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Take 'em straight to TED.

His name is Nathan Myhrvold... come on Slashdot... you used to be cool (in an ironic sort of way)

TED Profile.
Nathan Myhrvold on archeology, animal photography, BBQ ...(Not anything on the research in question)

His name is Nathan Myhrvold... come on Slashdot... you used to be cool (in an ironic sort of way)

TED Profile.
Nathan Myhrvold on archeology, animal photography, BBQ ...(Not anything on the research in question)

One of the best videos I have seen that delves into this subject was Jill Bolte Taylors TED talk about her own stroke.

Let me state up front that for many, many reasons I think society is better of heading towards New Urbanism... both for sociological, psychological, resource efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. We could be happier, healthier, live in cleaner cities and maybe even work less hours and yet still have the same, if not better levels of comfort.

However, it seems the 2 main problems with EV's have been solved. Those 2 problems were:
1. No one wants to buy an expensive new battery every few years as the car battery runs down. (Although battery life technology increases all the time).
2. No one wants to have to stop and charge for 8 hours on the occasions they need to drive more than 160km.

This is solved with the "Better Place" battery swap system! The irony here is I actually think a "Better Place" is a car-free, or extremely "car-disciplined" town plan like New Urbanism is a much better place to live.

Better Place have developed a new international EV car standard and are inviting all car companies to join up or be left behind. Renault-Nissan have already joined up, and will be producing the first cheap mass produced electric car ever.

They sell you the car, but they own the battery.

Then for most suburban driving you'll just charge whenever the car is still. (Which works out on average about 22 hours a day!) You'll charge at home, at work, at the shops. (Better Place installs EV charge points everywhere when they "do" a city).

The CEO Shai Agassi gave a presentation at his TED talk.
Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars, Video on TED.com

Better Place is coming to taxis in Tokyo, a trial in Canberra, San Francisco, massive deployment in Israel (which will probably be the first country off oil for domestic car use), Hawaii, Denmark, and other places.

Shai's Australian talk basically said that on a per km basis, electricity will charge your car at about $0.80 cents a litre oil equivalent distance. Fuel in Australia costs around $1.20 to $1.30 a litre. Imagine how fast people are going to want these cars when they realise how convenient and cheap they are now, let alone when peak oil hits.

However.... there are a whole bunch of other peaks coming, including peaks in various rare earths and metals used in car production, which is why I prefer the lower embodied energy solutions of New Urbanism and walkable cities.

Even the Australian Senate found for "more walkable" cities... and yet realised this could be difficult.

"Increasing walking, cycling and public transport use in cities is a worthwhile goal for a number of reasons, regardless of predictions about the oil future. If there is a long term rise in the price of oil, it will be all the more necessary."

However we should not underestimate the difficulties involved. Vast areas of post World War 2 suburbia have been designed on the assumption that most travel would be by car, and with the aim of making this easier. The effect has been to make travel in any other way more difficult, as activity centres disperse to sites distant from the public transport network, and the environment for pedestrians and cyclists is degraded by traffic. In these areas existing public transport routes do not serve many travel needs, and existing services mostly function as welfare for people without cars, with a very low proportion of total trips

Sometimes talking to people with very pro-sciene views, you get the idea that "science" is either an accumulated set of known facts or a perfect method which, because of peer review, is infallible at learning absolute truth.

In reality, it's just a set of processes that we've developed and which has been generally more successful at producing helpful results than other methods. No reason to think that the way we go about it couldn't be improved. I can't imagine that failing to share the results failed experiments doesn't sometimes result in the loss of important information.

Coincidentally I just saw this talk which raises the question whether helpful data can be gathered even if it's not gathered through conventional rigorous scientific methods. It seems like an interesting idea-- they're essentially gathering lots of data from various sources and using statistical analysis developed by economists to try to draw conclusions. My biggest concern would be purposeful manipulation by someone with an agenda.

But anyway, all of this is to say that this has gotten me thinking about how the scientific process may still be open to some innovation.

That's because they know they'll lose.

Here's Apple's "multi-touch" patent.
Date filed: July 3, 2006

Here's Jeff Han demonstrating multi-touch interface in Feb. 2006 that he had been working on. Pinch and zoom? Gestures? Multiple fingers/hands? It's all there. You can tell he didn't come up with that overnight.

