Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate

One thing the world needs, one thing this country desperately needs is a better way of conducting our political debates. We need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument. (Applause) If you think about the arguments we have, most of the time it's shouting matches on cable television, ideological food fights on the floor of Congress. I have a suggestion. Look at all the arguments we have these days over health care, over bonuses and bailouts on Wall Street, over the gap between rich and poor, over affirmative action and same-sex marriage. Lying just beneath the surface of those arguments, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics.

So what I would like to do today is have something of a discussion. First, let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality, give you a very short lecture on Aristotle of ancient Athens, Aristotle's theory of justice, and then have a discussion here to see whether Aristotle's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today. So, are you ready for the lecture? According to Aristotle justice means giving people what they deserve. That's it; that's the lecture.

(Laughter)

Now, you may say, well, that's obvious enough. The real questions begin when it comes to arguing about who deserves what and why. Take the example of flutes. Suppose we're distributing flutes. Who should get the best ones? Let's see what people -- What would you say? Who should get the best flute? You can just call it out.

(Audience: Random.)

Michael Sandel: At random. You would do it by lottery. Or by the first person to rush into the hall to get them. Who else?

(Audience: The best flute players.)

MS: The best flute players. (Audience: The worst flute players.)

MS: The worst flute players. How many say the best flute players? Why? Actually, that was Aristotle's answer too.

(Laughter)

But here's a harder question. Why do you think, those of you who voted this way, that the best flutes should go to the best flute players?

Peter: The greatest benefit to all.

MS: The greatest benefit to all. We'll hear better music if the best flutes should go to the best flute players. That's Peter? (Audience: Peter.)

MS: All right. Well, it's a good reason. We'll all be better off if good music is played rather than terrible music. But Peter, Aristotle doesn't agree with you that that's the reason. That's all right. Aristotle had a different reason for saying the best flutes should go to the best flute players. He said, that's what flutes are for -- to be played well. He says that to reason about just distribution of a thing, we have to reason about, and sometimes argue about, the purpose of the thing, or the social activity, in this case, musical performance. And the point, the essential nature, of musical performance is to produce excellent music. It'll be a happy byproduct that we'll all benefit. But when we think about justice, Aristotle says, what we really need to think about is the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing. One of the reasons that the best flute players should get the best flutes is that musical performance is not only to make the rest of us happy, but to honor and recognize the excellence of the best musicians.

Now, flutes may seem ... the distribution of flutes may seem a trivial case. Let's take a contemporary example of the dispute about justice. It had to do with golf. Casey Martin -- a few years ago, Casey Martin -- did any of you hear about him? He was a very good golfer, but he had a disability. he had a bad leg, a circulatory problem, that made it very painful for him to walk the course. In fact, it carried risk of injury. He asked the PGA, the Professional Golfers' Association, for permission to use a golf cart in the PGA tournaments. They said, "No. Now that would give you an unfair advantage." He sued, and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, believe it or not, the case over the golf cart. Because the law says that the disabled must be accommodated, provided the accommodation does not change the essential nature of the activity. He says, "I'm a great golfer. I want to compete. But I need a golf cart to get from one hole to the next."

Suppose you were on the Supreme Court. Suppose you were deciding the justice of this case. How many here would say that Casey Martin does have a right to use a golf cart? And how many say, no, he doesn't? All right, let's take a poll, show of hands. How many would rule in favor of Casey Martin? And how many would not? How many would say he doesn't? All right, we have a good division of opinion here. Someone who would not grant Casey Martin the right to a golf cart, what would be your reason? Raise your hand, and we'll try to get you a microphone. What would be your reason?

(Audience: It'd be an unfair advantage.)

MS: It would be an unfair advantage if he gets to ride in a golf cart. All right, those of you, I imagine most of you who would not give him the golf cart worry about an unfair advantage. What about those of you who say he should be given a golf cart? How would you answer the objection? Yes, all right.

Audience: The cart's not part of the game.

MS: What's your name? (Audience: Charlie.)

MS: Charlie says -- We'll get Charlie a microphone in case someone wants to reply. Tell us, Charlie, why would you say he should be able to use a golf cart?

Charlie: The cart's not part of the game.

MS: But what about walking from hole to hole?

Charlie: It doesn't matter; it's not part of the game.

MS: Walking the course is not part of the game of golf?

Charlie: Not in my book, it isn't.

MS: All right. Stay there, Charlie.

(Laughter)

Who has an answer for Charlie? All right, who has an answer for Charlie? What would you say?

Audience: The endurance element is a very important part of the game, walking all those holes.

MS: Walking all those holes? That's part of the game of golf? (Audience: Absolutely.)

MS: What's your name? (Audience: Warren.)

MS: Warren. Charlie, what do you say to Warren?

Charley: I'll stick to my original thesis.

(Laughter)

MS: Warren, are you a golfer?

Warren: I am not a golfer.

Charley: And I am. (MS: Okay.) (Laughter)

(Applause)

You know, it's interesting. In the case, in the lower court, they brought in golfing greats to testify on this very issue. Is walking the course essential to the game? And they brought in Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. And what do you suppose they all said? Yes. They agreed with Warren. They said, yes, walking the course is strenuous physical exercise. The fatigue factor is an important part of golf. And so it would change the fundamental nature of the game to give him the golf cart. Now, notice, something interesting -- Well, I should tell you about the Supreme Court first.

The Supreme Court decided. What do you suppose they said? They said yes, that Casey Martin must be provided a golf cart. Seven to two, they ruled. What was interesting about their ruling and about the discussion we've just had is that the discussion about the right, the justice, of the matter depended on figuring out what is the essential nature of golf. And the Supreme Court justices wrestled with that question. And Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, said he had read all about the history of golf, and the essential point of the game is to get very small ball from one place into a hole in as few strokes as possible, and that walking was not essential, but incidental.

Now, there were two dissenters, one of whom was Justice Scalia. He wouldn't have granted the cart, and he had a very interesting dissent. It's interesting because he rejected the Aristotelian premise underlying the majority's opinion. He said it's not possible to determine the essential nature of a game like golf. Here's how he put it. "To say that something is essential is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement, (Laughter) that is, what distinguishes games from productive activity, (Laughter) it is quite impossible to say that any of a game's arbitrary rules is essential."

