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What I like about this fact is that people think positively: they're ready to donate to something they like. But in most of it... As this talented speaker on TED said, we need to integrate the technology, entertainment, design, i.e. the happy (and consumer) part of our life with the awareness of injustice, bad life of poor, bloody lessons of history and other things which would make us little more adequate about what world we live in. He also said that the indicator of health of society is how they treat the poor, not the rich. I join those commentators who think that $2.5M would do much more useful and meaningful things if it was donated elsewhere, i.e. with a little bit deeper thougth.

The link in my post was to another talk he gave. The one I meant to post was: http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education.html

I'll single out one facet of education, and that is mathematics. The pinnacle of pre-college math study is calculus. Arthur Benjamin(of Mathemagics fame) in my view has a simple solution for math education in school. Rather than making calculus the pinnacle, you make statistics the pinnacle. These days I feel that school doesn't teach what regular people need for life skills. We use statistics and probability every day in one form or another. Arthur Benjamin gave his talk about this at a TED convention, and it can be found here: ere http://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_does_mathemagic.html . I think if people start breaking down education into core areas and start finding solutions to more specific problems that plague educational system. Art has a simple, but good idea.

Fortunately, I don't believe that would hold. The need for interoperability with "non-supported" platforms and devices still exists. And the storage is cloud-based which does not guarantee persistence nor consistency of service (ever try to use Netflix on a device with under 400MB of space to buffer? or at night when they do maintenance?). This is almost certainly less convenient than popping a DVD into a tray and hitting play. Far less. That is the opposite direction of ripping, and far more cumbersome than piracy, which makes it in no way an alternative.

The purpose of ripping is that I can make a backup (either physical or digital) and be assured that my copy is protected. "Digitizing" my DVD to be held in someone else's cloud does not offer the same. This means I can take 1 file and play it *ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD* on *ANY DEVICE I OWN* at my own leisure without asking permission, paying a fee for a service, and with complete and utter privacy. Piracy results in high quality and extremely fast delivery of these DRM-free universal formats that almost every device in existence (including my TV, via USB, right out of the box) can play. That delivery chain is far more efficient and convenient to me than anything else available, and it is precisely this fact that prompts the MPAA and RIAA to try to get legislation to kill it. They still want their 1970s model of what amounts to extortion back. Relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Oh, and the last thing you want is a server somewhere keeping a log of when and how often you watch those digitized porn DVDs you own, right? The privacy concerns I don't think I've seen mentioned yet in RE to this story, but they're enormous, too. Just as important as the convenience factor.

There are those with boots on the ground in these poverty stricken areas that disagree with your conclusion about redistribution. There was PBS documentary a few years ago about an Ethiopian expat. working in the US who returned to her home country to solve the problem of famine. In spite of many decades of billions of dollars of direct aid, there were still massive regional famines in her home country. She saw that access to capital and markets was restricted for poor rural farmers, so they were not getting fair prices for their product nor were they able to get accurate market information about which crops to grow. The issue is very complicated, tied up with government corruption, state control, rent-seeking monopolists, etc., but many international aid organizations including the UN have embraced the concept.

The basic premise is a variation on the "teach a man to fish" argument. In this case it is "give a man access to a market where he can sell the fish for a fair and transparent price" and he'll eat for a lifetime. The agricultural revolution in the west was not simply one of better farm machinery and fertilizers. It also included infrastructure like grain storage, transportation, access to capital and futures markets.

And now many more people are late, for the fine was too low: social pressure had kept people in line, but the small fine told them being late was no big deal.

The problem may not be that the fine was too low, but that fines and rewards are a different kind of motivation, based on selfishness instead of social responsibility. Conflicting incentives can make people less likely to do something. Psychologist Barry Schwartz explains it in this TED talk (skip to 10:50 for the relevant part).

I have felt the effect myself, when new management in a company where solidarity and cooperation had been an important part of the corporate culture started "motivating" people with a strong focus on bonuses and personal targets. They seemed to work on the assumption that selfishness and personal gain are the only things that drive people. That isn't true for me, my (relatively modest) material needs are covered by half the salary they already paid me, and the effect this strong focus had on me was to distract me from my real motivations to work hard, it took the pleasure out of it. I clearly felt it as a distraction. I've moved on to greener pastures, not financially but certainly motivationally.