Looks like someone at Apple noticed his or similar technology/research and said - hey, this hasn't been patented yet!

Give props to the USPTO and the patent system, as usual.

Jeff Han did this four years ago:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html

He now has a company spun off from his research at NYU:
http://www.perceptivepixel.com/

I'll use this opportunity to make a larger point: you're not going to get much progress out of the corporate game of developing a product. The difference is in these two questions:

1. What is possible to sell?

2. What is possible?

Your view shows how ignorant you are of a 3rd world situation.

3rd world?

It's not quite that simple either. People have 12 babies because they assume that the majority of them are going to die before the age of 5. However, if you lower the infant mortality rate and the expectation of infant mortality, you actually reduce the number of children born because you can reasonably assume you'll be able to raise each child to adulthood. At least, that's what they argue in this recent TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_saves_lives.html

The "way to a better future for the world" is birth control and education. Don't want to sound cold, but the places with the most human suffering are also the areas with the worst overpopulation vs. the least natural resources.

Dr. Hans Rosling debunked that theory a while ago. I'd highly recommend watching this (10 minutes) video. He uses his gapminder.org tool and backs the points he makes with real data.

The tl;dr version of the video:

"My students, they tell me population growth destroys the environment, so poor children may as well die ... Now, the problem with that thinking, with this thought, is not that it's not moral, it's that it's wrong. And I will show you why..."

If you have more free time on your hand after watching this, I'd highly recommend looking up his TED talks, specially the one titled "Let my dataset change your mindset".

My GF's great-grandmother passed away in November. She was very close.

Weepy GF gets onto the web site of a regional Canadian carrier that prides itself on its customer service, selects her flight, and begins to fill out the VISA information. After filling out most of the information she clicks "continue" and *bam* up comes VISA's activation during shopping page (ADS) with a giant "I agree" button under inscrutable masses of legal fine print. She is in a fine state of mind for clicking her life away.

This happens right in the middle of the transaction, with no advance warning. Not on the page before she began filling out the details: to complete this transaction with your VISA card, you will be obligated to click "I agree" to the ADS terms of service, which shifts VISA's liability onto your shoulders and plays havoc with established web security practices and altogether makes the world a shittier place.

All of this under the commercial maxim that instant gratification == learned helplessness. Your average user will blindly click anything during gratification interruptus.

As it happens, my red-eyed GF muttered out loud "WTF is this?". It took me about 30s to get past "HF those sleezy MFs". Then I told her to slam down the virtual circuit on her half-completed web page transaction and start the transaction over again using an aging circuit-switched technology far less suited to rights erosion, and also more expensive for the airline to provide. Real human at the other end. What a PITA.

Brilliant lose-lose for everyone involved.

Two of the links I recorded checked this out:
Links More Banking Stupidity: Phished by Visa
Verified by Visa: British banks phish their own customers - Boing Boing

Redacted portions of an online TOS from a large Canadian bank which has since gone 404.

You agree not to: modify, adapt, sub-license, translate, sell, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the Verified by Visa Website or service or the software used in connection with Verified by Visa.

You agree to immediately notify us by contacting us, as we require in our cardholder agreement with you for a lost or stolen card of any unauthorized use of your password or other verification information, or any other breach of security. You will be liable for any unauthorized activity involving use of your password or Activation Data, until we receive such notice.

Answer me this, Batman:

How is one supposed to notify the bank that you've lost control over the password, when you lose control to a phishing widget embedded in a concealed iFrame?

I wrote that riddle back in November, and I'm no closer now to coming up with the solution. FWIW, this agreement is probably less egregious than the one that came up under ADS, from a different major Canadian bank. Bonus marks for completing this task without first discovering how the service works which violates your TOS.

This whole thing makes me seriously limbic.

Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity

And on the other side, among our kids, there's a growing copyright abolitionism, a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do, rejects copyright and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other, a fact we should have learned many, many times over, and both extremes in this debate are just wrong.

For the good of society, the law ought not to be an ass, and the VISA company ought to not be pushing the matter like a used car salesman at the helm of an invincible glass castle.

As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer". Telling the people only what they want to hear is just as bad (if not worse) than only telling them the news YOU want them to hear...

This whole thing reminds me of a couple of TED talks. They're not directly related, but they're some food for thought on the following question: Is it good for us to get what we want?