So there you have Justice Scalia taking on the Aristotelian premise of the majority's opinion. Justice Scalia's opinion is questionable for two reasons. First, no real sports fan would talk that way. (Laughter) If we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary, rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring, we wouldn't care about the outcome of the game. It's also objectionable on a second ground. On the face of it, it seemed to be -- this debate about the golf cart -- an argument about fairness, what's an unfair advantage. But if fairness were the only thing at stake, there would have been an easy and obvious solution. What would it be? (Audience: Let everyone use the cart.) Let everyone ride in a golf cart if they want to. Then the fairness objection goes away.

But letting everyone ride in a cart would have been, I suspect, more anathema to the golfing greats and to the PGA, even than making an exception for Casey Martin. Why? Because what was at stake in the dispute over the golf cart was not only the essential nature of golf, but, relatedly, the question, what abilities are worthy of honor and recognition as athletic talents? Let me put the point as delicately as possible: Golfers are a little sensitive about the athletic status of their game. (Laughter) After all, there's no running or jumping, and the ball stands still. (Laughter) So if golfing is the kind of game that can be played while riding around in a golf cart, it would be hard to confer on the golfing greats the status that we confer, the honor and recognition that goes to truly great athletes. That illustrates that with golf, as with flutes, it's hard to decide the question of what justice requires, without grappling with the question "What is the essential nature of the activity in question, and what qualities, what excellences connected with that activity, are worthy of honor and recognition?"

Let's take a final example that's prominent in contemporary political debate: same-sex marriage. There are those who favor state recognition only of traditional marriage between one man and one woman, and there are those who favor state recognition of same-sex marriage. How many here favor the first policy: the state should recognize traditional marriage only? And how many favor the second, same-sex marriage? Now, put it this way, what ways of thinking about justice and morality underlie the arguments we have over marriage? The opponents of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage, fundamentally, is procreation, and that's what's worthy of honoring and recognizing and encouraging. And the defenders of same-sex marriage say no, procreation is not the only purpose of marriage. What about a lifelong, mutual, loving commitment? That's really what marriage is about. So with flutes, with golf carts, and even with a fiercely contested question like same-sex marriage, Aristotle has a point. Very hard to argue about justice without first arguing about the purpose of social institutions and about what qualities are worthy of honor and recognition.

So let's step back from these cases and see how they shed light on the way we might improve, elevate, the terms of political discourse in the United States, and for that matter, around the world. There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion. So better to shy away from, to ignore, the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life. It seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite, that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter. That, it seems to me, is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. Chris. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Anderson: From flutes to golf courses to same-sex marriage. That was a genius link. Now look, you're a pioneer of open education. Your lecture series was one of the first to do it big. What's your vision for the next phase of this?

MS: Well, I think that it is possible. In the classroom, we have arguments on some of the most fiercely held moral convictions that students have about big public questions. And I think we can do that in public life more generally. And so my real dream would be to take the public television series that we've created of the course -- it's available now, online, free for everyone anywhere in the world -- and to see whether we can partner with institutions, at universities in China, in India, in Africa, around the world, to try to promote civic education and also a richer kind of democratic debate.

CA: So you picture, at some point, live, in real time, you could have this kind of conversation, inviting questions, but with people from China and India joining in?

MS: Right. We did a little bit of it here with 1,500 people in Long Beach, and we do it in a classroom at Harvard with about 1,000 students. Wouldn't it be interesting to take this way of thinking and arguing, engaging seriously with big moral questions, exploring cultural differences and connect through a live video hookup, students in Beijing and Mumbai and in Cambridge, Massachusetts and create a global classroom. That's what I would love to do.

(Applause)

CA: So, I would imagine that there are a lot of people who would love to join you in that endeavor. Michael Sandel. Thank you so much. (MS: Thanks so much.)


這個世界所必要的一件東西 這國家所急需的 是一個更好的 論辯政治的方式 我們需要重新發現 早已失傳的民主論辯的技藝 （掌聲） 想想我們現今的主要辯論， 大多數時間，它們都是 有線電視頻道上的叫囂比賽 國會上演的意識形態 大胃王比賽 我有一個建議 看看近來 我們所有的這些 關於健保的辯論、 看看關於華爾街的獎金和緊急援助、 關於貧富差距、 看看關於防止種族與性別歧視的 積極行動和同性婚姻 在這些爭論之下 潛藏著 一種鼓噪的欲望湧向四方， 這些是 倫理哲學上的大問題 涉及正義的大問題 但我們卻很少 表達、維護、 與爭論 這些藏於我們政治生活中的倫理議題

所以，今天我要做的是 討論一些事 首先，讓我引述 一位著名哲學家的話 他曾寫過這些關於 正義與道德的問題， 我要談一段在舊時雅典 古老雅典時代的亞理斯多德 的正義論 接著會後討論 看看亞理斯多德的想法 是否在實際上， 告訴了我們 思考與辯論 今日問題的方法 所以，你們準備好這堂課了嗎？ 根據亞理斯多德 正義 意指 給予人們他們所應得的 意思就是，這堂課

（笑聲）

現在，你們也許會說，嗯，那是再明白不過的道理 真正的問題開始於 當人們爭論 誰應該得到什麽、以及爲什麽 以長笛為例 假設我們分配長笛 誰應得到那最好的呢? 讓我們看看有誰... 你認為呢？ 誰應該得到最好的？ 你可以直接說

（觀眾：隨機分配）

Michael Sandel：隨機選取，你們可以透過抽籤 或者先到先拿 哪一種？

（觀眾：最優秀的長笛吹奏者）

Michael Sandel：最優秀的長笛樂手（觀眾：最糟的長笛樂手）

Michael Sandel：最糟的長笛樂手 有多少人贊同 最優秀的長笛樂手 爲什麽？ 事實上，那也是亞理斯多德的答案

（笑聲）

但這裡有個更難的問題 爲什麽你們認為 你們這些贊成此法的人 最好的長笛 應該給予最優秀的長笛樂手呢？

Peter：這賦予所有人最大的利益

Michael Sandel：賦予所有人最大利益 我們得以聆聽好音樂 如果把最好的長笛 給予最優秀的長笛樂手 那是 Peter？（觀眾：Peter）

Michael Sandel：好的。 嗯，這是好理由 我們所有人都會過得比較好，假使他演奏好音樂的話 而不是難聽的音樂 但是，Peter 亞理斯多德並不同意 你所說的是合理的 沒關係 亞理斯多德有不同的理由 當他提到 最好的長笛應該給予最優秀的長笛樂手 他說 那是長笛存在的目的 就是要被拿來好好演奏 他說 推論一件事物 是否公平地分配 我們必須提出、 並且有時候要辯論 這東西的目的何在 或 這個社會活動的目的何在 在這個案例中，是音樂表演， 在這一點上，音樂表演的 主要本質 是爲了產生絕佳的音樂 它會營造一個歡樂的副產品 使我們所有人皆獲得益處 但，當我們思考正義時 亞理斯多德說 我們真正必須思考的問題是 這個活動的主要本質 以及那值得尊重、欣賞、 、與承認的品質 關於最好的長笛應該給予最優秀的長笛樂手 的其中一個理由是 音樂表演 並不只是爲了要使我們感到愉快而已， 它還得使那 最傑出的音樂家 獲得殊榮 並認可其傑出表現

