I had in my chicken.

So when I went through the data, I had very surprising results, because I found that four out of the five marinating ingredients actually inhibited the carcinogen formation. When compared with the unmarinated chicken, which is what I used as my control, I found that lemon juice worked by far the best, which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent. The saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well, decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent. Olive oil slightly decreased the PhIP formation, but it was nearly negligible. And the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range, but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens.

Another important factor that I didn't take into account initially was the time cooked. And I found that if you increase the time cooked, the amount of carcinogens rapidly increases. So the best way to marinate chicken, based on this, is to, not under-cook, but definitely don't over-cook and char the chicken, and marinate in either lemon juice, brown sugar or saltwater.

(Applause)

Based on these findings, I have a question for you. Would you be willing to make a simple change in your diet that could potentially save your life? Now I'm not saying that if you eat grilled chicken that's not marinated, you're definitely going to catch cancer and die. However, anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle.

Is it worth it to you? How will you cook your chicken now?

(Applause)

Shree Bose: Hi everyone. I'm Shree Bose. I was the 17-18 year-old age category winner and then the grand prize winner. And I want all of you to imagine a little girl holding a dead blue spinach plant. And she's standing in front of you and she's explaining to you that little kids will eat their vegetables if they're different colors. Sounds ridiculous, right. But that was me years ago. And that was my first science fair project. It got a bit more complicated from there. My older brother Panaki Bose spent hours of his time explaining atoms to me when I barely understood basic algebra. My parents suffered through many more of my science fair projects, including a remote controlled garbage can.

(Laughter)

And then came the summer after my freshman year, when my grandfather passed away due to cancer. And I remember watching my family go through that and thinking that I never wanted another family to feel that kind of loss. So, armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology, I decided I wanted to do cancer research at 15. Good plan. So I started emailing all of these professors in my area asking to work under their supervision in a lab. Got rejected by all except one. And then went on, my next summer, to work under Dr. Basu at the UNT Health Center at Fort Worth, Texas. And that is where the research began.

So ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people don't know about, or at least don't pay that much attention to. But yet, it's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States. In fact, one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. One in 100 will die from it. Chemotherapy, one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today, involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells.

Cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug -- a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the DNA of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves. Sounds great, right? But here's the problem: sometimes patients become resistant to the drug, and then years after they've been declared to be cancer free, they come back. And this time, they no longer respond to the drug. It's a huge problem. In fact, it's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today.

So we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called Cisplatin. And we wanted to figure this out, because if we could figure that out, then we might be able to prevent that resistance from ever happening. So that's what we set out to do. And we thought it had something to do with this protein called AMP kinase, an energy protein. So we ran all of these tests blocking the protein, and we saw this huge shift. I mean, on the slide, you can see that on our sensitive side, these cells that are responding to the drug, when we start blocking the protein, the number of dying cells -- those colored dots -- they're going down. But then on this side, with the same treatment, they're going up -- interesting.

But those are dots on a screen for you; what exactly does that mean? Well basically that means that this protein is changing from the sensitive cell to the resistant cell. And in fact, it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant. And that's huge. In fact, it means that if a patient comes in and they're resistant to this drug, then if we give them a chemical to block this protein, then we can treat them again with the same drug. And that's huge for chemotherapy effectiveness -- possibly for many different types of cancer. So that was my work, and it was my way of reimagining the future for future research, with figuring out exactly what this protein does, but also for the future of chemotherapy effectiveness -- so maybe all grandfathers with cancer have a little bit more time to spend with their grandchildren.

But my work wasn't just about the research. It was about finding my passion. That's why being the grand prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair -- cute picture, right -- it was so exciting to me and it was such an amazing honor. And ever since then, I've gotten to do some pretty cool stuff -- from getting to meet the president to getting to be on this stage to talk to all of you guys.

But like I said, my journey wasn't just about the research, it was about finding my passion, and it was about making my own opportunities when I didn't even know what I was doing. It was about inspiration and determination and never giving up on my interest for science and learning and growing. After all, my story begins with a dried, withered spinach plant and it's only getting better from there.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Naomi Shah: Hi everyone. I'm Naomi Shah, and today I'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients. 1.6 million deaths worldwide. One death every 20 seconds. People spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors. And the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of HIV and tuberculosis combined. Now these statistics had a huge impact on me, but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round. It confused me; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season?

With this question in mind, I started researching, and I soon found that indoor air pollutants were the culprit. As soon as I realized this, I investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients. At first, I just wanted to figure out which of these four pollutants have the largest negative health impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients. But soon after, I developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients. And it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health, because that relationship seems so important.

So with that in mind, I started researching more, I started investigating more, and I became very passionate. Because I realized that if we could find a way to target remediation, we could also find a way to treat asthmatic patients more effectively. For example, volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools, homes and workplaces. They're everywhere. These chemical pollutants are currently not a criteria air pollutant, as defined by the U.S. Clean Air Act. Which is surprising to me, because these chemical pollutants, through my research, I show that they had a very large negative impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients and thus should be regulated.

So today I want to show you my interactive software model that I created. I'm going to show it to you on my laptop. And I have a volunteer subject in the audience today, Julie. And all of Julie's data has been pre-entered into my interactive software model. And this can be used by anyone. So I want you to imagine that you're in Julie's shoes, or someone who's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder. So Julie's going to her doctor's office to get treated for her asthma. And the doctor has her sit down, and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate -- which is essentially her exhalation rate, or the amount or air that she can breathe out in one breath.