The big problem with our news these days, in my opinion, is that we're already "getting what we want" and so the "news" that most of us get are in the form of entertainment shows that cater to our emotional needs. Strangely, I'm not talking about the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, but rather of all these news shows who put on vapid (but often attractive) pundits who tell us in snarky tones who we can blame for what's wrong with our lives. News is aimed at the lowest common denominator to such a degree that you *need* a certain level of personalization in order to get real news right now. You need to find a niche news source in order to get anything remotely informative, and increasingly even newspapers are becoming a niche source.

Now I would agree that it would be great if new agencies were independent and credible groups of diverse but intelligent and informed people who told us the things we needed to know about, whether we liked it or not. Part of the problem with that idea, though, is that our current news agencies are entertainment businesses run by entertainment empires for profit. Another part of the problem is that people self-filter anyway-- keep telling people things that they don't want to hear and they stop listening. Even when you get all your news in the form of a newspaper, you might only read the articles you're interested in.

As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer". Telling the people only what they want to hear is just as bad (if not worse) than only telling them the news YOU want them to hear...

This whole thing reminds me of a couple of TED talks. They're not directly related, but they're some food for thought on the following question: Is it good for us to get what we want?

The big problem with our news these days, in my opinion, is that we're already "getting what we want" and so the "news" that most of us get are in the form of entertainment shows that cater to our emotional needs. Strangely, I'm not talking about the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, but rather of all these news shows who put on vapid (but often attractive) pundits who tell us in snarky tones who we can blame for what's wrong with our lives. News is aimed at the lowest common denominator to such a degree that you *need* a certain level of personalization in order to get real news right now. You need to find a niche news source in order to get anything remotely informative, and increasingly even newspapers are becoming a niche source.

Now I would agree that it would be great if new agencies were independent and credible groups of diverse but intelligent and informed people who told us the things we needed to know about, whether we liked it or not. Part of the problem with that idea, though, is that our current news agencies are entertainment businesses run by entertainment empires for profit. Another part of the problem is that people self-filter anyway-- keep telling people things that they don't want to hear and they stop listening. Even when you get all your news in the form of a newspaper, you might only read the articles you're interested in.

As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer". Telling the people only what they want to hear is just as bad (if not worse) than only telling them the news YOU want them to hear...

This whole thing reminds me of a couple of TED talks. They're not directly related, but they're some food for thought on the following question: Is it good for us to get what we want?

The big problem with our news these days, in my opinion, is that we're already "getting what we want" and so the "news" that most of us get are in the form of entertainment shows that cater to our emotional needs. Strangely, I'm not talking about the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, but rather of all these news shows who put on vapid (but often attractive) pundits who tell us in snarky tones who we can blame for what's wrong with our lives. News is aimed at the lowest common denominator to such a degree that you *need* a certain level of personalization in order to get real news right now. You need to find a niche news source in order to get anything remotely informative, and increasingly even newspapers are becoming a niche source.

Now I would agree that it would be great if new agencies were independent and credible groups of diverse but intelligent and informed people who told us the things we needed to know about, whether we liked it or not. Part of the problem with that idea, though, is that our current news agencies are entertainment businesses run by entertainment empires for profit. Another part of the problem is that people self-filter anyway-- keep telling people things that they don't want to hear and they stop listening. Even when you get all your news in the form of a newspaper, you might only read the articles you're interested in.

(helps to preview) Here's the fixed link: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html/

I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions presented here. Susan Blackmore and Richard Dawkins have described evolution differently -
http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html . The idea relates to replicators, and that the replicators actually evolve, and that genetic replicators are only one form of replication. Wherever there is replication, there is evolution. This relates to genes, and the category described by Dawkins, memes. Susan Blackmore identified a new replicator named temes. (described in the linked video). In this paradigm, evolution relates to replicators adapting to new environments to survive, which could easily apply to organisms that do not partake in genetic evolution.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science.html Enjoy.. It is shown that the rate of development AND adoption of technology(be it biological or technological) follows something similar to Moore's law, not a linear curve

Hey baby, how's your baby? Fair exchange, in my books.

From Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thank to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. Many are not aware of -- no this is not a joke. This is very serious. It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. And providing data free of charge, on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much.

Quite in the opposite of the World Bank [who rock] it's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in a modern way, as we do. And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor.

