Slashdot Mirror

I've just come across a TED Talk you might like: Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.

I live on the not-so-Pacific coast. One day the buildings here will be sorted into two rough groups: the OLD buildings from the Port-au-Prince distribution, and the NEW buildings from the Santiago distribution.

Oh, hell. I'll include a link for the geographically impaired. Peter Haas: Haiti's disaster of engineering

It's not the age so much as the ethos of the day. Network transparency in X was never foreseen to handle streaming HDTV, 3D animation frame rates at the limits of human perception, or strange constraints of the pocket toys that are gaining prominence.

What I don't get in this discussion is the fear that native Wayland apps won't play nicely with remote X sessions. How many people do full motion video editing over remote X sessions? This is the kind of app most in need of a tighter and more seamless binding to the local display.

Is someone going to port the 2D Oracle installer to Wayland native? What the hell for?

What I expected to see here was more debate about whether Shuttleworth is a positive driving force in the Linux user experience ecosystem.

I'm inclined to think from the comments I've read here that this is a needed initiative. "We've always done it that way" is hardly a better reason to keep something around, than "old" is a reason to toss it out.

I suspect there's an element to this agenda of improving the working relationship with graphic chip vendors so that Linux does not run so far behind proprietary releases, moving X a little further out of the picture of what open source contributions from Intel and AMD need to validate as part of the Ubuntu release cycle, in performance validation, if nothing else.

There is actually precedent that has determined that recipes--at least, lists of ingredients and/or instructions for preparing them--are not copyrightable. Point of interest, but jokes are not copyrightable also. (Though a specific performance of those jokes can be.)

Reference

VERY interesting talk about making money in industries that are exempt from copyright, specifically the fashion industry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLqjQ55tz-U or http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html ... It's not just about Facebook, it has other interesting contents on "the beauty of data visualization" -- "David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world."

Pawan Sinha runs Project Prakash which goes into rural areas of India where treatment for congenital cataracts is not generally available. They do the surgery, for free, and in some cases ask the recipient whether they would like to contribute to the research program, which tracks how patients learn to see after the surgery [pdf]. The oldest person to receive the surgery was 29, and has had limited recovery of visual acuity. Children under the age of 6 typically have excellent prognoses following the surgery. See Pawan's TED talk here.

Scratch that, it’s actually a TED talk by David McCandless.

Here's a TED talk from Alan Russell on the methods and details of this technology.

> Why is 300 variations a problem?

Oblg. Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

Or said another way ...

http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2008/05/gcc-opensslc-fno-random-seed.html
People in the Linux community love to talk about how Linux is all cooperation and programmer love-making. But just take a look. These people don't cooperate. There are hundreds of slightly different distributions. Distributions don't talk to upstream. Upstream doesn't talk to distributions. Ten different programs are written to do the same thing in ten different shitty ways. When I ask two people to work together to solve my problem, I don't mean, "please independently come up with ten solutions each, none of which solve my problem. Thanks."

--
"When I was 20, 'wasting' time to get Linux/BSD work was an investment in learning; at 40 I'd rather waste time gaming / movies, then trying to dick around with all the package dependencies"
  - UnknownSoldier

Yeah, we need to eliminate mathematics from education because the economist's wet dream of Homo economicus is already working too well. What's sad is to see a statistician write this. For shame, for absolute shame. Statistics are quoted in every newspaper and on every TV station every day, mostly to the befuddlement of the general public.

The problem is that we don't want an educated public who regards the following paper as common sense:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Or course what I'm saying is not original to me. Dweebs everywhere are catching on.

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education

Although I would say that the principle of calculus is important. The problem with calculus is that we can't resist testing ugly mechanics. I guess we have our grade three spelling teacher to thank for that. Great literature, but can't spell during a flood of inspiration? Go to the back of the class.

Jane Austen's famous prose may not be hers after all

Regurgitating trig identities as evidence of grasping calculus has an electric chair utility function in the non-engineering population. But seriously, 16% of American GDP spent on health care, largely at the mercy of corporate observational studies, and a statistician is arguing that math education is overrated. Oh, the humanity! How about the general population having the vaguest clue about long tails and concentration of risk?