現在，分配長笛似乎... 看起來是個平凡的例子 讓我們舉一個關於分配正義的 當代例子 這與高爾夫有關 幾年前，Casey Martin Casey Martin 有人聽過他嗎？ 他是一個非常好的高爾夫球手 但他是殘障人士 他的腳有問題，循環系統出了問題 這使得他在走路時 奇痛無比 事實上，這也有運動傷害的危險 他問 PGA 美國職業高爾夫球協會 是否可以在比賽中 使用高爾夫球車 他們說：「不， 那會讓你得到不公平的優勢。」 他一狀告上法院 他的案子一路上到 美國最高法院，你們相信嗎 這麼一件關於高爾夫球車的訴訟 因為法律上說 我們必須考慮到殘障人士 為他們提供妥善的輔助設施 提供妥善的殘障設施 並不會 改變比賽 或活動的本質 他說：「我是一位優秀的高爾夫球選手 我要參加比賽 但我需要一輛高爾夫球車 讓我可以從這一球洞到下一球洞。」

假使你們是 最高法院 假設你們要審議 這個涉及正義的案子 有多少人會認為 Casey Martin 有權使用高爾夫球車？ 另外，有多少人認為他沒有？ 好，讓我們做個調查，請舉手 有多少人站在 Casey Martin 這一方？ 那有多少人不支持他呢？ 很好，我們已有兩種不同的意見了 有人不給予 Casey Martin 使用高爾夫球車的權利 你們的理由是什麽？ 請舉手，我們會試著把麥克風遞給你 你的理由是什麽？

（觀眾：那會形成不公平的優勢）

Michael Sandel：那會形成不公平的優勢 假使他可以得到高爾夫球車 好的，在你們之中 我想多數不願給他高爾夫球車的人 大多擔心勝之不武 那麼，在你們當中，那些認為 應當給予他高爾夫球車的人怎麼說？ 你們會如何表達反對立場？ 是，好的

觀眾：車子並不構成比賽的一部份

Michael Sandel：你的名字是？（觀眾：Charlie）

Michael Sandel：Charlie 說 我們會給 Charlie 一隻麥克風，當有人想要回答時 告訴我們，Charlie 你爲什麽說他應該獲得一輛高爾夫球車？

Charlie：車子不是比賽的一部分

Michael Sandel：那從一洞走到另一洞又怎麼說呢？

Charlie：這與比賽無關，它不算比賽的一部份

Michael Sandel：在賽程中走路不算比賽的一部份？

Charlie：對我來說不是，它不是。

Michael Sandel：好，請留在那，Charlie

（笑聲）

誰想替 Charlie 回答？ 好，有誰想替 Charlie 回答的？ 你會怎麼說？

觀眾：耐力是比賽中一個非常重要的部分， 走完那些球洞

Michael Sandel：走過所有那些洞？ 那是高爾夫比賽的一部份？（觀眾：一點也不錯）

Michael Sandel：你的名字是？（觀眾：Warren）

Michael Sandel：Warren Charlie：你有什麽想跟 Warren 說？

Charlie：我堅持原來的論點

（笑聲）

Michael Sandel：Warren，你打高爾夫嗎？

Warren：我不打

Charlie：但我打。（Michael Sandel：好的。） （笑聲）

（掌聲）

你們知道 這很有趣 在這個案例中，在下級法院 他們把偉大的高爾夫選手帶進 這個特殊的案例中 步行在比賽中是必不可少的過程嗎？ 於是他們找來 Jack Nicklaus 和 Arnold Palmer 你們猜他們都怎麼說？ 是的，他們同意 Warren 的說法 他們說，是的，走完全程 是費力的運動 疲憊是高爾夫球賽中的重要一環 所以讓他使用高爾夫球車 會改變 比賽的根本性質 現在，請注意， 這裡有件有趣的事 嗯，我應該先告訴你有關最高法院的事

最高法院 作了裁決 你們認為他們怎麼說？ 他們說，是的， Casey Martin 必須獲得一輛高爾夫球車 七比二，他們裁決。 有趣的是，關於他們的這項判決 以及關於我們剛剛的討論， 那些有關 權利與正義等問題 都是建立於 我們對高爾夫球比賽 的必要本質的認識， 而最高法院 審慎思量了那問題 Stevens 法官，寫給多數人 說他遍讀了高爾夫球的歷史， 而這項比賽的必要之處 在於 把一個非常小的球，從一個地方 推到另一個洞裡 盡可能地使用最少的稈數 而走路並不是必要的，反而僅只是次要的

現在，有兩位持反對意見者 一位是 Scalia 法官 他不願賦予使用高爾夫球車的權利 他提出一個非常有趣的異議 有趣 是因為 他否決了大多數人所持的 亞理斯多德假設 他說 要決定一項賽事的本質，比如高爾夫球賽 是不可能的 以下是他的見解 「當談到某些事物是必要時 通常我們會說，它是在 爲了要達到某種目標時，是必要的。 但畢竟一項比賽的最終本質 除了達到娛樂目的之外，並沒有任何其他目標 （笑聲） 也就是說，把比賽 與生產活動區別開來 （笑聲） 我們不可能說 任何一種比賽的任意規則 是必要的。」

所以在這，你們有 Scalia 法官 採取亞理斯多德 的多數人意見的假設 根據兩個原因， 我們可以質疑 Scalia 法官的意見 第一，沒有哪個真正的球迷會那樣說話 （笑聲） 如果我們想到 我們所關心的比賽的規則 只不過是任意性的， 而非一種追求 道德與卓越的設計 一種值得我們尊敬的事物 我們根本不會關心這項比賽的結果 這也是第二個客觀的 的理由 面對它時 當面對這些高爾夫球車的辯論時 它看來似乎是一項關於公平的爭議 一項不平等的優勢 但，倘若公平性是唯一一項受到威脅的事物的話 解決辦法應該是再簡單明白不過 那是什麽？（觀眾：讓每個人都有車） 讓每個人都可乘坐高爾夫球車 如果他們要的話 這麼一來，就可以消除那些關於公平性的反對聲浪了