OP is correct, people will likely go with whatever is suggested by the government, even given the chance to review and modify it. Dan Ariely points out this effect in the context of organ donor percentages across multiple nations in his TED talk. I also think that Intuit is, though admittedly biased, correct (at least insofar as the company was quoted correctly in the summary).

But what I want to know is, by what metric do you determine the average case? 95% of the time the government's calculations are accurate? 99%? 99.9%? The census.gov Population Clock estimates that there are 308 million people in the United States, and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics currently claims that the employment-population ratio is 58 percent, which I assume translates to about 179 million people who'll be paying income taxes.

If the error rate is 1%, just short of 2 million people will have to correct mistakes in their government-provided taxation proposals. If the error rate is 0.1%, it'll be just shy of 200,000 people.

I agree in principal that taxes could be streamlined, but I would want to see some hard numbers after a trial run before deciding that the government was doing a good job (and I would want to see a comparison with the current error rate, as well as hard numbers on the Intuit-assisted error rate).

Eventually, non-smartphones will fade away. Saying that their smartphone marketshare is going down and the rest doesn't matter is akin to saying that computer sales have declined, but hey, we're still selling typewriters.

This might be the case for western countries, but the bulk of people and the biggest market is in countries where people have a lot less income. Nokia is targeting these markets with their cheaper models and unmatched (volume & price) production system. It makes sense when you think about it. It's just often hard to see that world looks quite different outside our little lives.

Have a look at this TED presentation about poverty. It gives a pretty good picture about where we are now globally

Regarding China I can recommend this TED presentation which shows quite nicely the change in priorities between the "communist" and "state capitalist" periods in China around the 03:50 mark. The fact there is starvation in the midst of a revolution or civil war should come as a surprise to no one and really doesn't say much about the actors in those events.

I'm not saying there were no institutional problems, such as forcing collectivization on farmers who historically are fiercely individualist and the whole quota system is clearly a bad idea. However at least part of the reason for the shortages in the eastern block was the fact that we were bankrupting them through an expensive arms race (in fact the western world is bankrupt too though it hasn't come out yet because we're still on top for the moment and China keeps buying our debt) while also gauging them in international trade for ideological reasons. Furthermore the "supermarket shelves overflowing with goods" is a bad metric for success. It is rather an example of the west's unsustainable way of living: there is no way all the people on earth could live like this without depleting all our resources in short order. Better metrics would be general health, literacy, lack of malnutrition, etc.

One of the problems I have with these discussions is the beam in our own eye is often ignored. The west has had more than its share of tyranny and abuses though it generally, though not exclusively, preferred to apply them to foreign countries and their populace rather than its own.

We need to work in our local cities and communities to retrofit our urban designs so that we aren't forced into a very expensive lifestyle.
Two great sources to start:

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

http://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-American/dp/0865476063/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263584896&sr=8-20

Another talk on the same topic. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war.html

Military robots are the future of war. We will see robot armies fighting each other. Consider what kind of surveillance state you can create by millions of robotic insects, using swarm intelligence / smart dust to report on everyone.

Maybe mankind ends up like in matrix, but with opposing robot armies trying to kill the last survivors from the superpowers, who are hiding deep down underground, kept alive by fading nuclear reactors...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the appeal of Natal is not so much the motion sensing but the head and eye tracking. This means revolutionizing the way camera systems and perspective will work in games. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then watch this ted talk http://blog.ted.com/2008/04/wii_remote_hack.php and note that Johnny Lee has been on the Natal team for quite some time. Clearly the developers have a lot more to work with here than just motion controls.

Speaking of fresh water, I'm sure some of

these

could help

Not only that the guy sounds like a bit of a douchebag, why would you EVER use mathematics for human relationships?

I didn't know there was a douchebag continuum. As for mathematics, it beats dropping a pebble in the jar every time you turn the trick. But who's counting?

Personally, I chose to read the article as a fabulous send up of the Drake equation. Only he doesn't get his math quite right, because attraction tends to be reciprocal, plus attraction is open to subtle distortions and shouldn't be modelled as a constant term.

Turns out, god made ugly people so the rest of us could hook up.

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

I don't disagree the mouse will disappear, just that Eye-tracking won't be the thing to do it. I believe Multi-touch will be, go google some of Jeff Hans videos (or look it up on TED.com) and you will see some amazing applicatons he's made with Touch Screens, or even sophistaced smart boards and projection techniques using relatively affordable hardware.