What Alan Greenspan got wrong is that while heads-up poker is a zero sum game and self interest carries the day, multiparty poker is subject to implicit collusion. You just need one weak player at the table bleeding a big stack for the poker sharks at the table to lick their chops collectively and organize for a division of spoils.

In the world of Goldman Sachs, the chump at the table is the average wage slave trying to save for retirement with no mathematical tools whatsoever. "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker." So, after one viewing of Fox News, you're expected to know the score. If the general public wasn't trained by public education to play over their heads, the financial elite might be subject to the market discipline of having to play at a table of equals. The horror! The horror!

Williard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your market discipline was unsound.
Goldman: Is my market discipline unsound?
Williard: I don't see any market discipline at all, sir.
Goldman: Who needs discipline when education is bliss?
Williard: These savages have K12?
Photographer: One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions.
Williard: Are you giving up America for a Playmate of the Month?
Goldman: Playmate of the Year, chief, Playmate of the Year.
Williard: What's in it for the crew?
Goldman: Would you believe 'sloppy seconds'?
Willard: You're the asshole of the world, major!

Playmate of the Year: Who are you?
Cleaned out: I'm next, ma'am.
Playmate: Are you crazy, Goddammit? Don't you think it's a little risky for your 401(k)?

Willard: Charlie Brown didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or bleeding too fast. His idea of great retirement was cold grits and a little bush meat. He had only two ways home: death, or bingo, the largest risk his education had trained him to comprehend.

Hans Rosling expained it really well at TED.

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

Yes, if you talk to some "conservatives", liberals want to legislate every aspect of your life, deciding what you're allowed to eat and when you can go to the bathroom. Liberals want to take all your money and give it to poor, lazy, inner-city black people. Liberals are weirdo hippy peaceniks and would surrender to the first attack on this country.

And if you ask some "liberals", conservatives are a bunch of hateful, xenophobic bigots who cling to their religion because they're too stupid to think for themselves. Conservatives want to take all your money and give it to one super-rich set of overlord corporate conspirators who will rule the world with an iron fist.

Both have some small amount of truth to them, but are mostly unfair. In both the case of "liberal" and "conservative", the terms might have several meanings. Many "conservatives", for example, are actually quite radical.

I think this talk is a pretty good place to start for a discussion on the virtues of being liberal vs. conservative.

Just wanted to bring Jonathan Haidt's "5 Moral Foundations" theory into the conversation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

Or watch the TED video if you're too lazy to read
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/341

Should be easier to tie in dopamine receptor genes to one or more of those traits:

1. Care for others, protecting them from harm. (He also referred to this dimension as Harm.)
      2. Fairness, Justice, treating others equally.
      3. Loyalty to your group, family, nation. (He also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
      4. Respect for tradition and legitimate authority. (He also referred to this dimension as Authority.)
      5. Purity, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions.

Strange about the introvert vs. extrovert thing... I would have surmised just the opposite... being an introverted engineer liberal type myself. And conservatives are the ones that typically go out to church to collect as a community.

There's a TED talk from a guy who researched giving computer/internet access to kids in India and it greatly increased their learning capabilities. I think the failure of computers in the studies you guys are talking about has more to do with the people not knowing how to integrate computers with the classroom rather than the computer itself being a "hindrance to learning". http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

as proven by Sugata Mitra (of Hole in the Wall project fame), if you get rid of the teachers and provide one computer per 4 children, and let the kids collaborate, they teach one another

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

The quote from Arthur C Clark is particularly telling: Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer.

Actually, it may be more efficient to replace the existing house with a more energy efficient house.

Link goes to one of my all time favorite Ted videos, because I often find myself asking the same questions as Catherine Mohr; except, where I guess, she has quantitative answers!

Yes, because people have proven that having more than one drug store, supermarket, or fast food chain inevitably disorients them and fouls up their lives.

Actually, it does. Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice. However, it also has its advantages, which is the reason we have them anyway.