Brad: The Game

Back when I had an overnight job I spent a whole night playing around on that twisted "chose your own adventure" game/hypertext story.

Really, I think the best "hypertext" books were the Broaderbund Dr. Seuss stories I got for my daughter. They really were pretty cool and brought the book to life. The Ted Talk I watched last night sort of approached the subject as well.

Please have your wife talk to her doctor about a blood test for vitamin D deficiency (which is related to the immune system). Related:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/news-archive/2010/vitamin-d-regulatory-hormone-of-immunity-and-inflammation/

Please also look into the work of Dr. Joel Fuhrman, who is his first "Healthy Times" newsletter has an article about people coming into his office related to Lyme disease and feeling much better after they improve what they eat (much more vegetables and fruits and omega-3s and so on).
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/newsletter.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx

Even if the issue is Lyme disease, vitamin D and phytonutrients help build up the immune system so it can fight of pathogens.

Also look into the book "The Lyme Disease Solution" by Kenneth B. Singleton M.D., which has sections about how sunlight and a better diet help with Lyme disease.
http://www.amazon.com/Lyme-Disease-Solution-Kenneth-Singleton/dp/1934812005

I agree about the computer-aided diagnosis. I hope some day we will have cheap tests people can do at home for nutritional status and vitamin D levels from a drop of blood, perhaps involving cell phones, as described here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp.html

Until then, please look into these issues for yourself and your wife (since you may be at risk as well if you eat in similar ways or have a similar lifestyle without immense amounts of sunlight).

Who turned what into an emotional issue? http://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_on_averting_climate_crisis.html

Yeah it's been proven time and time again that most people:
1) don't know what they really want
2) don't say what they really want
3) are very bad at judging how they would feel about things in the future.

For decades people didn't say they wanted chunky spaghetti sauce.
http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say, "What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce." And for all those years - 20, 30 years - through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did.

As Howard loves to say, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants."

If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you'd say? Every one of you would say "I want a dark, rich, hearty roast." It's what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee. What do you like? Dark, rich, hearty roast! What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want - that "I want a milky, weak coffee."

But as Apple knows, once you give them what they want, they'll buy it.

I completely agree with you and everyone else that the world has become more peaceful in general.

I don't agree that it's because of nukes, not outside USA, USSR and Western Europe.

On the general history of violence:
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

Watching the trailer, I could not help notice how old he's become, even compared to the TED video (2007). Dear Randi, please stay with us for a lot longer!

Aubrey deGrey gives a spirited TED talk on the subject.

And they've had better objectives applied to them: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_la_grou_plugs_smart_power_outlets_1.htm l

Karen Armstrong in one of her TED talks put forth an idea that all religions should concentrate on the Golden Rule - the rule that Confucius created 3,000 years ago. Compassion. Orthopraxy as opposed to orthodoxy.

We should all act like a compassionate person instead of worrying about how others believe and if they believe "correctly" - which is lost on pretty much every practitioner of the religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

It is :-/

The fashion industry has no copyright yet still manages to make a profit.

http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Because the fashion industry uses trademarks. People selling copies of Gucci bags aren't prosecuted for selling copies, they are prosecuted for selling copies that claim to be from Gucci.

It is :-/

The fashion industry has no copyright yet still manages to make a profit.

http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Just like a politician to bring up a massive government boondoggle which might have some scientific benefits, but which provides no possibility of a payoff in practical terms.

I propose a different science/engineering race with China:

The first to build and get patents on associated technology for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. China announced a year or two back that they had begun.

LFTR most likely would provide a trillion dollar+ payoff to whoever gets there first and can deploy it both domestically and sell exports to other countries within the lifespan of the patents.

Or how about the closely related WAMSR - the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor.

Those look both doable, almost certainly cheaper than a moonbase (though possibly still somewhat expensive), and would have enormous benefits for mankind.