I just watched this and I agree - even the keyboard will probably be phased out once accurate Touch screen technology gets better amongst the big players. The great thing about all of Jeff Hans' items is that they are Open Source, if I put the money down for the hardware* I can duplicate EVERYTHING he demos, even contribute to his projects.

I might fire off an email and just ask him if he has any research going on with Eye tracking technology, and if he does, how much it would cost to set something like that up.

I think ultimately by the time I reach 80, some of the tech in Minority Report should be existant. We will have cool interfaces that change with multiple inputs from the user. And that Ads can essentially read my retinas from far away, and annoy the hell out of me.

*In fact, the first video of his that I saw he was demoing how a Wiimote and an Infra red Diode (Approximately 50 dollars) could produce a smart board (several hundred dollars). I am still considering doing this with just to play around with it.

Let me state up front that for many, many reasons I think society is better of heading towards New Urbanism... both for sociological, psychological, resource efficiency and energy efficiency reasons. We could be happier, healthier, live in cleaner cities and maybe even work less hours and yet still have the same, if not better levels of comfort.

However, it seems the 2 main problems with EV's have been solved. Those 2 problems were:
1. No one wants to buy an expensive new battery every few years as the car battery runs down. (Although battery life technology increases all the time).
2. No one wants to have to stop and charge for 8 hours on the occasions they need to drive more than 160km.

This is solved with the "Better Place" battery swap system! The irony here is I actually think a "Better Place" is a car-free, or extremely "car-disciplined" town plan like New Urbanism is a much better place to live.

Better Place have developed a new international EV car standard and are inviting all car companies to join up or be left behind. Renault-Nissan have already joined up, and will be producing the first cheap mass produced electric car ever.

They sell you the car, but they own the battery.

Then for most suburban driving you'll just charge whenever the car is still. (Which works out on average about 22 hours a day!) You'll charge at home, at work, at the shops. (Better Place installs EV charge points everywhere when they "do" a city).

The CEO Shai Agassi gave a presentation at his TED talk.
Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars, Video on TED.com

Better Place is coming to taxis in Tokyo, a trial in Canberra, San Francisco, massive deployment in Israel (which will probably be the first country off oil for domestic car use), Hawaii, Denmark, and other places.

Shai's Australian talk basically said that on a per km basis, electricity will charge your car at about $0.80 cents a litre oil equivalent distance. Fuel in Australia costs around $1.20 to $1.30 a litre. Imagine how fast people are going to want these cars when they realise how convenient and cheap they are now, let alone when peak oil hits.

However.... there are a whole bunch of other peaks coming, including peaks in various rare earths and metals used in car production, which is why I prefer the lower embodied energy solutions of New Urbanism and walkable cities.

Even the Australian Senate found for "more walkable" cities... and yet realised this could be difficult.

"Increasing walking, cycling and public transport use in cities is a worthwhile goal for a number of reasons, regardless of predictions about the oil future. If there is a long term rise in the price of oil, it will be all the more necessary."

However we should not underestimate the difficulties involved. Vast areas of post World War 2 suburbia have been designed on the assumption that most travel would be by car, and with the aim of making this easier. The effect has been to make travel in any other way more difficult, as activity centres disperse to sites distant from the public transport network, and the environment for pedestrians and cyclists is degraded by traffic. In these areas existing public transport routes do not serve many travel needs, and existing services mostly function as welfare for people without cars, with a very low proportion of total trips (less than 5%)."

Chapter 5:21-22

My favourite piece ever to explore how quickly we could retrofit suburbia around walking distance plans is Worldchanging: My Other Car is a Bri

Actually, if we would have funded Project Orion, we would have gone to Saturn in the early 1960's. See http://www.ted.com/talks/george_dyson_on_project_orion.html among other references.

You're wrong - we do have more opportunities and choices now than we used to. Children once grew up on farms with the expectation that they'd take over duties when old enough to do so. Education was for a select few - it wasn't seen as being valuable or useful to people that had their menial labor careers mapped out already. You ate what was being grown locally (in season produce).

Barry Schwartz gave an interesting talk (transcript) at TED in 2006 on why choice and extra freedoms lead to depression.