Yes, yeast piss is dangerous to consume. It's full of very tiny disease-causing yeast and bacterial homunculi. No, that's not right. It's actually sterile when excreted from the yeast cell, but if the (male) yeast cell gets a forked eye and squirts all over the toilet seat, the sticky residue breeds disease-causing bacterial homunculi. No, that's not right either. Yeast don't argue about the toilet seat. The whole analogy seems broken beyond repair. If I had fallen for the Gerry Germ propaganda back in grade three, maybe I'd now fall for the ruse that disgust is scale invariant. Have I told you the one about the soiled electron?

There was a lot of similar crap back in the days of Gerry Germ. The next school year, I was struggling with the idea of "cold blooded" dinosaurs. I got the idea that dinosaurs might be like lizards and not croak immediately if their body temperature fell to ambient, but I never cottoned to the idea that dinosaurs didn't quaff Gatorade to cool down after an intense one-on-one. I think my science teacher at the time was a bit tenuous on the distinction between homeostatic and exothermic.

My next science teacher was adamant that fossil fuels were non-replenishable, which struck me as a chemical impossibility unless petroleum was a byproduct of supernovas as governed by their rigid cosmological schedules. Later I figured out that "non-replenishable petroleum" was a statement of science by someone with bills to pay. From the point of view of paying your bills, petroleum is non-replenishable. I don't recall my science teacher once mentioning that uranium is non-replenishable, and this was well before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, so it wasn't yet clear this wouldn't soon become your typical tax-payer's favorite whinge.

We're pretty stupid for the most part about plants, too.

Stefano Mancuso: The roots of plant intelligence

In addition to (bacteria==pathogens==germs) and (dinosaurs==lizards with giant bodies and small brains) and (petroleum==Genesis project) and (plants==passive and simple minded) there was the depiction of the electron as a tiny point mass, or sometimes an advanced mention of an atom's "cloud of electrons", but never any mention of hydrogen's "cloud of electron". Until you get the idea that one is a crowd, you don't get anything. You have to go one step beyond the misanthrope's creed (one's company, two's a crowd) to really _get_ quantum physics.

These days the biologists are tapping into the poets ("I contain multitudes") and it turns out that "one" is an entire ecosystem, even if it still takes two to tango. I might have cracked the sanitization of this in elementary school, but my books and teachers were strangely silent about the urogenital baton-pass routing around the bath soap. At least in this case they had a coherent motive for keeping the lights dim.

You're preaching against the ivory towers and to everyman. Kudos!

However, because the people in ivory towers (take a look at the SCOTUS) all come from and promulgate the status quo. People from Harvard (or any other "Prestigious University") get the best jobs, highest pay, and hire Harvard Grads, not because they are the best, but to keep the status going. It is self serving at best, and at worst is so incestuous that the outcome can only be genetically flawed.

On the other hand, you can do something like this which really shows how flawed current classroom education models can really be. A method which happens to fit what you seem to be proposing.

I watched an interesting TED presentation a while ago about geo-engineering. The presenter pointed out that we should develop international agreements around geo-engineering to prevent one country from unilaterally deploying a solution that may benefit them but be to the detriment of the rest of the world. Not that it would stop anybody from going ahead and doing it anyways...

.

Benoit Mandelbrot practically invented a new field of mathematics that we now use for everything from measuring the size of forests to identifying cancer in its early stages. He was the best of mathematicians.

Eight months ago he gave a ted talk describing his work. If you want to explore fractals for yourself, I recommend GNU XaoS for all platforms.

His presentation.

I thought the research was pointing at the fact that bacteria seem to function as collectives and are therefore more complex then their individual components would indicate. http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

Reminds me of this talk, about the brain and certain damage it can receive.

Vilayanur Ramachandran on your mind

-Quartinae

Take a look at this guy: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

Summary: you put a computer somewhere in rural India. Kids, who don't know much of english, flock to it and learn on their own how to use it; when you come back later, they say "We need a faster CPU and a better mouse."

In my experience, kids want to learn. At age three, you have to try hard to make them stop asking "why?" about almost everything. If they have a sliver of interest, they will pick up reading with a wee bit of parent assistance (as I did, FWIW) before school. As they grow up and become adolescents and eventually adults, they will acquire a passion and develop their skills in it, as I'm convinced most people here have done. When they do, you encourage them and lend them a helping hand if (and only if!) they ask for it.