So that peak expiratory flow rate, I've entered it up into the interactive software model. I've also entered in her age, her gender and her height. I've assumed that she lives in an average household with average air pollutant levels. So any user can come in here and click on "lung function report" and it'll take them to this report that I created. And this report really drives home the crux of my research.

So what it shows -- if you want to focus on that top graph in the right-hand corner -- it shows Julie's actual peak expiratory flow rate in the yellow bar. This is the measurement that she took in her doctor's office. In the blue bar at the bottom of the graph, it shows what her peak expiratory flow rate, what her exhalation rate or lung health, should be based on her age, gender and height. So the doctor sees this difference between the yellow bar and the blue bar, and he says, "Wow, we need to give her steroids, medication and inhalers."

But I want everyone here to reimagine a world where instead of prescribing steroids, inhalers and medication, the doctor turns to Julie and says, "Why don't you go home and clean out your air filters. Clean out the air ducts in your home, in your workplace, in your school. Stop the use of incense and candles. And if you're remodeling your house, take out all the carpeting and put in hardwood flooring." Because these solutions are natural, these solutions are sustainable, and these solutions are a long-term investments -- long-term investments that we're making for our generation and for future generations. Because these environmental solutions that Julie can make in her home, her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her.

So I'm very passionate about this research and I really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma, more respiratory disorders, as well as more pollutants. But before I end my talk today, I want to leave you with one saying. And that saying is that genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. And that made a huge impact on me when I was doing this research. Because what I feel, is a lot of us think that the environment is at a macro level, that we can't do anything to change our air quality or to change the climate or anything.

But if each one of us takes initiative in our own home, in our own school and in our own workplace, we can make a huge difference in air quality. Because remember, we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors. And air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients, anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general.

So I want you to reimagine a world with better air quality, better quality of life and better quality of living for everyone including our future generations.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Lisa Ling: Right. Can I have Shree and Lauren come up really quickly? Your Google Science Fair champions. Your winners.

(Applause)

Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology

2012-01-14T20:00:00.001-08:00

ABOUT THIS TALK

We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do -- Drew Berry wants to change that. At TEDxSydney he shows his scientifically accurate (and entertaining!) animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells.

ScienceCasts: Re-thinking an Alien World

2012-01-14T01:23:00.000-08:00

How Madrid transformed a highway into an amazing park [video]

2012-01-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

Shares this fascinating video of how Madrid transformed a congested highway into an urban park, and reclaimed a significant river in the process. Here’s how they did it:

MADRID — The rerouting of a major highway has left the capital of Spain with a border of green space.

Between 2003 and 2007, six kilometers (about 3.7 miles) of the highway that encircles Madrid, the M-30, was rerouted and buried underground.

The construction rescued nearby residents from congested auto pollution and left a massive space open for development.

“All of our business really suffered,” said Antonio Gonzalez, the owner of a riverfront convenience store, Alimentación de Galicia. He described the five years his street was under construction as the most difficult time in his store’s 18 years of existence.

The Madrid City Council held a contest for what to do with the new open space, which winds through five neighborhoods considered to be an older and neglected part of the city. The Madrid Rio Project was born.

Over the last four years, one million square meters (or about 3,000 acres) of newly opened space was transformed from the previously industrial Rio Manzanares into a 24/7, well-lit green space stocked with more than 33,000 trees, 63 drinking fountains, and the largest bicycle-accessible area in the city.

“Now it’s improved a bit,” Gonzalez said in his native Spanish. “There are always a lot of people on the street, moving around the river project, cycling, walking, everything.”

The tree-lined western shore, bordered in part by the city’s largest park Casa de Campos, is filled with modern playgrounds, bicycle lanes and jogging paths. The eastern side is a more tree-scattered and open prairie space. The latter side of the Manzinares sees many local, often family-owned businesses — countless small bars, sprinkled with independent convenience, food and hardware stores.

Both sides are residential in nature and have apartment buildings visited by families on the weekends and skateboarders after sundown. The coastline is often crossed by preserved old foot bridges, including the Puente de Segovia from the sixteenth century. When SmartPlanet visits, the Galician bakery is just re-opening its doors after a siesta and young families are strolling along the river and storefronts, enjoying the mild autumn air.

While no one seems to be swimming in the Manzanares yet — in some places it is less that a foot deep and fairly murky brown throughout — the ceasing of construction this summer allowed land-locked city residents to enjoy a handful of small beaches, offering sand and fountains in the same spirit as similar projects in beach-less Berlin and Paris.

The construction of the verdant coastline is finally completed, but the brown, shallow river itself is far from people-friendly. In response, the city has implemented a filtration system that will collect and filter rainwater, where much of the river’s pollution comes from. The project is partly funded by the European Union, which is working to assist local governments in achieving a 35-percent annual reduction in direct discharges. In the interest of efficiency, the scheme will retain 95 percent of the rainfall.

The protection of a bordering river is one of the reasons the Moors settled Madrid back in the ninth century. In modern times, all Madrileños live within a 15-minute walk to green space, making the MadridRio Project just another way to utilize open space in a park-filled city.

Listen to the information on audio (in Spanish).