But, no doubt Republicans would decry a program to rapidly get the LFTR or WAMSR up and running as a socialist, big-government program. . . but somehow, a freaking moonbase isn't. Oh, I know why - because there's no actual money to be made on a moonbase, so the private sector doesn't care about it and thus doesn't need "protection" from government programs.

Check out this TED talk.

But it does not logically follow that we must do something about it.

If you want to find out how much CO2 a car releases, you ask an engineer. If you want to find out how much the CO2 will impact weather patterns as a whole, you ask a climatologist. But if you want to find out how to balance the two, you can't ask either, you have to ask an economist: http://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_sets_global_priorities.html

That's if you want to prioritize satisfaction over all else. Paradoxically reduced choice can lead to greater satisfaction even if it leads to lower productivity. While customers may be seeking to maximize satisfaction for personal use, I daresay most businesses would choose to maximize productivity, or bang for the buck. While libertarians (both the right wing and left wing types) would choose to maximize choice.

We could mine the moon for for water, bring into low earth orbit and convert nto rocket fuel at a tenth of the price that it takes to launch the same fuel from the earth: Bill Stone on TED.

> Apple's success is the limited variance. They make a few models of each device, and generally a good/better/best option for each

That is certainly a factor.

See: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

For why choice is a bad thing for consumers.

http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html This video does a much better job than I could ever do expaling some of the issues around SOPA.

As for a boycott, that is just about impossible to do... Do you go out to restaurants/bars? they have a license to play music and so some of the money I pay for dinner still goes that way. Same for just about anytime you hear music in public.

Anyways, that whole looking into dirt on dickheads worked very well for Wikileaks and Julian...

Indeed.

I think the media industry goes way too far. They want to control what you view, how you view it, what you view it on... and they abuse the law as a standard practice. They want to inhibit all progress in how we use media because the old way is so damn profitable. They want to sell us something and include a list of unreasonable restrictions. If I buy something, I should own it and be allowed to do whatever I want with it.

I agree...They want us to consume their content the way they tell us..NO sharing,NO fair use. I also think it's really not about pirating at all but about power,control and pure,never ending greed. Check out this informative Ted Talk...They have been behaving this way for years. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Obligatory TED talk.

Until you mentioned it, I didn't know it existed. I think I found the link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/cheryl_hayashi_the_magnificence_of_spider_silk.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Worth every second it takes to watch it and, more importantly, SHARE IT.

You know a joke is obvious when you get to the comments section only to discover three people have already made it. Alas!

Unrelatedly, TED has a lot to say on the topic of ageing, much of it accessible. The general gist seems to be "as long as food is plentiful, it's in our best interest to reproduce fast and die young, so eating conservatively makes our bodies think they need to survive longer."

I was not a fan of Cowen's arguments in two episodes of Econtalk, but there was a lot about his TED talk Be suspicious of stories that I really liked.

The first was that overuse of the good vs evil story mode lowers your IQ by ten points.

The second was that over-reliance on the story "we need to get tough with ..." is nearly as bad.

Here's Cowen being an idiot:
Cowen on the Great Stagnation
And here's the rebuttal, fresh off the press:
Ion Proton sequencer decodes DNA fast and on the cheap

The space program is big and impressive and you can pick up chicks by sneaking them into the JPL and letting them steer the Mars rovers. However, the entirety of the space program, IMHO, is bupkis in significance compared with sequencing the human genome and the era of proteomics now unfolding. Stagnation my ass.

In a terrorist society, only psychopaths commit crimes, of which there are plenty, as the society conspires to drive them to it.

What drives me nuts about this story is the tacit concession to escalationism. If you shoot at someone and later they stumble over your corpse, you can't say you didn't have it coming.

Urination = Disrespect
Bullets = Terminal Contempt

The urine perps should be disciplined, no question, but it's hardly legitimate fodder to order another cargo ship of Chinese machetes.

You could train the local crows to do it for you...

Like this guy

I like your point, but I think you're missing out on something.