然而，讓每個人乘坐高爾夫球車 可能會，我懷疑， 可能會使美國高爾夫球公開賽 與那些球星 蒙受詛咒， 甚至如果為 Casey Martin 首開先例的話，其結果也有可能變得如此 爲什麽？ 因為，在這高爾夫球車的爭議中 所受到威脅的事物 並不只是高爾夫球的本質而已 它還涉及所謂運動員天賦的問題： 什麽樣的能力 是值得 運動員的才華 獲得崇敬與認可呢？ 我盡可能地試著 細緻地鋪陳論點： 高爾夫球選手們 多多少少 對於比賽的地位有些敏感。 （笑聲） 畢竟，這項比賽沒有跑步或跳躍， 而那顆球通常也靜止不動。 （笑聲） 所以，如果高爾夫球是那種 可以安坐於車上的比賽的話 這麼一來，人們就很難賦予 那些高爾夫球巨星 偉大崇高的地位了， 也很難給予偉大球星 榮耀與認可了。 這說明了 高爾夫球 如同長笛一般 是很難界定 其所需的正義， 當你們不解決如下問題時： 「什麽是這項活動的 內在本質、 以及 什麽樣的品質、 什麼樣的卓越內涵 關於這項活動 是值得尊敬與認可的？」

讓我們拿最後一個例子說明 當代著名的政治辯論： 同性婚姻 有些人認為，國家僅僅只能 承認傳統的婚姻 在男人與女人之間的婚姻； 另外，也有些人希望，國家能承認 同性婚姻 這裡有多少人 贊成第一項政策的： 國家只應承認傳統婚姻？ 另外，有多少人贊同同性婚姻？ 現在，這麼說好了， 在我們既有的 涉及到正義與道德的這些爭議下 關於婚姻， 我們有什麽樣的思考方式？ 反對同性婚姻的人說 婚姻的目的 基本上說來，是爲了生育， 而那是值得尊敬、 認可、與鼓勵的； 然而，捍衛同性婚姻的人說：不， 生育並不是婚姻的唯一目的， 那一個終身的、相互的、愛的承諾又如何呢？ 那的確與婚姻息息相關啊。 因此，長笛、高爾夫球車、 甚至如此激烈爭辯的議題 像同性婚姻 亞理斯多德提及了一個重點 倘若我們首先沒有探討 社會制度的目的、 與什麼樣的品質是值得 尊敬與認可的話， 要爭辯何謂正義是極為困難的。

因此，讓我們從這些案件回過頭來 看看它們如何向我們提供一種方式 使我們藉此得以會進步、提高 在美國的 政治論述的語彙 以及世界各地關於這方面的政治語言方式， 倘若我們在政治中 愈是直接地涉入倫理議題， 人們會傾向於認為 那是解決分歧的藥方， 從那方面說來，這也是一個 解決不寬容與強制脅迫的藥方。 因此，我們不如迴避、 略過 那些人們帶進公民生活中 的宗教與倫理衝突 在我看來，我們的討論 反映了相反的一面， 一個達成相互尊重 的更好方式是 直接地涉入 公民帶入公共生活中的 的倫理衝突 而不是要求 人們在進入政治以前， 把他們最深的倫理衝突 留在政治之外。 在我看來，那是一個 開始重建 民主辯論技藝的方法

謝謝大家

（掌聲）

謝謝

（掌聲）

謝謝

（掌聲）

非常感謝 謝謝，謝謝各位 Chris 謝謝，Chris

Chris Anderson：從長笛、高爾夫球場 到同性婚姻 實在是非常巧妙的連結 你的確是開放教育的先驅 你的系列課堂是開創者之一 你下一個階段的計劃是什麽？

Michael Sandel：嗯，我想這是可能的 在這個教室裡，我們有 學生們曾經討論過的 關於道德衝突的最激烈辯論 涉及了許多大型的公眾議題 我想我們可以更廣泛地 把它置入於公眾生活 所以，我真正的夢想是 創辦一個我們曾有過的課堂辯論 在電視節目之中 現在，透過網絡 這已經是可行的了 任何人在世界每個角落都可以進入 看看我們是否可以與一些機構合作 比如在中國、印度、 非洲、和世界各地的大學 試著提升 公民教育 與更豐富的 民主辯論

Chris Anderson：所以你在某種程度上，想像了 一個現場的、即時的 真實對談，徵求問題 但要求中國和印度的人們參與？

Michael Sandel：我們在這裡做了一點 在 Long Beach 那兒有 1500 人參與 另外，我們也在哈佛大學的講堂上 與 1000 位學生進行討論。 這不是很有趣嗎？ 以這種 思考與辯論的方式 深刻地討論宏大的倫理議題， 發掘文化差異 並且透過現場直播 使得在北京、孟買、 劍橋、麻薩諸塞州的學生 都能一起創造全球教室 那就是我想做的事。

（掌聲）

Chris Anderson：所以，我猜想 會有許多人願意加入你的努力的 Michael Sandel，非常謝謝你。(MS：謝謝各位。)

(第一堂)思考者的自白與答問2-1

台北藝術大學「思考者的自白與答問」第一堂／主講：姚仁祿。
本課程通過五個「思考主題」,每個「思考主題」討論課三週,總共十五堂個,並提供「觀察、思辨與練習」得實例與習題。
課程的目標是,讓大家能更貼近當今世界的困局與機會,學習「看得更真,想得更深」的能力。

No free iPod for students this year

Episode 2 - Gundam Seed: Episode 50 English Dubbed

Gundam Seed Destiny ep 2 Dubbed

Zel | Myspace Video






Watch Gundam Seed: Episode 50 English Dubbed episodes and free chapters. English Dubbed Episode guide, chapter Gundam Seed: Episode 50 To a Future that Never Ends.The Archangel, Eternal, and Kusanagi plunge into the battle, trying to keep both sides from using their weapons of mass destruction. Rau destroys Flay’s escape shuttle, killing everyone on board. Flay’s spirit visits the grief striken Kira to apologize and thank him. Kira destroys the Providence with the Freedom, while Athrun remote-destructs the Justice to destroy GENESIS. With both the PLANTs and the Earth Alliance forces in disarray, the renegade moderate faction of the PLANTs seize the opportunity to call for a cease-fire, effectively ending the war.