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation

2012-01-12T20:02:00.000-08:00

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation
By Cory Doctorow at 9:26 pm Tuesday, Dec 27

Here's the video of my keynote last night at the 28C3, the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, entitled "The coming war on general computation."

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race.

The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to "secure" anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society.

Transcript

Introducer:

Anyway, I believe I've killed enough time … so, ladies and gentlemen, a person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow!

[Audience applauds.]

Doctorow:

27.0 Thank you.

32.0 So, when I speak in places where the first language of the nation is not English, there is a disclaimer and an apology, because I'm one of nature's fast talkers. When I was at the United Nations at the World Intellectual Property Organization, I was known as the “scourge” of the simultaneous translation corps; I would stand up and speak, and turn around, and there would be window after window of translator, and every one of them would be doing this [Doctorow facepalms]. [Audience laughs] So in advance, I give you permission when I start talking quickly to do this [Doctorow makes SOS motion] and I will slow down.

74.1 So, tonight's talk – wah, wah, waaah [Doctorow makes 'fail horn' sound, apparently in response to audience making SOS motion; audience laughs]] – tonight's talk is not a copyright talk. I do copyright talks all the time; questions about culture and creativity are interesting enough, but to be honest, I'm quite sick of them. If you want to hear freelancer writers like me bang on about what's happening to the way we earn our living, by all means, go and find one of the many talks I've done on this subject on YouTube. But, tonight, I want to talk about something more important – I want to talk about general purpose computers.

Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding – so astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them: to figure out what they're for, to figure out how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. Which, unfortunately, brings me back to copyright.

133.8 Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the lessons they can teach us about the upcoming fights over the destiny of the general purpose computer are important. In the beginning, we had packaged software, and the attendant industry, and we had sneakernet. So, we had floppy disks in ziplock bags, or in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. And they were eminently susceptible to duplication, and so they were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

172.6 Enter DRM 0.96. They started to introduce physical defects to the disks or started to insist on other physical indicia which the software could check for – dongles, hidden sectors, challenge/response protocols that required that you had physical possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy, and of course these failed, for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, of course, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers, while leaving the people who took the software without paying for it untouched. The legitimate purchasers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they resented the inconvenience of having to transport large manuals when they wanted to run their software. And second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. Typically, the way that happened is some expert who had possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse engineer the software and release cracked versions that quickly became widely circulated. While this kind of expertise and technology sounded highly specialized, it really wasn't; figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing, and routing around the defects in shitty floppy disk media were both core skills for computer programmers, and were even more so in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had BBSes, online services, USENET newsgroups, and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files, or, as the network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

296.4 Which gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Now, information technology makes things efficient, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have. You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for one Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button at one penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, and another price in another, and so on, and so on; the fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament book of Numbers, a kind of tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information and the ways we could charge them for it.

355.5 But none of this would be possible unless we could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a video, or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move music from the iPod onto another device, but how the Hell could you do that once you'd given them the file? In order to do that, to make this work, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

395.8 But as they say on the Internet, “now you have two problems”. You also, now, have to stop the user from saving the file while it's in the clear, and you have to stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, because if the user finds the keys, she'll just decrypt the file and throw away that stupid player app.

416.6 And now you have three problems [audience laughs], because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to render the file in the clear from sharing it with other users, and now you've got *four!* problems, because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too, and now you've got *five!* problems, because now you have to stop users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users what the secrets were!

442.0 That's a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization, which created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media cleartexts from the unlocking programs while they were running, and it created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works and secrets and all with a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap. And with that, illegal copying ended forever [audience laughs very hard, applauds], the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft carriers, “Mission Accomplished”. [audience laughs]

511.0 Well, of course that's not how the story ends because pretty much anyone who understood computers and networks understood that while these laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve; after all, these were laws that made it illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs, they made it illegal to tell people what you found when you looked inside your computer, they made it easy to censor material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had happened; in short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. After all, copying only got easier following the passage of these laws – copying will only ever get easier! Here, 2011, this is as hard as copying will get! Your grandchildren will turn to you around the Christmas table and say “Tell me again, Grandpa, tell me again, Grandma, about when it was hard to copy things in 2011, when you couldn't get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn't even notice it was doing it, tell us again when it was so stupidly hard to copy things back in 2011”. And so, reality asserted itself, and everyone had a good laugh over how funny our misconceptions were when we entered the 21st century, and then a lasting peace was reached with freedom and prosperity for all. [audience chuckles]

593.5 Well, not really. Because, like the nursery rhyme lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, and so on, so must a regulation that has broad general appeal but is disastrous in its implementation beget a new regulation aimed at shoring up the failure of the old one. Now, it's tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless, and just leave it there, which is not a very satisfying place to go, because it's fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another theory about what's happened.

644.4 It's not that regulators don't understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law! M.P.s and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning, and we don't have an M.E.P. from child welfare. (But perhaps we should.) And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, nevertheless, often do manage to pass good rules that make sense, and that's because government relies on heuristics – rules of thumbs about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue.

686.3 But information technology confounds these heuristics – it kicks the crap out of them – in one important way, and this is it. One important test of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose is first, of course, whether it will work, but second of all, whether or not in the course of doing its work, it will have lots of effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up and said “well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can't we do something about this?”, the answer would of course be “no”. Because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an /epidemic/ of bank robberies, even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

762.0 But. If I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I said, “I would like you to pass a law that says it's illegal to put a hands-free phone in a car”, the regulator might say “Yeah, I'd take your point, we'd do that”. And we might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say “well, once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars”. We understand that we can keep cars cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. In fact, there's that heuristic that we can apply here – special-purpose technologies are complex. And you can remove features from them without doing fundamental disfiguring violence to their underlying utility.