Radio isn't just used to tell stories. It's used to communicate. Nobody is telling stories in the cockpit of an aircraft, for instance. It's just communicating messages. Information back and forth.

There are lots of examples where this is true. And to extend your analogy with other species, there are plenty of other species that communicate on our own planet (even microbes!). It just so happens that the complexity of that communication seems to scale to a degree with the complexity of the organism. And it also so happens that we're the only species thus far that's developed the reasoning level and had the ability to develop tools to extend communication like radio.

Further, any other species that wishes to communicate over great distances on another world, regardless of whether or not they are culturally story tellers or not, will likely face similar problems to us, in terms of the physical limitations of passing messages across space within the universe (whether that space is a light year or a mile).

It stands to reason that similar solutions (radiation) will be sought. You could argue that they'd use different bands. Perhaps. We use the bands we use because they work best in our environment. For instance, most of our environment is opaque on the visual and IR bands, so that doesn't work. That's why we don't use those bands for much. Radio, on the other hand is easy to generate, can give you good range, is not very bad for you (like x-ray or gamma), and much of the world is transparent to it, so you don't need to worry about line of sight so much.

Now that said, we have no idea what they would transmit. Sound? Visuals? Digital representations of something? What are the odds that another intelligent civilization uses sound to communicate in the first place? I have no idea. If not sound, what? If a civilization is transmitting say, smell, or some abstraction of a sense we do not posses, how would we interpret this if we detected it? If we realized that it was intelligent, how would we decode it?

FTA: Simply, Life is "self-reproduction with variations" - like mutating computer viruses?

Yes - and science (including science done at NASA) has done a good job of defining this already;

Christoph Adami: Finding life we can't imagine (Oct'11)
How do we search for alien life if it's nothing like the life that we know? At TEDxUIUC Christoph Adami shows how he uses his research into artificial life -- self-replicating computer programs -- to find a signature, a 'biomarker,' that is free of our preconceptions of what life is.

From the transcript:

One day a NASA manager comes into my office, sits down and says, "Can you please tell us, how do we look for life outside Earth?" And that came as a surprise to me, because I was actually hired to work on quantum computation. Yet, I had a very good answer. I said, "I have no idea." And he told me, "Biosignatures, we need to look for a biosignature."

[...]

So I'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to, but in fact on processes only. And if you take a look at that, this was actually in a book that I wrote that deals with artificial life. And that explains why that NASA manager was actually in my office to begin with. Because the idea was that, with concepts like that, maybe we can actually manufacture a form of life.

[...]

So the first thing that we learn is that it is possible to define life in terms of processes alone, without referring at all to the type of things that we hold dear, as far as the type of life on Earth is. And that in a sense removes us again, like all of our scientific discoveries, or many of them -- it's this continuous dethroning of man -- of how we think we're special because we're alive. Well we can make life. We can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it. And once we have that, then it is not such a difficult task anymore to say, if we understand the fundamental processes that do not refer to any particular substrate, then we can go out and try other worlds, figure out what kind of chemical alphabets might there be, figure enough about the normal chemistry, the geochemistry of the planet, so that we know what this distribution would look like in the absence of life, and then look for large deviations from this -- this thing sticking out, which says, "This chemical really shouldn't be there." Now we don't know that there's life then, but we could say, "Well at least I'm going to have to take a look very precisely at this chemical and see where it comes from." And that might be our chance of actually discovering life when we cannot visibly see it.

Speaker: Christoph Adami
Christoph Adami researches the nature of living systems, using 'artificial life' -- small, self-replicating computer programs. His main research focus is Darwinian evolution, which he studies at different levels of organization (from simple molecules to brains). He has pioneered theapplication of methods from information theory to the study of evolution, and designed the "Avida" system that launched the use of digital life as a tool for investigating basic questions in evolutionary biology. He is Professor of Applied Life Sciences at the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, CA, and a Visiting Professor at the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action at Michigan State University. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Note that his TED video includes his life definition also - his work is an excellent piece of science.

FTA: Simply, Life is "self-reproduction with variations" - like mutating computer viruses?