D9 Video: Leo Apotheker Full Session

Google’s Uphill Battle With Social, Animated

Why mobile users and developers should care about what Matt Murphy thinks

Either The Best or Worst Special FX Demo Reel of All Time

Chewsy

REaltor.com

Visited Vizio

visited Vizio (you already saw that visit in a previous post) to learn more about 3D, then visited Oakley to learn more about the latest in 3D glasses (hint: they are selling far better than they expected, I learned from execs there, which shows that 3D TV is indeed taking off, just not with the tech press). While there I got a good look at a new custom printing technology they built, which shows how custom products can be in the future.
If you were watching my wife’s Facebook feed you’d know that we got lots of beach time, along with time at LegoLand and Disneyland too. Great times and my brain is buzzing with new ideas to bring back to my work at Rackspace.

ゲゲゲの女房

Visited Dan Meis

He’s a world-famous architect who designs sports stadiums around the world. You’ll know his work if you see a baseball game in Seattle’s Safeco Field or a basketball game at Los Angeles’ Staples Center. I always am inspired by how big he thinks, which is why I started the conversation asking about something small he designed lately. Of course he switched the topic to discussing what he’s working on now: a soccer stadium for a future World Cup in Qatar.

TEDxBloomington -- Robert Scoble -- "The 2030 Class Is Arriving"

Robert Scoble co-authored Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers and is a well-known technology blogger/evangelist. He is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. He currently works for Rackspace where he is building a community called Building 43.

At TEDxBloomington, Scoble talks about how, today, we're about midway between his graduating class from the mid 1980s and that of babies being born today, that of 2030. Reviewing all the current technology that was unavailable during his education, he asks what the future will look like for these new babies, and suggests a series of ideas so we can help our children better prepare. He says "The future belongs to the geeks" and asks "Are we preparing our kids to be the geeks of the future?"


About TEDx In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxBloomington, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxBloomington event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

Talkwheel: roundtable

One problem with many of the most popular social networking sites is that conversations are displayed linearly. This breaks up the discussion and can make it difficult to locate specific parts of a conversation. Talkwheel is changing this with its new user interface.

"Talkwheel is a real-time collaboration platform built around group discussion," explains Jeff Harris, Founder and CEO of Talkwheel. "We believe at Talkwheel that the core of collaboration is actually the discussion. All these companies out there are building a bunch of bells and whistles around the discussion model, but all have really neglected the actual discussion area. In the real world when we're with a group of people, we don't stand in a line and try to talk to each other. We sit around a roundtable and try to create this circular dynamic to get everyone involved...Talkwheel is really trying to keep this round table design and really capture the real world dynamic online."

In Talkwheel, each "wheel" has its own specific group, and you can filter the wheel by topic, time or users (coming soon). This eliminates the need to search through emails or scroll up and down forums to find the information that is most relevant to you. Groups can be private or public, and users can comment to the entire group or send individual, private messages to one other within the groups.

Talkwheel offers both a free social site as well as a version it hopes to sell to businesses. One feature set that has been particularly appealing to business users during beta testing is real-time analytics on all the information shared. "You can get sentiment analysis—what users like and what they don't like about different issues going on," says Harris, "so it's very helpful for HR. Companies are also using this to engage their customers on different focus groups, so you can get a really deep insight on what your employees and customers feel on different issues and topics."

Users can upload photos and videos to a discussion, and these items can be opened within the app, so users do not have to hop from page to page during a discussion. Talkwheel also plans to go mobile soon with apps for iPhone and Android devices.

"We wanted to make Talkwheel very, very viral," explains Harris, "so when you create a wheel, you can invite users who are registered or are unregistered. If I invited an unregistered user, all they have to do is click accept and it automatically registers them. They just type one password, and they're into Talkwheel.

Plizy

With so much video content online, navigating among all the options and choices can sometimes be overwhelming. Plizy recognizes this and is providing a solution that may change the way you watch and discover video on the Internet.

"We are a video discovery platform, so everything is cloud-based," explains Jonathan Benassaya, Founder and CEO of Plizy. "We have a cloud with a recommendation engine able to understand, from your video habits and your interests, [how] to create automatic channels tailored to what you do and what you like."

Plizy uses a variety of factors to learn what you like and recommends videos based on that information. "We have a patent pending recommendation engine," says Benassaya, "where we use three kinds of information. [We use] the social graph, obviously, but also we create your interest graph based on your Facebook and your Twitter account. So we try to understand if you like tech, if you like sports, if you like baseball, if you like Asia, etc...and above that, we use some algorithms. The most well known is collaborative filtering, which is the ability to recommend content based on your habits. It's a hybrid recommendation engine, so we don't use only your social graph."

The content that the service provides comes from a large and growing list of providers that Plizy hand picks—both public sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, and sites that provide original content, such as Revision3.

"As of today, we have more than 300 channels that we've picked on the web," says Benassaya, "which are the best web content so far. You can enjoy TED, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Facebook at the same place. And we are adding something new in the coming days, which is the ability to download some content, so you will be able to download TED videos [for example] and watch them on the plane or the bus or in a train. So we're trying to push the experience, the discovery, and the access to the best content."

The company is also working on technology that will allow you to push content to just about any device you would use to watch videos. Unlike when using AirPlay, you will be able to continue using your tablet for other things while streaming content. "[The system] is cloud-based," explains Benassaya, "and the cloud can control two screens. That's why you have an entire communication between two screens."

Plizy plans to roll out a wealth of new features over the coming months as it expands from its current iPad app to other devices. "We help people discover the right content," says Benassaya, "because they want to discover things, but they don't have time for that. Plizy is here for this."

Skype For Android Now Supports Video Calls, Works Over WiFi And 3G

This would go over big here in Vegas.

AutoWed Wedding Vending Machine by Concept Shed from Conceptshed on Vimeo.

Viral Video: “The Muppets” Are Back (and I, For One, Am Thrilled)

As with my deep adoration of Barry Manilow, I am a closet fan of “The Muppets.”
They’re back in a new movie and, apparently, it’s still not easy being green.

Rajesh Rao: A Rosetta Stone for the Indus script

I'd like to begin with a thought experiment. Imagine that it's 4,000 years into the future. Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist -- no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter. All knowledge of the English language and the English alphabet has been lost. Now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities. What might they find? Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them. Perhaps some circular pieces of metal. Maybe some cylindrical containers with some symbols on them. And perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers -- buried in the hills somewhere in North America -- massive versions of these same symbols. Now let's ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future?