816.5 This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network – the PC and the Internet. Because if you think of computer software as a feature, that is a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that's running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature, then this heuristic leads you to think that you could reasonably say, “make me a computer that doesn't run spreadsheets”, and that it would be no more of an attack on computing than “make me a car without a hands-free phone” is an attack on cars. And if you think of protocols and sites as features of the network, then saying “fix the Internet so that it doesn't run BitTorrent”, or “fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves”, then it sounds a lot like “change the sound of busy signals”, or “take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network”, and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.

870.5 Not realizing that this rule of thumb that works for cars and for houses and for every other substantial area of technological regulation fails for the Internet does not make you evil and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world for whom ideas like “Turing complete” and “end-to-end” are meaningless. So, our regulators go off, and they blithely pass these laws, and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are suddenly numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we're not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is to say “that? That infringes copyright.” It fails to attain the actual goal of the regulation; it doesn't stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement – it satisfies the security syllogism: “something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done.” And thus any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset.

931.2 This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence happens in other engineering contexts. I've a friend who was once a senior executive at a big consumer packaged goods company who told me about what happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they'd thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them! Well after the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of “entropy” to the marketing department [audience laughs], they arrived at another solution – “solution” – they'd develop a detergent that used enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, the kind that you get with broken fibers that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. But that was because the detergent was literally digesting your clothes! Using it would literally cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine! This was the opposite of making clothes newer; instead, you were artificially aging your clothes every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed the “solution”, the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your clothes up to date – you actually had to go buy new clothes because the old ones fell apart.

1012.5 So today we have marketing departments who say things like “we don't need computers, we need… appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits”. And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea – just a program that does one specialized task – after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the “appliance” app; we're making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer – it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

[audience applauds loudly] Thanks.

1090.5 Because we don't know how to build the general purpose computer that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some program that we don't like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware – a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge, over the objection of the computer's owner. And so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware.

1118.9 There was, of course, this famous incident, a kind of gift to people who have this hypothesis, in which Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs, and terminated them, and which also hid the rootkit's existence by causing the kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive. But it's not the only example; just recently, Nintendo shipped the 3DS, which opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven't altered the old firmware in any way, and if it detects signs of tampering, it bricks itself.

1158.8 Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it runs signed operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations.

1175.5 And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!

[audience laughs and applauds] Don't applaud me, applaud the MPAA!

1221.5 Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly successful – after all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies! [laughs, scattered applause]

1270.2 But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously, which is why on one hand, Canada has had Parliament after Parliament introduce one stupid copyright bill after another, but on the other hand, Parliament after Parliament has failed to actually vote on the bill. It's why we got SOPA, a bill composed of pure stupid, pieced together molecule-by-molecule, into a kind of “Stupidite 250”, which is normally only found in the heart of newborn star, and it's why these rushed-through SOPA hearings had to be adjourned midway through the Christmas break, so that lawmakers could get into a real vicious nationally-infamous debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance. It's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gulled time and again into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copyright proposals because when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts; they send health experts, not copyright experts; they send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone! [applause]

1350.3 Canada's Parliament didn't vote on its copyright bills because, of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation's fisheries, and thousand other issues! The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, that copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish, and not a war. Why would other sectors nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the world we live in today is /made/ of computers. We don't have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don't have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers [laughter]; a 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it's a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software.

1418.9 The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create. Think of radio for a minute. The entire basis for radio regulation up until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor, and turn it into something that interferes with air traffic control signals. But powerful software-defined radios can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher to air traffic controller just by loading and executing different software, which is why the first time the American telecoms regulator (the FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, they asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in trusted computing machines. Ultimately, whether every PC should be locked, so that the programs they run are strictly regulated by central authorities.

1477.9 And even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this was the year in which we saw the debut of open sourced shape files for converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their *minds* over people in their jurisdiction printing out sex toys. [guffaw from audience] The trajectory of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances, from solid state meth labs, to ceramic knives.

1516.0 And it doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really… *really*… important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch… literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place – “can't you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

1576.3 And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.

1627.8 As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I get into a car – a computer I put my body into – with my hearing aid – a computer I put inside my body – I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. [vigorous applause from audience] Thank you.

1669.4 Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer's camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been photographing students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSes on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.

1705.0 Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won't be able to fight on without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on – we have a organizations that fight for them – EFF, Bits of Freedom, EDRi, CCC, Netzpolitik, La Quadrature du Net, and all the others, who are thankfully, too numerous to name here – we may yet win the battle, and secure the ammunition we'll need for the war.

1778.9 Thank you.

[sustained applause]

SWITL

2012-01-12T19:54:00.000-08:00

EV Mini Sport: Mini Electric Sports Car From Japan (Video)

2012-01-12T19:03:00.000-08:00

LED light bulbs, just how efficient are they?

2012-01-12T17:43:00.001-08:00

CloudMagic - Email and Twitter Search

2012-01-11T21:41:00.000-08:00

The MakerBot Replicator™!