Despite what they keep showing in the press releases, I don't think the gesture control is what the big titles will be using it for. Remember Johnny Lee's wiimote hack at TED? http://blog.ted.com/2008/04/wii_remote_hack.php According to his blog, he's been working on Natal and seems very impressed with the specs. http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2009/06/project-natal.html Anyway, I'm guessing it's new camera controls like his that would really sell this thing for the "serious gamers" and not necessarily the motion sensing.

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

The woman who heads Washington DC's Educ Dep't has such a plan for teachers (ie, to pull in more great teachers), but her intention is also tied up with removing tenure (so they can get rid of lousy teachers).

Another way to solve at least the over-prescription problems in any pill-based country's medical care system is to increase the number of doctors, eg, by:

1. creating many more places for future students at medical school, but... ALSO:

2. link getting such a place with an agreement to serve for a year or two in places where doctors are scarce

Sorry, PCP / Doctor 603, I - for one - am NOT prepared to buy into your (subtle):

    "Pay me more or - I swear! - I'm, gonna [continue to] over-prescribe anti-biotics!!!"

More doctors - graduating from med schools with more places for them to study - is a MUCH better place to send the cash you might like to pocket, for your entertainment, etc.

Think:

1. China's Barefoot doctors (past? or still going? Many, low-cost, low-skilled medics),

2. In traditional (ie, Pre-Mao) China, I'm told that patients only paid their doctor when well again, &

2. Have a look at India's "McDonald's-style" eye-care, for its many people with vision problems
        as recently documented, eg, in a recent talk at "TED India" (It's now at: http://ted.com/ )

        (Altho NOT the same, its org'l model translates easily to primary med care)

If we're ever going to see genuine & significant improvement in our levels of health,
it's going to be by finding & training more genuinely good people (eg, children of
folks, who've died and/or gone bankrupt at the hands of overcrowed &/or greedy
medical "care" - such as it is - businesses)

Such people might be motivated to work for the patient's good - no matter what -
rather than look for excuses to over-medicate, eg, "You need to pay me more!"

Doctor 603, by me, you ought to be in a differnt business, where human health
is NOT put at risk, by your greedy demands for a raise.

You've signed a contract to practice medicine, in patients' interests, not yours!

If you can't do that for the amount you agreed to, you've breached your contract
and should go elsewhere; maybe change profession.

---

By contrast, I'm told that some doctors (eg, in Britain's health care system) are
paid more when patients health RISES &/or when more of them STOP smoking.

Are you prepared to sign a PERFORMANCE-BASED pay agreement like that?

I have NO qualms about you earning more, as your patients' health increase,
but a plea for more money, that holds patients' health hostage, is just WRONG.

Get the AMA & your employer to buy into Performance-Based Compensation
(PBC's) and you'll win our support as you achieve the intended health rise.

In the case of Staph, you or a loved-one could have a car crash NEAR an
infected hospital, & THEIR lives could be more at risk if they needed some
IMMEDIATE emergency surgery, and got it in such a place.

Ie, fixing the system is also in YOUR interest, so, stop begging for more $$$'s
and - like the rest of us - start demanding better Community Health, already!

It's got to feel better (both for you & all of us), than focusing only on the $$$'s.
Try it, you'll like it.

The guy from dirty jobs at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html

This is a good place to recommend Bonnie Bassler's talk at TED.

She points out that not only are the human cells in our body outnumbered 10 to 1, but if we count DNA, the human DNA is outnumbered 100 to 1 (I suspect on account of mtDNA though she doesn't say that).

Kids can, and will teach themselves given the chance.

another link

(you may want to skip about 5 minutes into the video. The comments are good too.)

T

If you haven't seen this TED.com video with Dan Pink on the science of motivation, it's worth a watch: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html In case you don't want to watch TFV, it could be summarized as: "Using compensation to motivate tasks requiring higher cognition doesn't work. Behavioral science has understood this for decades, but business isn't listening."