Or, you send them to school (or rather, you don't resist the people who pressure them to go there), and the school system will drain the curiousity out of them and make certain they won't later acquire a passion for much of what's taught in there.

Ask yourself: did you become fascinated by mathematics, programming, astronomy, biotechnology, music or law (just to name some of the stated passions of slashdotters) because you were forced to study it in school? Did you become good at it because you were forced to study it?

Sugata Mitra would disagree.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

How is the parent comment interesting?

The child-driven education
As long as they have access to information especially access to the internet they will learn a lot. That video IS interesting.

How about Better Place? The creator had a prominent TED speech. Fills up faster than a regular car, and cheaper to own. The only issue is that they plan on charging by the mile, but insist it's still cheaper than your gas guzzler.

More choice is not necessarily a good thing.

but really was just a gimmick to draw in crowds and immerse them in a spectacular alien world without much substance

Not to detract from your overall point, which was really solid, but I thought I'd refer you to Cameron's TED talk where he basically cops to what you're saying. The only difference is, the world isn't a gimmick. He wanted to make a movie demonstrating the value of his digital production company and felt that an immersive alien experience was the best way to do it. He so deeply enjoys the feeling of being in our real alien worlds, like deep diving in the ocean, but can't get anyone to watch a movie about that.

Cameron's a selfish guy, but not nearly the money-slut everyone paints him to be.

Not salient to the point, but I thought you might enjoy the TED talk. :)

Here's an idea: do it, rather than posting on Slashdot about it.

radish may already plan on doing it, you don't know. Posting on Slashdot about it does not take away his/her ability to do so.

Yes it does.

Well, first of all, because watching people is a lot more interesting than reading things. We've been doing it (watching people talk, and understanding a lot more than from paper) for literally millions of years. Reading? Not so much. Maybe a few hundred years.

Chris Anderson recently had a talk at TED describing why video is so important. There are many things you just cannot describe easily with words or graphs. I'm pretty sure that all the information imparted in those videos is readily available in a bunch of papers, RFCs or... papers. But in one easy-to-read page that will get people motivated? Probably not.

I liked this video very much http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception.html , because it explains a lot.

the thing is that throughout human history, strange things have been reported by a lot of people. at some point in time, "people with both feet on the ground" started to control technology and science, because money started being involved. My problem is that research into the "paranormal" is generally made by overexcited idiots or people who don't care about having a scientific career (once you put "UFO investigator" on your CV, there's a certain image...). Is this because "no nonsense" people control science, or because there are no paranormal phenomena?
As a scientist who needs money, I am forced to do what society pays me to do, and I have no way of deciding if there is any truth in these reports, because I can't trust the investigators who give positive results, and when trustworthy people say things, they don't have any proof, with a good reason for not having proof. I admit I am a bit frustrated that I can't study these things myself, to be sure...
For instance, I've seen UFOs: something that looks like stars, moving in the sky in straight lines, sometimes disapearing. I assume they're satelites. At some point, I've seen three of these lights moving in formation (again in a straight line, no weirdness), so I've begun to think some of them are high altitude planes (what would be the point of 3 satelites moving in formation? also, I didn't see these disapear), but I also know that plane lights usually flicker. to me they are UFOs because I'm not sure what they are, but there's nothing supernatural about them.
What I would like is to be able to type "night UFO" in google (or another search engine), and be directed to the website of a respectable astronomical institute, where they list the types of moving lights that can be seen in the nightsky, with example photos and films. What I do find when searching "moving lights nightsky" is "unexplained-mysteries.com" (I didn't even click on it) and the like. So I'm a bit disapointed. I have to search "satellite night sky" to find the explanation, which means I already know the answer.

Some ignoramus actually removed all chemical equations from the Smelting article.

Some ignoramus put forward a regressive edit on an article lacking citations as evidence of process problems at Wikipedia. Yes, the edit was poorly judged, but an article lacking citations is a cork in a windstorm.

I tend to defend Wikipedia since the interesting question is "Why does it work at all?" One lesson we've learned is that metrics of irreproachability constitute a poor utility function with respect to what most people need most of the time. It falls short when the aim is to slap your name on a document purporting to contain original work adding value to the community.