2012-01-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

In this video Bre Pettis, CEO and Co-founder of Makerbot Industries, reveals the newest generation of MakerBots - The Replicator!

Up Close With The Lytro

2012-01-11T19:44:00.000-08:00

The Lytro. VP of Marketing Kira Wampler ran us through its paces as we learned how the camera grabs not only the color and intensity but the direction of light coming in from a scene.

Soil science produces better tasting wine

2012-01-11T19:19:00.000-08:00

Radically rethinking agriculture with genetic engineering

2012-01-11T19:18:00.001-08:00

Creating a smarter food label

2012-01-11T19:15:00.000-08:00

Graphic designer Renee Walker says current food labels can be confusing and should instead focus on ingredients. She shows SmartPlanet how she created a new design based on blocks of color.

BitTorrent on your TV!

2012-01-10T17:42:00.001-08:00

http://download.cnet.com/BitTorrent/3000-2196_4-10211384.html

MR. DAISEY AND THE APPLE FACTORY

2012-01-10T05:52:00.000-08:00

WEVideo

2012-01-10T00:10:00.000-08:00

Samsung’s Live Press Conference At CES International 2012

2012-01-09T18:21:00.000-08:00

A.J. Jacobs: How healthy living nearly killed me

2012-01-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement. And I've done this in three parts. So first I started with the mind. And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z -- or, more precisely, from "a-ak" to "Zywiec." And here's a little image of that. And this was an amazing year. It was really a fascinating journey. It was painful at times, especially for those around me. My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. So it had its downsides.

But after that, I decided to work on the spirit. As I mentioned last year, I grew up with no religion at all. I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. (Laughter) Not really. But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it. So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible. And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard -- because Leviticus says you cannot shave. So this is what I looked like by the end. Thank you for that reaction. (Laughter) I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski. I got both of them. So there was the topiary there. And there's the sheep.

Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be, the healthiest person alive. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years. And I just finished a couple of months ago. And I have to say, thank God. Because living so healthily was killing me. (Laughter) It was so overwhelming, because the amount of things you have to do, it's just mind-boggling. I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers. And they were telling me all the things I had to do. I had to eat right, exercise, meditate, pet dogs, because that lowers the blood pressure. I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book. I had to put on sunscreen. This was no small feat, because if you listen to dermatologists, they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen. And you have to reapply it every two to four hours. So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen. I was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year. There was the washing of hands. I had to do that properly. And my immunologist told me that I should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house, because those are just orgies of germs. So that took a lot of time.

I also tried to be the safest person I could be, because that's a part of health. I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council. They started a public campaign that says, "A walking helmet is a good helmet." So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking, but also for walking around. And you can see there they're shopping with their helmets. (Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that. Now it's a little extreme, I admit. But if you think about this, this is actually -- the "Freakonomics" authors wrote about this -- that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving. So something to think about tonight if you've had a couple.

So I finished, and it was a success in a sense. All of the markers went in the right direction. My cholesterol went down, I lost weight, my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant. So that was nice. And it was successful overall. But I also learned that I was too healthy, and that was unhealthy. I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family. And as Dan Buettner can tell you, having a strong social network is so crucial to our health.

So I finished. And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over. I went to the dark side, and I just indulged myself. It was like something out of Caligula. (Laughter) Without the sex part. Because I have three young kids, so that wasn't happening. But the over-eating and over-drinking, definitely. And I finally have stabilized. So now I'm back to adopting many -- not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore -- but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year. It was really a life-changing project. And I, of course, don't have time to go into all of them. Let me just tell you two really quickly.

The first is -- and this was surprising to me; I didn't expect this to come out -- but I live a much quieter life now. Because we live in such a noisy world. There's trains and planes and cars and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy. (Laughter) And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard -- not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does, but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response. A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage. The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year. And it was done in Europe. And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution. So they think it's actually very deadly.

And by the way, it's also terrible for your brain. It really impairs cognition. And our Founding Fathers knew about this. When they wrote the Constitution, they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate. So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist. So as a patriot, I felt it was important to -- I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way.

And the second point I want to make, the final point, is that -- and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED -- that joy is so important to your health, that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them. And just to give you one instance of this: food. The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what's the most pleasurable. But I think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food. To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel. So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes -- throw in some sunflower seeds. And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos. (Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person.

So that is it. The book about it comes out in April. It's called "Drop Dead Healthy." And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour. That's my greatest hope.

So thank you very much.

(Applause)

Sebastian Wernicke: 1000 TEDTalks, 6 words

2012-01-06T19:21:00.001-08:00

I am a statistician by training, so for my TED talk I did a tongue-in-cheek data analysis of about 600 other TED talks. I found that the most loved talks typically evoke emotion—for example, through using words like “happiness,” “the brain,” and “coffee.” So you might want to try talking about “how drinking coffee spreads happiness in the brain.” Also, don’t talk about oxygen, aircraft, or computers—statistically, technical terms are associated with less popular talks. These also cite the New York Times much more than the best-rated ones. The more successful speakers tend to use fewer slides and more props. About half of the most popular TED talks don’t even use slides at all. And for some reason, talks that people rank as “fascinating” employ a lot of purple, and ones that are “ingenious” emphasize the color green. It is statistically significant, but I haven’t found anyone who can explain that to me.