Yes - and science (including science done at NASA) has done a good job of defining this already;

Christoph Adami: Finding life we can't imagine (Oct'11)
How do we search for alien life if it's nothing like the life that we know? At TEDxUIUC Christoph Adami shows how he uses his research into artificial life -- self-replicating computer programs -- to find a signature, a 'biomarker,' that is free of our preconceptions of what life is.

From the transcript:

One day a NASA manager comes into my office, sits down and says, "Can you please tell us, how do we look for life outside Earth?" And that came as a surprise to me, because I was actually hired to work on quantum computation. Yet, I had a very good answer. I said, "I have no idea." And he told me, "Biosignatures, we need to look for a biosignature."

[...]

So I'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to, but in fact on processes only. And if you take a look at that, this was actually in a book that I wrote that deals with artificial life. And that explains why that NASA manager was actually in my office to begin with. Because the idea was that, with concepts like that, maybe we can actually manufacture a form of life.

[...]

So the first thing that we learn is that it is possible to define life in terms of processes alone, without referring at all to the type of things that we hold dear, as far as the type of life on Earth is. And that in a sense removes us again, like all of our scientific discoveries, or many of them -- it's this continuous dethroning of man -- of how we think we're special because we're alive. Well we can make life. We can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it. And once we have that, then it is not such a difficult task anymore to say, if we understand the fundamental processes that do not refer to any particular substrate, then we can go out and try other worlds, figure out what kind of chemical alphabets might there be, figure enough about the normal chemistry, the geochemistry of the planet, so that we know what this distribution would look like in the absence of life, and then look for large deviations from this -- this thing sticking out, which says, "This chemical really shouldn't be there." Now we don't know that there's life then, but we could say, "Well at least I'm going to have to take a look very precisely at this chemical and see where it comes from." And that might be our chance of actually discovering life when we cannot visibly see it.

Speaker: Christoph Adami
Christoph Adami researches the nature of living systems, using 'artificial life' -- small, self-replicating computer programs. His main research focus is Darwinian evolution, which he studies at different levels of organization (from simple molecules to brains). He has pioneered theapplication of methods from information theory to the study of evolution, and designed the "Avida" system that launched the use of digital life as a tool for investigating basic questions in evolutionary biology. He is Professor of Applied Life Sciences at the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, CA, and a Visiting Professor at the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action at Michigan State University. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Note that his TED video includes his life definition also - his work is an excellent piece of science.

There's a TED talk about this: Beware online filter bubbles!

They were already doing that. There is a great talk about "personalizing search results" to the point where when one person searches for "Egypt" you get information about riots, while another person searches for "Egypt" and they get nothing about those events.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Listen to it and learn.

It is rare indeed that a programmer has the artistic eye for design and are a great programmer.

Is it really that rare, or are you just looking for love in all the wrong places?

John Brockman: the man with a three digit speed dial

I quickly realised, but did not articulate, something the anthropologist Gregory Bateson told me 10 years later: that of all our human inventions, economic man was by far the dullest.

We've had superlative typography since the 1980s, but instead the world standardized on Widow Maker and other typographic abominations. Economic man noted the score, and the rest is WYG will make your eyes bleed. Then Steve figured out how to pour feminine charms back into the genie bottle by making the terms of engagement non-negotiable. That's one way to do it. Who knows what user interface nightmares ensue once you begin speaking with each other.

The contributors to Edge are what I call third-culture thinkers or intellectuals. Not only are they focused on science-minded pursuits based on evidence and empiricism, they are also public communicators, reaching out to the public by means of their books, lectures, etc. They live by their wits, and doing so in the changing times of the digital age is a challenge. Their concerns are very different than, say, the casual user, who has signed up for a social network and by default becomes the product whose private information is sold to advertisers.

If it's asking too much to straddle two culture, how about being insanely good at just one? From How (La)TeX changed the face of Mathematics

Big mistakes people should stop making:
1. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
2. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
3. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.

Tyler Cowen: Be suspicious of stories

Tyler has a nice riff there about how ditching the "good vs evil" depiction of world events immediately raises your IQ by ten points. There are many writers out there who could raise their IQ by an additional ten points investing less in glassy gassy.