So yes, Wikipedia falls vastly short of providing a credible foundation for promulgating reputation. The niche it properly occupies is halfway between the card catalog and the dusty tomes of eminence. It's a secondary transfer station in the subway system of knowledge.

When I was eight years old my father showed me how to wind a wire around a large nail and make an electromagnet. It wasn't long before I looked up electromagnetism in an edition of the Encyclopedia Britanica from the 1960s. This was heavy going for a nine year old. I learned practically nothing, the eminence and authority of the text flying completely over my head.

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education

And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12 year-old children in a south Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?

How did it go? SPOILER ALERT

"Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing?" They said, "We look at it every day." So I said, "For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand?" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else."

Going back to my early experience with Britannica, "apart from understanding that the ratio of windings in a transformer established the ratio of voltage and the inverse ratio for current, I've understood hardly anything else." That's not high praise. I'd have made more progress with an internet full of unreliable napkin diagrams explicated in a foreign language.

The problem is that all too often irreproachable equates to inaccessible. You can even find this relationship within the cloisters of the peer review process.

From the font of no knowledge:

When later challenges to the legitimacy of the papers submitted by the Bogdanov brothers arose, the debate spread to the question of whether the substitution of a "publication requirement" by university professors when they do not understand students' work is a valid means of determining the veracity of a paper.

My recent insight into peer review is that it operates at two distinct time scales. The short time scale is career advancement with tau = 5 years. The longer time scale is reliable scientific consensus which a time scale of tau = 30 years. (It sometimes takes seven tau periods before the last ripple is smoothed out.) There is no question that peer review is a excellent mechanism to achieve scientific consensus over century time scales.

The scientists themselves are caught up in the dual function of peer view to gate career advancement and to establish the accurate, long term consensus, and thereby sometimes fall into the trap of conflating power with authority.

Within the context of scientific peer review, over the generational time frame, the cliques and rivalries fall by the wayside, the old arguments lose their sex appeal, and the bad actors move onto more topical debates.

Peer review fails to transcend human politi

There is a very interesting TED talk about this exact topic (how copyright affects creativity in other industries): Lessons from fashion's free culture

Secondly, cancer is growing in all of us, all the time... The reason we don't all die of tumors shortly after birth is because the immune system identifies them and eliminates them.

There are other factors that keep cancerous cells in check, too. Apparently angiogenesis plays a role in allowing cancer to grow.

Jobs was right to think that he could get on the plane with his stars because, usually, he would be able to.

Exactly, because everywhere everything should be like it is in the US.

Now go and watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_different.html

Where (or when) did you get a snapshot of those numbers? Iran (which completely blocks wikileaks) has 111 pages, not just 11 (thought, I do agree, 111 pages is still too low). And Italy has 99 pages, not just 3.

Also, it's weird that Kenya and Iceland don't appear in your samples. Kenya and Iceland may not be in the most widely read categories on wikileaks, perhaps no outsider really cares about them I suppose, and perhaps, they don't contain very many pages either, but in both those cases at least, those two countries have profoundly been affected by leaks appearing on wikileaks. In the former, it can be said that wikileaks (in this case, Julian Assange especially) completely changed the course of a Kenyan election, and exposed the many corruptions of a former President/dictator who was trying to regain power. And in the latter case, Iceland, Wikileaks exposed key details about the financial bailout/crisis in Iceland that had been officially censored by the government, that it created such popular uproar in Iceland, that the Iceland government promised that it would never censor anything again, that it completely overhauled its speech laws, passing unanimously, and even agreed to become a haven for free speech (even from foreign powers, not just itself).

Seems like someone should read The Paradox of Choice. Or, perhaps either of the talks the author gave at TED or Google.

I saw this same concept demo'd on the TED podcast by an american company over a year ago: http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/25/wireless_electr/

He also seems to specifically target the US and only the US, as if no other country is currently doing dubious shit.

Please stop all that 'poor me'/'poor us'/"it's unfair" whiny victim talk.