The maximum time you are given for a TED talk is 18 minutes. This really forces the speakers to make just one point, and get to it immediately. You don’t have any time for diversions. When you prepare your talk, there are always certain phrases or slides that you think are incredible. Then you start showing them to other people, and they tell you different. You have to be really brutal about cutting them out. For my TED talk, there was tons of stuff I had to throw out. It was the right thing to do, but I’m still sad for some of that material.

At your typical conference, people there are basically forced to endure the talks—it’s happening at you. Looking at the TED speakers, many of them talk about very serious or fascinating topics, yet they don’t flaunt their ego. At TED, it’s more about contributing to the conference.

Wernicke, a consultant at Oliver Wyman, created the website TEDPad.

If you go on the TED website, you can currently find there over a full week of TEDTalk videos, over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings. And that's a huge amount of data. And it got me wondering: If you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis, could you reverse engineer a TEDTalk? Could you create the ultimate TEDTalk? (Laughter) (Applause) And also, could you create the worst possible TEDTalk that they would still let you get away with?

To find this out, I looked at three things: I looked at the topic that you should choose, I looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage. Now, with the topic: There's a whole range of topics you can choose, but you should choose wisely, because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk. Now, to make this more concrete, let's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite TEDTalks and in the least favorite TEDTalks. So if you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go. (Laughter) (Applause) Whereas, if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen, girls, aircraft -- actually, I would like to hear that talk, (Laughter) but statistics say it's not so good. Oh, well. If you generalize this, the most favorite TEDTalks are those that feature topics we can connect with, both easily and deeply, such as happiness, our own body, food, emotions. And the more technical topics, such as architecture, materials and, strangely enough, men, those are not good topics to talk about.

How should you deliver your talk? TED is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock, so they're going to hate me for revealing this, because, actually, you should talk as long as they will let you. (Laughter) Because the most favorite TEDTalks are, on average, over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones. And this holds true for all ranking lists on TED.com except if you want to have a talk that's beautiful, inspiring or funny. Then, you should be brief. (Laughter) But other than that, talk until they drag you off the stage.

(Laughter)

Now, while ... (Applause) While you're pushing the clock, there's a few rules to obey. I found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite TEDTalks as opposed to the least favorite TEDTalks. I'll give you three examples. First of all, I must, as a speaker, provide a service to the audience and talk about what I will give you, instead of saying what I can't have. Secondly, it's imperative that you do not cite The New York Times. (Laughter) And finally, it's okay for the speaker -- that's the good news -- to fake intellectual capacity. If I don't understand something, I can just say, "etc., etc." You'll all stay with me. It's perfectly fine. (Applause)

Now, let's go to the visuals. The most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker. And analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite TED speakers, you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average, make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average TED speaker. Slides are okay, though you might consider going for props. And now the most important thing, that is the mood onstage. Color plays a very important role. Color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website. (Applause) For example, fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color, (Laughter) much more than the average TEDTalk. Ingenious TEDTalks, much more this green color, etc., et. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, personally, I think I'm not the first one who has done this analysis, but I'll leave this to your good judgment.

So, now it's time to put it all together and design the ultimate TEDTalk. Now, since this is TEDActive, and I learned from my analysis that I should actually give you something, I will not impose the ultimate or worst TEDTalk on you, but rather give you a tool to create your own. And I call this tool the TEDPad. (Laughter) And the TEDPad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected, highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own TEDTalk. You only have to make one decision, and that is: Are you going to use the white version for very good TEDTalks, about creativity, human genius? Or are you going to go with a black version, which will allow you to create really bad TEDTalks, mostly about blogs, politics and stuff? So, download it and have fun with it.

Now I hope you enjoy the session. I hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible TEDTalks. And I hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this, which I really want to see.

Thank you very much.

(Applause) Thanks.

若你上 TED 的網站，你會看到超過一整星期的 TEDTalk 影片，超過13億字的字幕。還有百萬以上的使用者評比，資料量很龐大。所以我在想，如果你把這些資料進行統計分析，你可不可能反向製作出一個 TEDTalk？還是你可以創造出一個「最棒的」TEDTalk？（掌聲）還是說，你可以製作出一個最爛的 TEDTalk，而且還可以全身而退？

為了找到解答，我選擇三個層面來分析。我先看該選什麼當做演說的標題，再來看看在台上該怎麼表達，以及該使用什麼視覺輔助。先來說標題，你可以選的標題範圍很廣，但你應該謹慎地選擇，因為你所選定的標題，將會嚴重影響聽眾對你演說的反應。為了讓你更明白一點，讓我們先來看看篩選出來的前十名最佳字句，這是統計分析的結果，是分別從聽眾最喜愛的 TEDTalk，和聽眾最不喜愛的 TEDTalk 中所篩選出來的。所以，如果你到這兒來，發表一個主題是「法國咖啡如何在我們的大腦裡傳播快樂」的演說，那就對了！（掌聲）但是，如果你的主題是敘述你所從事的專案計畫，內容與氧氣、女孩、飛機等字眼有關，我個人其實還滿想聽這種演說的，但統計數據卻告訴我們這不夠吸引人。嗯, 好。如果我們廣泛地推論，最受歡迎的 TEDTalk 所談論的主題，是聽眾容易與之產生共鳴的，既簡單而又深入，像是快樂、我們的身體、食物和情緒等。而比較技術性的主題，像是建築、材料、還有 – 這非常的奇怪 – 男人，這些就不是那麼受歡迎的主題。