Why do you claim that over population is a huge problem? The rate of human population growth has been declining for decades. It currently seems as we'll never even hit 10 billion before we drop in total numbers.

I recommend Hans Rosling on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

Population growth has to slow down, bacause it's been excessively high for the past centure.

Just scant century ago, the population of the world was under 2 billion. Now it's 7. In just 100 years, the human population more than tripled. In contrast, the previous 100 years prior to that, it barely doubled from about 1B to just under 2.

Anyone who sees the population curve over the past few hundred years would see exponential growth, but anyone who knows history that it's unlikely to be sustainable.

The question becomes, though, can the Earth sustain it? Are we using up banked natural resources (like oil) faster than such resources can be renewed? And more importantly - what about the environment - climate change or no, pollution is an issue (unless you believe Beijing's air quality reports).

Why do you claim that over population is a huge problem? The rate of human population growth has been declining for decades. It currently seems as we'll never even hit 10 billion before we drop in total numbers.

I recommend Hans Rosling on the subject: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

Interesting/Informative post, but you miss two key issues:

1. You ARE aware that the whole fashion industry has NO copyright and yet still continues to profit, right?
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

>

I watched this awhile ago, and while correct that fashion has no copyright, it does have trademark protection. By making trademark an essential part of the designs fashion has in many ways achieved very similar protections to if they had copyright. My wife's Coach purse has their C as a very intrinsic part of the design. You could not create the same purse without that trademark as part of the design. And if you created a purse using a similar C they could go after you for the trademark violation as your C is too close to the Coach C and could be seen as diluting their trademark which is a legal no-no. Integrating your trademwark into a design has sort of become a design constraint of the fashion industry by which they achieve IP protection. It's not quite as good as full copyright protection, but it does cover a lot.

There is no difference in the intrinsic value of the product.
2. Correct. You are close to a key Insight to reach the next level of understanding but not quite there yet; so let me help you out --> Value is multi-valued! i.e. Two different people can value the same thing differently; what is it "perceived" value then? The High, the Low, the Average? No, it is BOTH the low AND the high. It is a 1-to-many relationship, NOT a 1-to-1 relationship. THIS is the main factor on why [almost] all economic theories are doomed to fail -- they don't accurately model the relationship of value -- multi-valued, not single-valued.

This I have thought about a lot in the past and wholeheartedly agree with. I have items, like Neverwinter Nights, that looking back, given the hours and fun I had with that game that probably has closer to a value of $250-$300. I have expensive recumbent panniers that cost me $390. However, they have lasted me years thus far, have a lifetime warranty and I expect them to last years to come. These I would be willing to pay $1000 for given their actual utility and value. The problem of course is I don't know that before I purchase something. I can only guess if my $50 for a game will really pan out. As I've bought plenty of games for which it's a bad investment. So it's really difficult to parse out what the correct perceived value should be, even for myself at purchase time. I won't really know the value until several months down the road. At best I'm making an educated guess at purchase time, which I would say for a lot of items ends up being incorrect in some way.

Interesting/Informative post, but you miss two key issues:

1. You ARE aware that the whole fashion industry has NO copyright and yet still continues to profit, right?
Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

> There is no difference in the intrinsic value of the product.
2. Correct. You are close to a key Insight to reach the next level of understanding but not quite there yet; so let me help you out --> Value is multi-valued! i.e. Two different people can value the same thing differently; what is it "perceived" value then? The High, the Low, the Average? No, it is BOTH the low AND the high. It is a 1-to-many relationship, NOT a 1-to-1 relationship. THIS is the main factor on why [almost] all economic theories are doomed to fail -- they don't accurately model the relationship of value -- multi-valued, not single-valued.

> The real counterfeit is ... people are buying fake value
People literally buy into the pseudo-cool factor all the time. They are called "fads." Suckers have yet to learn that having object X doesn't matter one bit when you the true value in life is relationships. e.g. The rest of us get on with our lives buying the $20 jeans instead of the $100 designer jeans laughing (and/or feeling sad) at the sucker ^H^H^H financial idiot willing to throw away his money at a lame attempt of being a hipster.