Now this is no hypothetical question. In fact, this is exactly the kind of question we're faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago. Now the Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations. So it occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran. Now given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings. In fact, what archeologists have found is none of that. They've found small objects such as these.

So here's an example of one of these objects. Well obviously this is a replica. But who is this person? A king? A god? A priest? Or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me? We don't know. But the Indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them. Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city. Now we don't know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter. In fact, we don't even know what any of these objects say. And that's because the Indus script is undeciphered. We don't know what any of these symbols mean.

Now the symbols are most commonly found on seals. So you see up there one such object. It's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it. Now that's a magnificent piece of art. So how big do you think that is? Perhaps that big? Or maybe that big? Well let me show you. So here's a replica of one such seal. It's only about one inch by one inch in size -- pretty tiny. So what were these used for? We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other. So you know those packing slips you get on your FedEx boxes? So these were used to make those kinds of packing slips. Now you might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text. So perhaps they're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other -- we don't know. We need to decipher the script to answer that question.

Now deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it's actually become a question that's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia. In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people. So first, there's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Indus script does not represent a language at all. These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields. Now there's a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language. So if you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family. So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit.

Now there's a last group of people who believe that the Indus people were the ancestors of people living in South India today. Now these people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today. And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian.

Now which of these hypotheses can be true? We don't know, but perhaps if you deciphered the script, you would be able to answer this question. But deciphering the script is a very challenging task. First, there's no Rosetta Stone. I don't mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text. So we don't have such an artifact for the Indus script. And furthermore, we don't even know what language they spoke. And to make matters even worse, most of the text that we have are extremely short. So as I showed you, they're usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny.

And so given these formidable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script. So in the rest of my talk, I'd like to tell you about how I learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the Indus script. Now I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook. And why was I fascinated? Well it's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world. Now my career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on.

But in 2007, my path crossed again with the Indus script. That's when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script. And so it was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity. And I'd like to describe some of the results that we have found. Or better yet, let's all collectively decipher. Are you ready?

The first thing that you need to do when you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing. So here are two texts that contain some symbols on them. So can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right? I'll give you a couple of seconds. Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay. Okay. Left to right? Oh, it's almost 50/50. Okay. So the answer is: if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you'll notice that there's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. And so they had to cram the sign. One of the signs is also below the text on the top. And so this suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left. And so that's one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts. And the Indus script now has this particular property.

What are the properties of language that would show? So languages contain patterns. So if I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be? Most of you said U, which is right. Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be? Now there's several thoughts. There's E. It could be I. It could be A, but certainly not B, C or D, right? Now the Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns. So there's a lot of texts that start with this diamond-shaped symbol. And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol. And this is very similar to a Q and U example. This symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs, but never by these other signs at the bottom. And furthermore, there's some signs that really prefer the end of texts, such as this jar-shaped sign. And this sign, in fact, happens to be the most frequently occurring sign in the script.

Now given such patterns, here was our idea. So the idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts. And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other. Now given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it. So we could deliberately erase some symbols, and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols. So here are some examples. So you may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune.

So what we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol. Now in the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer. Now there's also practical use for this particular procedure. There's a lot of these texts that are damaged. So here's an example of one such text. And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction. So here's an example of a symbol that was predicted. And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze.

Now here's one other thing you can do with the computer model. So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard. I think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this. Now such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy. This is a physics and information theory term. But just imagine it's a really random jumble of letters. Now how many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard? You might have encountered the stuck keyboard problem -- so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again. Now this kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there's no variation at all. Language, on the other hand, has an intermediate level of entropy; it's neither too rigid, nor is it too random. What about the Indus script? Here's a graph that plots the entropies of a whole bunch of sequences. So at the very top you find the uniformly random sequence, which is a random jumble of letters -- and interestingly, we also find the DNA sequence from the human genome and instrumental music. And both of these are very, very flexible, which is why you find them with a very high range. Now at the lower end of the scale, you find a rigid sequence, a sequence of all A's, and you also find a computer program, in this case in the language Fortran, which obeys really strict rules. Linguistic scripts occupy the middle range.

Now what about the Indus script? So we found that the Indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts. Now when this result was first published, it was highly controversial. There were people who were raising a human cry, and these people were the ones who believed that the Indus script does not represent language. I even started to get some hate mail. My students said that I should really seriously consider getting some protection. Now who'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession? Now what does this result really show? It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language. So, as the old saying goes, if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands. So what other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language.

Well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages. So for example, here's the same sentence written in English and the same sentence written in Dutch using the same letters of the alphabet. Now if you don't know Dutch and you only know English and I give you some words in Dutch, you'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns. Some things are not right, and you'll say these words are probably not English words. Now the same thing happens in the case of the Indus script. So the computer found several texts -- two of them are shown here -- that have very unusual patterns. So for example the first text: there's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign. Now this sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the Indus script, and it's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair.

So why is that the case? We went back and looked at where these particular texts were found, and it turns out that they were found very, very far away from the Indus Valley. They were found in present day Iraq and Iran. And why were they found there? But what I haven't told you is that the Indus people were very, very enterprising. They used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived. And so in this case, they were traveling by sea all the way to Mesopotamia, present day Iraq. And what seems to have happened here is that the Indus traders, the merchants, were using this script to write a foreign language. It's just like our English and Dutch example. And that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the Indus Valley. So this suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages. The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language.

So if it does represent language, then how do we read the symbols? That's our next big challenge. So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds. So most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words. So as an example, here's a word. Can you write it using pictures? I'll give you a couple seconds. Got it? Okay. Great. So here's my solution. So you could use the picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf -- and that's "belief," right. There could be other solutions. Now in the case of the Indus script, the problem is the reverse. So you have to figure out the sounds of each of these pictures such that the entire sequence makes sense. So this is just like a crossword puzzle, except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles, because the stakes are so high if you solve it.

Now my colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola have been making some headway on this particular problem. And I'd like to give you a quick example of Parpola's work. So here's a really short text. It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign. And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants. And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth. In Dravidian languages, the word for fish is "meen" which happens to sound just like the word for star. And so seven stars would stand for "elu meen" which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation. Now similarly, there's another sequence of six stars, and that translates to "aru meen" which is the old Dravidian name for the star constellation Pleiades. And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it. And that could be translated into "mey meen" which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn. So that was pretty exciting. It looks like we're getting somewhere.