該怎麼進行演說呢？ TED 最負盛名的是對演說者時間的嚴格掌控，所以他們會很討厭我告訴你們這一點，因為根據統計，你應該在他們允取你的時間範圍內，說得愈長愈好，因為最受歡迎的 TEDTalk，平均比最不受歡迎的演說，時間長上一半。這是 TED.com 的排行榜告訴我們的事實，除非你的演說是優美的、具啟發性的或是有趣的，那麼，你應該簡潔些。不然的話，你應該一直說到他們要把你拖下台為止。

（笑聲）

嗯，好.. （掌聲）在你爭取更多演說時間的同時，還有幾項規則要遵守。我會發現這些規則，是因為我統計了演說中所出現的辭句，看看哪些在最受歡迎的 TEDTalk 中較常出現，哪些又在最不受歡迎的 TEDTalk 中出現。我會舉三個例子說明。首先，身為一個演說者，我必須提供我所知道的資訊給聽眾，而不是告訴聽眾我不知道什麼。第二，要記住不要引用紐約時報的報導。（笑聲）最後，我要告訴你們一個好消息，要學會不懂裝懂。如果不瞭解某件事，就用「諸如此類...」來矇混過去。你們都知道我在說什麼吧! 這樣很好啊！（掌聲）

現在我們來談談視覺輔助。在講台上最醒目的視覺標的應該就是演說者了。統計分析顯示，若你想成為最受歡迎的 TED 演說者，你應該把頭髮留得比一般人長一點，記得戴上眼鏡，然後穿得比一般 TED 演說者再正式一點，投影片可以用，但如果能有道具輔助會更好。然而，最重要的事是講台上的氣氛。色彩佔有很重要的地位，你選用的色彩會決定你在網路上的評價（掌聲）舉例來說，被評價為「引人入勝」的 TEDTalk 都大量使用這種藍色，使用頻率比一般的 TEDTalk 高得多。被評價為「機智」的演說多是這種綠色，諸如此類... （掌聲）我個人覺得，我應該不是第一個做這種分析的人，但這留給你們自己判斷吧！

現在該是我們把所有東西拼湊在一起製作出最棒的 TEDTalk 的時候了。由於這是 TEDActive，從我研究的統計資料裡，我知道我該給你們一些實際的東西，我不會強迫你們做出最棒的或是最爛的 TEDTalk，但我會給你們一套工具讓你們製作出自己的演說。我把這個工具命名為 TED Pad。（笑聲） TED Pad 內含有 100 組精選語句，你可以善加組合，製作出你自己的 TEDTalk。你所要做的決定只有一個，那就是：你是要使用白色的版本來製作出優質的 TEDTalk，內容關於創造力、人類的才華？還是你想要選用黑色的版本？那讓你可以製作出超爛的 TEDTalk，內容大部分涵蓋部落格還有政治這些玩意兒。現在就下載，好好玩一玩吧！

希望你們喜歡我的演說。也希望你們喜歡自己製作出來的最棒及最爛的 TEDTalk。也希望你們之中有人會受到啟發，明年可以站在台上，我真的很期待你們的演說。

謝謝你們。

（掌聲）

Paddy Ashdown: The global power shift

2012-01-06T15:35:00.000-08:00

A Youngster's Bright Idea Is Something New Under the Sun

2012-01-05T19:56:00.000-08:00

By SOPHIA HOLLANDER

NORTHPORT, N.Y.—A new way of collecting solar energy has polarized scientists around the world and ignited fierce debate on the Internet, where the innovator in question has been called everything from an alien to the agent of a global conspiracy.

13-year-old Aidan Dwyer developed a new way to collect solar energy, and along the way sparked a fierce debate among scholars and scientists. He joins the News Hub to tell his story. Photo: Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal

Maybe a better title would be an intellectual Hannah Montana. That's because the scientist, Aidan Dwyer, is 13 years old.

This past summer, Aidan won a national science competition with what seemed to be a bright idea: His research appeared to show that solar panels arrayed like the leaves on a tree collect sunlight more efficiently than traditional setups.

Enlarge Image

Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
Aidan with his tree-branch mode

Many people on the Web called the Long Island teenager a "genius" who had achieved a true "breakthrough" in solar power. Others praised him for proving that nature's own designs are superior to man's.

But there was one little problem: To prove his hypothesis, Aidan had measured the wrong thing.

As readers figured out the mistake, the Internet went supernova. Commenters and bloggers attacked Aidan with vitriol usually saved for political enemies and the Kardashians. Blogs decried his experiment as "bad science" and "impossible nonsense." Someone called him "an alien—a cool one, though."

Aidan and his family watched in amazement as strangers around the world debated his intelligence and abilities, as well as his opinion of subjects generally beyond the scope of a suburban boy his age: politics, evolution and the state of modern society, for example.

He got some constructive advice, said Aidan's mother, Maureen. "Then there were people who were just—"

"Haters," Aidan chimed in with a grin.

The legitimacy of his original idea remains unsettled, though scientists are skeptical. Aidan is now revamping his experiment as he maneuvers around homework, sleepovers and the odd curfew violation.

But there is no disputing that he has become a star. Many in the scientific community are championing his intellectual curiosity and graceful ability to weather an Internet firestorm, making him a hot speaker at events around the world.