For a time, the newly "elected" Kenyan government ***WAS*** his sole and unique target. And if anyone is to blame about you not knowing about how his work impacted the course of history in Kenya -- you only have yourself to blame. It's not like he was making a big secret out of it.

Why do you assume I vote Republican? Actually, I voted for Cynthia McKinney in the last election, and Nader in years before, mostly as a protest vote. :-) I'm in a "safe state" so I knew the Democrats would win in those states anyway.

Do you see how your assumptions could be part of the problem? Also, Democrats, like Republicans, are a big part of the problem... Democrats are not engaging with these bigger trends. Obama is a mostly a corporatist and upholder of a broken status-quo relative to what we could see. Look at who he put in charge of US economic policy (people from Wall Street). Look who he put in charge of "education" reform (people from big schools). He's also a militarist -- within three days, he used military killer robots (drones) in a way that lead to the (claimed) deaths of three children.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Obama-Finds-Predator-Drones-Hilarious-1171
Solutions to moving beyond that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

You're not engaging with the factual information I presented (as factual as stuff is from the US Government http://www.shadowstats.com/ ). Why? Is it perhaps just too unsettling to think about the implications? Those jobs and population figures are not much of calculations as a statement of facts as presented by the US government and a simple prediction of population growth the next decade based on the last decade.

It's true there are retirements coming up, but that is not going to fix the big trend. And in the short term (next decade) many people in the USA lost much of their retirement nest egg and are working longer, either postponing retirement or going back to work after the had retirement (incidentally, depressing wages).

So, again, where are thirty million net new jobs going to come from in the USA over the next decade?

Are you suggesting people stop trying to make sense of macroeconomic trends? Sure, doing volunteer stuff etc. is great, and I do, but you also just can't stick your head in the sand. Also, how can anyone start a business and hope for success in it if the fundamental dynamics of the economy are changing and they are not aware of it?

Also, if you look at the basic demographics of what is going on in the world (see Hans Rosling), you will see that "foreigners" are rapidly increasing in their ability to produce their own stuff. The USA has very little relative advantage anymore, the way it did when it was the only major intact economy after WWII.
    http://www.gapminder.org/
    http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
And, you'd also see that even China is automating to cut labor costs...
    http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338

Anyway, you might want to think about how you are filtering, spinning, and assuming information here.

The good news is, this all helps me get a better sense of how to present things, so thanks.

Building the game layer on top of the world: Seth Priebatsch on TED.com

The filter in the article is just an ordinary active carbon filter. This is waaay better.

Cool piece of equipment. It's basically an RO filter. The pressure required for operation comes from the user pumping it up with an air pump. It's also small enough to take camping or on long hikes if you have a source of untrusted water nearby.

The filter in the article is just an ordinary active carbon filter. This is waaay better.

There's no contradiction. He said they want to do something useful. That doesn't mean they want to do the same thing that that particular employer wants them to do. It also doesn't mean they want to do the same useful thing every day according to a timetable set by others.

I'd add to the OPs comment that the enthusiasm to go and do something useful for the pleasure of doing it is all too often killed by an educational system that's geared to the industrial revolution's imperative to produce worker bees. See:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Here's a video about how a rainforest was created in only 20 years, altering weather and creating a habitat for abundant life. This could be done all over the world to mediate the effects of Human activity.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

This guy built a laser which tracks mosquitoes in a room and zaps them. Surely the technology can be adapted...

Still no reason not to look at the problem and try to do our best. Who knows, perhaps the threshold is a little more flexible than thought, or we can come up with solutions that would make it more easy to reduce the carbon dioxide (and other gases) output. I, for one, will be reducing my share by eating 70% less meat per week, as indicated by http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat.html

B.

I had the same doubts as well. But if you watch Gates' TED speech, and also this speech http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html which includes a very nice moving bubble chart you will see that (apparently) as the child mortality improves, people have less children. In other words, when children die by the dozens, people overcompensate for that by having more of them. Gates is essentially trying to "hack" the system by improving child mortality and _fixing_ overpopulation.

BTW, in a recent conversation, i was said "skeptical guy", but after seeing that chart i changed my mind. Do watch that speech, it's very interesting.