But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations? Well not yet. So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track. So today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century. The decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly. Now the Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent.

So why should we care? The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us. So these are our ancestors -- yours and mine. They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history. Now if we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again. So what would they tell us? What would we find out about them? About us? I can't wait to find out.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Joshua Walters: On being just crazy enough

My name is Joshua Walters. I'm a performer.

(Beatboxing)

(Laughter)

(Applause)

But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar. I reframe that as a positive, because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become. When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ. Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ.

(Laughter)

I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show. (Laughter) There's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time. They're just practicing. One day they'll get here. Now when I got out, I was diagnosed and I was given medications by a psychiatrist. "Okay, Josh, why don't we give you some -- why don't we give you some Zyprexa. Okay? Mmhmm? At least that's what it says on my pen." (Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see. I can feel your noise. The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode, and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs, where I was sleeping through high school. The second half was just one big nap, pretty much, in class. When I got out I had a choice. I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness.

(Bugle sound)

There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive -- at least the hypomanic edge part of it. Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks. Many of the speakers here, many of you in the audience, have that creative edge, if you know what I'm talking about. You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible.

And there's a book -- John Gartner. John Gartner wrote this book called "The Hypomanic Edge" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete. A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called "Touched With Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with. Some of them committed suicide. So it wasn't all the good side of the illness.

Now recently, there's been development in this field. And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: "Just Manic Enough." Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum -- you know what I'm talking about -- not maybe full bipolar, but they're in the bipolar spectrum -- where on one side, maybe you think you're Jesus, and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money. (Laughter) Your call. Your call. And everyone's somewhere in the middle. Everyone's somewhere in the middle.

So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy. But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel. Maybe no one's really crazy. Everyone is just a little bit mad. How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum. How much depends on how lucky you are.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Irregular verbs

Irregular verbs

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Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Is Ready for His Close-Up: The Full D9 Interview

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is well-known in Silicon Valley as a funny guy, but he trotted out some serious stats in this onstage interview with Walt Mossberg at the recent ninth D: All Things Digital conference.
Among the many topics: Acquisition interest by Google and others; its new photo sharing service; the evolving business plan of Twitter; and how Costolo does not have a super-secret Mach 20 government plane to impress the crowd, even if the microblogging service is growing fast.
Still, as you will see, Costolo is pretty quick.

Solar Sinter solar-powered 3D printer turns sand into glass, renews our faith in higher education (video)

Solar Sinter solar-powered 3D printer turns sand into glass, renews our faith in higher education (video)Solar Sinter solar-powered 3D printer turns sand into glass, renews our faith in higher education (video)

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Pelican Imaging's prototype array camera could make your pictures better, phones thinner

Pelican Imaging's prototype array camera could make your pictures better, phones thinner (video)
By Tim Stevens posted Feb 10th 2011 11:05AM

If you want to look for life on another planet you don't build one radio telescope that's miles wide, you build a bunch of smaller ones and create an array out of them. As it turns out that basic idea works for capturing visible wavelengths as well. It's called a plenoptic camera, using an array of very small lenses that, when combined, can create an image as good as a larger one. Pelican Imaging is largely interested in the slim factor this kind of system could offer, potentially allowing for thinner phones, but this could also open the door to some interesting effects. Check out the video after the break for an example of the dynamic aperture control this sort of setup can allow, where you can change the focal plane of an image after it was taken. Given the small size of the array here you probably couldn't do anything too crazy, like take a picture through a tree, but the days of poorly focused cameraphone shots might finally be at an end -- whenever this actually comes to market.

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Is Nanosys’ awesome new screen technology gonna be in iPad 3? I hope so. Wow.

When Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove pulled two iPads out of his bag and turned them on one looked like when I first saw my first Kodachrome slide while the other looked muddy and crappy in comparison (I pulled out my own iPad and saw my screen looked muddy and crappy in comparison too). The new one was clear, beautiful, stunning, with richer colors than I had ever seen on a screen before.
“Is that the new retina display?” I immediately asked him.
“No, it is not a higher resolution display.” My eyes were telling me otherwise.
“What the f*** is going on here then?” I asked him. He calmly explained what Nanosys did and why they own 400 patents on what they were showing me, which they call Quantum Dot Enhanced Film (QDEF™) . 400!
This technology is so important Economist magazine just wrote about it (and they don’t write about startups very often). Even better, it’s designed AND made in the USA! For once Silicon Valley is seeming like Silicon Valley again.
Unfortunately you can’t really see the difference in the screen very well. Why? Because you are watching this video on an old crappy Dell, or a Macintosh, or an old-style iPad.
When Nanosys starts shipping its screen technology later this year our lives will change forever.
Every screen in your life will look dull and lifeless compared to a screen with Nanosys technology in it.
Now, let’s go through the business advantages:
1. Does not take more battery life.
2. Does not increase cost.
3. Does not require a new display architecture to push out more pixels or a GPU that is four times as fast to support more pixels.
4. They can make craploads of it.
5. They have patents up the yingyang so are gonna be the only game in town for a while.
6. This company is real and funded by the best VCs in the business. They also just won best new display technology at the Society for Information Display conference a couple of weeks ago.
If you watch one video of mine, watch this one. It’s awesome tech and I can’t wait to have it in all my screens. Unfortunately we gotta wait for Steve Jobs to bet on it big time.
I can just see the iPad 3 launch. We all know Apple is going to put in a double-pixel display (my sources have been talking about that for months now) but when you see this technology you’ll know just why the next displays are so freaking good on colors, too.

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Bootstrapping the CNN of tech: The story of TWiT

Bootstrapping the CNN of tech: The story of TWiT
By Janko Roettgers




It all started with boredom. Leo Laporte had a few gigs with TV and radio networks back in 2005, but his work schedule left him with nothing to do half of the month. So he started an audio podcast called This Week in Tech, also known as TWiT. He asked listeners for donations, which allowed him to hire production help and add additional shows. And then, one day, he told his then-bookkeeper Lisa Kentzell about his real goal: to become the CNN of tech.

“I said: Okay, let’s do it,” recalled Kentzell when I met her and Laporte in the TwiT cottage in Petaluma, California last week. Kentzell is now the CEO of TWiT, and the company is ready to take the next big step towards its ambitious goal in July with the move into a spacious new studio built with a 24/7 live video operation in mind.