"It looks like there is some validity to what he's come up with. But even if there wasn't any validity, I wanted to give this young man the opportunity to sort of say, 'Here's what I learned and here's what I did,'" said Andrew Zolli, the executive director of PopTech, a nonprofit organization focused on innovation.

AIDAN DWYER

In October, Aidan got a standing ovation from more than 500 people at PopTech's annual innovation conference in Maine after discussing his work and touching on the controversy.

He has been invited to address 300 undergraduate engineering students at New York University in the spring. He has filed a provisional patent application for his research. He has had, and declined, friend requests on Facebook from venture capitalists.

After viewing one of his talks on YouTube, organizers of World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi invited Aidan to participate—and offered to fly his family over, too. He is scheduled to speak at the event's opening ceremony this month.

"Our mandate is to look for great minds, talents, technology innovations around the world," said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the CEO of Masdar, a company owned by the Abu Dhabi government that founded and hosts the conference. "We need thousands of Aidans to help transform the way we produce and consume energy."

On a recent afternoon, Aidan and his parents admitted they were somewhat baffled by the attention for a project that began two years ago on a winter hiking trip through the Catskill Mountains.

Aidan, then 11, stared at the tree branches denuded of leaves and noticed they looked alike; he wondered why. Back home, his parents encouraged him to research the subject. Google searches uncovered that a mathematical concept called the Fibonacci number sequence underlies the structure of tree branches.

His parents had been hoping to install solar panels on their Long Island house, but their yard was too small and their roof wasn't suitable. There was, however, enough room for a tree. Perhaps, Aidan postulated, trees arranged their branches to improve the collection of sunlight. If he used the Fibonacci sequence to imitate that design with solar panels replacing leaves, maybe the structure could fit his family's limited space, look pretty—and power the house.

He did chores to earn the money to buy about $75 worth of materials. With help from his father—and after many mistakes—Aidan ended up with two models: a traditional flat-panel array and a tree-shaped solar collector designed to mimic the branch sequence of an oak tree. Over the course of months he compared measurements. To his delight, the tree structure's numbers were higher.

Exuberantly, he submitted the results to the Young Naturalist Awards, a national contest run by the American Museum of Natural History. Of 700 entries, his was picked as one of 12 winners.

"Then," Aidan said with a slight smile, "things got out of hand."

As the report went viral, attacked and championed in hundreds of comments, museum officials became worried. "We do think it's really important that information that we put forth is scientifically accurate," said Rosamond Kinzler, senior director of science education at the museum. They were also concerned for Aidan, she said.

Critics had a point: Aidan had recorded voltage, when he needed to calculate power. It is a serious flaw, explained Jan Kleissl, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

Imagine a water pipe, he said. Voltage is equivalent to water pressure. Current is the size of the pipe. Power is equal to the flow of water out of the pipe, which depends on both variables.

Dr. Kleissl praised Aidan's work, but added that even if Aidan had measured the right variables, "I'm certain that he will not find that his arrangement is better," he said. "I think it's a romantic ideal that nature has many lessons for us, and there are a few cases where this is true, but in the majority of cases we could teach nature, in a way, how to be better, faster."

On a recent afternoon, Aidan showed a visitor his newest model, tweaked to respond to his critics: a towering seven-foot tree form adorned with solar panels and painted green. He is now measuring current and power. So far, he said, the tree continues to outperform the traditional panel. "I'm thinking that it could actually change the world."

Next gen UI: Learning tools and toys for the digital age

2012-01-05T18:44:00.001-08:00

What if you no longer needed a screen, mouse, and keyboard to use a computer? Siftables creator, David Merrill, shows us how individual, cookie cutter-sized tiles that use motion sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication will teach users a new way to learn.

David Merrill: My name's David Merrill and I'm a principal at Taco Lab based in San Francisco and we build next generation user interfaces.

Background Music My background is in cognitive science and computer science and I've been interested for a long time in how our interactions with computers can be more natural and more efficient and more delightful. My colleague Jeevan Kalanithi and I were at the MIT Media Lab as graduate students, and we started working on a new physical interface called Siftables. Siftables is one example of what I think will be a new ecosystem of what I'm calling hand tools for the digital age, ways to interact with computation that's very different than the mouse and keyboard we use today.

Background Music We have built Siftables so that each tile is a little, self-contained interactive computer with a screen on top, the ability to sense its neighbors and the ability to communicate wirelessly. So you can represent a problem, say a math equation, on the screens of the Siftables with each screen showing one piece of the equation. And then by putting them together, it can compute the results of the equation showing you the answer. The way we use computers now, or even our mobile phones and other mobile devices is usually one person per display, one person per piece of technology. But Siftables is an example of what we've been calling cookie-scale computing where you've got smaller pieces of computation, the size of cookies, and you're actually interacting with a group of them together. And that's a version of computing that we haven't really seen yet, a way of interacting with computers that we think has a lot of potential to increase the ease with which we can manipulate digital information. I think our interfaces for computers in the future are going to take a lot of different forms that are not just gonna be the mouse and keyboard. And so that's really what I'm excited about is to see the ways that we can more seamlessly connect our brain and our intentions to what we can create with the computer, because it's a wonderful tool. It's got a lot of potential, but we're not yet leveraging it in the way that we could. That's the way that I want to interact with computers in the future, is for there to be a seamless translation from a thought that I have in my head to something that I've created with the machine.