There is a much bigger issue looming on the horizon ( 100 - 400 years) though that you will want to ponder -- what happens to "value" when anyone can simply "print" whatever object they want? =)

Cheers

You never see [fragmentation] applied to any other area, such as Automobiles, where there is even more diversity and choice.

First, for some things, possibly including automobiles, more choice isn't always a good thing. Second, "fragmentation" is much more of a problem for developers and not consumers. Third, "fragmentation" doesn't apply to things like automobiles because they don't run a common OS that developers write apps for. "Fragmentation" is referring to the fragmentation of the OS, not the hardware choices.

Can you imagine if there were something like CarOS that all automakers used, but tweaked the hell out of for their own cars? It would be just as "fragmented" a market and as much of a pain to write apps for.

FYI, there was a TED talk about Ekso (formerly Berkeley Bionics): http://www.ted.com/talks/eythor_bender_demos_human_exoskeletons.html

Of a neurologist who had a stroke, and wrote an article about it later. It was really amusing how she wrote about it. She knew what was going on, she knew the signs, hell, she was an expert. She called for help of course, but, she talked about how during it, she was having a rich internal dialog about the process... thinking of what functions were broken, how it was manifesting and how she experienced it....

You are probably thinking about Jill Bolte Taylor's "Stroke of insight". She even made a TED talk about it

There are examples of epigenetic modifications of somatic cells (that increase fitness) being transferred to gametes?

While this TED talk is not talking about transfer to gametes, it indicates that exposure to different environmental factors while in the womb can have an impact on development later in life:

http://www.ted.com/talks/annie_murphy_paul_what_we_learn_before_we_re_born.html

Much like the Linux scene frequently flares up to, we are stuck in the Paradox of Choice paradox with App Stores. I would guess most people would prefer a $50 suite that did everything except games for which their phone is useful to an adequate level.

Same situation with OSes and office productivity suites. Consumers have demonstrated over and over again that they would rather use crappy Windows + MS Office over having to try to pick the *right* distro of Linux and office suite.

Arguably, Apple's recent success figured this out with computer hardware by reducing the choice equation to price and portability.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html20 minute Ted Talk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMV4PIEIKY4A longer (1 hr) version from Google Tech Talks

In other words, the developer wouldn't have been free to choose, had Ariely had his way.

I don't think he's advocating it...I think he's only commenting on the psychology behind how people decide to spend money. His analysis completely ignores that companies make money from ad revenue on free apps which often results in more profit than an app sold at $0.99 because that's not relavent to the issue of the psychology behind the purchasing decision.

The interesting part of this story is how it illustrates human irrationality, not advocating Apple making a change. There's an old TED talk that examines this subject that I found fascinating. In it, lays out two hypothetical situations that are effectively identical but where the majority of humans will behave differently. I was fascinated by examining my own impulses when putting myself in the scenarios he posed and seeing that I had an urge to behave differently despite realizing that the situations were logically equivalent. For anyone interested, you can watch it here.

If gaming is the natural conclusion of giving kids these kinds of resources, then why not teach through games? There's a lot of material suggesting that games could be used in that way and be even more engaging than traditional learning tools. Gabe Zichermann touches on this point starting at 7:38 http://www.ted.com/talks/gabe_zichermann_how_games_make_kids_smarter.html Like he says, "not just are the kids going to be alright. Frankly, the kids are going to be awesome."

Once salary is satisfied, what drives us all are 3 things: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.

I get the sense from my friends who work on the West Coast that they get these things from their jobs. On the East Coast, it doesn't seem to occur as often (or at the very least is harder to find.) I'm not surprised that young 20-somethings bail as often as they do in such an environment.

Here's a TED talk about it: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

With Android tablets though, because they come in such varieties and with such a selection of features you can have a much more personalised experience. Not to mention the fact that individual manufacturers can customise the interface, like HTC Sense and Samsung TouchWiz, to give you more opportunity to pick one that you like.

For many people, more choice is a bad thing.