Check out this video of Leo Laporte and Lisa Kentzell showing off their new studio:


The new space is only a couple blocks away from the old studio, but in a way, the two studios are worlds apart. The old TWiT cottage, which has been Laporte’s home base since 2005, looks like your grandma’s small old summer house taken over by a bunch of geeks. Too many geeks, actually. The 18 staffers are literally bumping into each other all the time. The new studio, on the other hand, will have multiple sets, 40 cameras, state of the art tech and lots of room for future expansion.

The move is also as sign of TWiT doubling down on live video. It’s a ambitious proposition, in part because most of its audience still thinks of TWiT as a podcast network. Kentzell told me that TWiT sees about 5 million downloads every month. Live is harder to track, she said, but still much smaller.

“The live audience isn’t here yet,” admitted Laporte. “It’s a big bet on the future.” And live is expensive: TWiT recently had to shut down the live feed of its Roku channel because of exploding bandwidth costs. However, Laporte believes that these things will eventually sort themselves out with bandwidth prices going down.

Taking a step back when things get too expensive is also a part of the TWiT way of doing business. Laporte and Kentzell thought about moving to San Francisco with the new studio, but decided to stay in Petaluma to get more bang for their buck. The company only spends as much as it can afford at any given time, and has been entirely bootstrapped from day one, declining many opportunities for outside funding. “We are very committed to bootstrapping,” said Laporte. Kentzell agreed: “We wanted to have full creative and financial control.”

Speaking of Kentzell, she’s one of the lesser-known folks on the TWiT team, but Laporte couldn’t speak more highly of her. “It really wasn’t a business until Lisa came along,” he told me. Laporte initially hired her to do his books; he soon discovered that she was outsourcing the actual bookkeeping to a whole team she managed. Impressed, he convinced her to bring some of that leadership to TWiT. Laporte credits her for doubling revenue every year in the past few years, up to the tune of $3 million in 2010.

Much of that money comes from advertising these days, which is brought in by an external sales team. Initially, TWiT was entirely donation-based, with listeners shipping in as much as $20,000 per month. The company is relying on some of that loyalty to finish its new studio, which will cost about $850,000, by selling commemorative bricks to fans. “Donations give people a feeling to be part of it,” said Laporte.

So what’s next for TWiT? 24/7 live streaming is one goal, a satellite bureau in New York is also in the cards. Laporte also wants to hire more talent and add more shows after poaching broadcaster Tom Merritt and producer Jason Howell from CNET last year. But he doesn’t believe in branching out too far. “I’m not trying to get bigger, I’m trying to serve our niche better,” he said, adding that he’s confident to have a good sense of the content that will be popular. “I really understand our audience. I am one of them.”

And as for the ambitions to become the CNN of tech, Laporte says it’s not just a numbers game. He may never reach as many simultaneous viewers as the cable channels, but he believes TWiT can be just as relevant. His team will have succeeded once “a breaking news story happens and people turn to us,” he explained. Getting there may take years, and millions of dollars that Laporte and Kentzell intend to make the old-fashioned way – through bootstrapping. Said Kentzell, “It’s a little risky, but I think it’s worthwhile.”

Paul Nicklen: Tales of ice-bound wonderlands

About this talk

Diving under the Antarctic ice to get close to the much-feared leopard seal, photographer Paul Nicklen found an extraordinary new friend. Share his hilarious, passionate stories of the polar wonderlands, illustrated by glorious images of the animals who live on and under the ice.

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Video: A Look At High-Res 3D Laser Scanning With Makerbot’s Bre Pettis

In the olden days, when you wanted a bust made, you hired some fancy sculptor to come to your house and sit with you for hours a day until, months later, you had a handsome marble or ceramic bust. Now, however, you can get a bust made in a few minutes using laser scanners and Makerbot rapid prototyping machines. Ain’t progress wonderful?

Makerbot’s Bre Pettis invited me over to his new storefront in Brooklyn to build a bust for his upcoming New York Notables event in July. I got to join folks like Cory Doctorow and Moot (in miniature form) as we were scanned into a PC using a Polhemus laser scanner. To grab my physical details they dusted me talcum powder and then sat me down for a good two minute scan. The process was quick and painless and the results, as you see in the video below, were impressive.

We could have printed out my head in a few minutes but Bre and the gang were pretty backed up so they’re going to let me know when my tiny little head appears in their machine, ready for eventual deification by future generations.

Mitnick starts talking about LulzSec at about the 4 minute mark in the following video via CBS News’ What’s Trending.

On the other hand, LulzSec may inspire other hackers. Future groups may leave the cockiness at home and quietly do a lot more damage. It’s not like LulzSec’s potential demise will do much to shore up security efforts in various companies.

Microsoft Looks to Mango to Make Windows Phone a Better Communicator

With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft was basically looking to get back into the smartphone conversation. With the next version, codenamed Mango, the company hopes to prove itself a social butterfly.
Improved communications, along with better Web browsing and more powerful apps, were the key focal points as the company looked to make the first major update to its revamped phone software.

On Tuesday, the company is announcing a host of new communications options that are among 500 new features that Microsoft is adding to its phone operating system in the “Mango” update due out later this year. The company is outlining the changes and sharing other details at a press event in New York that is just getting underway. (It’s being Webcast and AllThingsD has live coverage here).
As part of its effort to be a better communicator, Microsoft is adding support for Twitter as well as tighter integration with Facebook and an integrated conversation feature that allows chats to move between Facebook Chat, Windows Live Messenger and text message all within a single “thread.” The company is also adding an option to let users combine contacts into various groups that can be reached en masse via email or text message. On the email side, customers will now have the option to combine views from various email accounts into a single inbox as well as view messages in either standard or conversation view.
While apps are important, Microsoft is hoping to convince friends that when it comes to keeping in touch, it is better to integrate multiple modes into a single hub than to have to open a different program for each means of communication.
“Our friends aren’t apps—they are people,” Sullivan said.
That said, even with Mango, users will have to do some switching. The feature that lets discussions move from chat to text message doesn’t extend to email, while Twitter users will still need a separate program to handle more advanced tasks.
Still, Microsoft hopes integrating more options into its People hub will help the company’s products stand out from rivals. Sullivan noted that Microsoft’s research shows people spend 2.5 hours a day socializing on their phone–more time than is spent eating. “It’s pretty dramatic,” he said.
The Mango release of Windows Phone is due to show up on phones later this year. In addition to current hardware partners that are planning new phones, Mango will work on existing Windows Phone devices and will form the basis for Nokia’s first crop of Microsoft-powered phones.

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