Its been well known for a while that financial motivation for creative work does not result in increased productivity or quality of work. Trying to incentivize coders to be more productive is often counterproductive since they'll be motivated to just hammer out something that works rather than spending a few moments actually thinking about the problem and coming up with an efficient solution that will be better for the codebase in the long run. Trying to reward individual coders based on some arbitrary measure of productivity will never properly reward the right coder nor produce the highest quality of code possible. Using subjective judgement by technical peers rather than objective measures cooked up by HR, providing comfortable and respectful working conditions and encouraging the exploration of the intellectual and creative sides of coding are probably some of the best steps one can take to help good coders produce great code. If you provide the right environment, you have a good chance of attracting a lot of great talent even if you don't offer the best pay in the market because having a job where you're intellectually challenged and your expertise is valued (and listened to!) can be worth a lot more to a good programmer than an extra few grand a year.

I believe the post right above yours brings the point home: the specific exponential power law followed appears to be unstable. That is if the frequency of attacks differs in a specific conflict the conflict ends shortly. The poster above nicely provided a link to a TED talk
Also being able to draw a straight line on a log log plot is all well and good but if you get the slope off by even a small amount you will soon be orders of magnitude off in your predictions. Thus while you might expect a power-law distribution from simple arguments getting the specific value is much more difficult.

Sean Gourley shows that if the exponent is larger or smaller than 2.5, the war becomes unsustainable and ends fairly quickly. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sean_gourley_on_the_mathematics_of_war.html

I beg all of you to please see this TED Talk before modding me down again.

Thank you for the link I'll watch it now.

Just from the title, can I say, it has been obvious to me for a long time that AGW has been a conflict about morality. The key is to look at what people propose to do to solve AGW. That tells you their morality.

There is nothing in AGW science that tells you what you should do about it. If you are a Robert Mugabe, you probably think of climate change as an opportunity to exploit to starve all the people from competing factions. You can starve them deliberately and blame it on climate change. Or if you are really lucky, climate change happens for real and those people are left stranded without food. Then you just prevent them migrating and starve them all. There is nothing about AGW that will change people's morality. This is what the environmental movement fails to understand. They see it as a way to make everyone become caring people, caring for each other and for the environment. It is far more likely that people will just react from the moral level that they are already at. A tribal Afghan will not stop firing rockets at American gunships just because he's now decided to devote himself to saving the planet. A Buddhist isn't about to stop spending all this time chanting in temples just because he's realised what he really needs to do is go out and learn how to build solar power stations for the village, as life is suffering anyway, so what difference does it make if the suffering is because of flood or disease? At the most climate change will be a football for environmentalists to progress the green party in Western countries. Nobody else cares.

One might just as well argue that water flowing down hill has made a sophisticated decision.

Actually, the behaviors and communication of groups of bacteria are much more complex than water flowing downhill. Consider that when you get a bacterial infection, the bacteria will typically work in a "growth phase" where they are multiplying but not doing being virulent. When the bacteria reach a certain population size (or density), they all switch on their virulence. Individuals are making decisions that actually manifest as a group decision. Water molecules do not do this.

A very interesting lecture on this is at:
http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

Please, please. See a great talk from David Deutsch at TED towards the end he talks about global warming, very interesting point of view.

And no, I'm not a climatologist, but neither I'm uneducated and will not bow before ANY priest of ANY religion.

Show me hard data; show me the experiments that prove your theory and I will certainly and humbly accept whatever it is you are saying.

Now, if you want me to just take you word for it, sorry. No can do.

In the 1970's the then current and accepted theory by the high priests was that pollution (i.e industrial waste gases) was going to freeze the Earth. Now it is going to burn it.

I beg all of you to please see this TED Talk before modding me down again. Ive been labelled heretic for posting on related stories in the last couple of weeks, actually modded insightful until the thought police arrived and modded me troll.

The weather exhibits chaotic behavior and to find precisely one single cause for variation is futile, like CO2 emissions from human activities.

The hottest day on record! screams the summary. Er, well since 1941. Well and good, how do you know the hottest day last century in Australia didn't happen in 1940?

The Earth has been getting warmer since about 10,000 years ago. Truth. AGW doesn't explain that. But it does follow that the Earth was getting warmer while we humans still lived in caves and were probably numbered in the thousands, not in millions of people. No, we are told. AGW is about the speeding up of warming. Really? We know for sure what the speed of variation would be without humans around? Let us not confuse premises with facts.

The variables are many and not one of them is well understood: ocean currents, atmospheric currents, solar radiation (insolation), the effect of the strength of the Van Allen belt, volcanic eruptions, etc. No weather model can correctly predict past, known, climate; how can one believe that the future predictions are correct?

We need a more open discussion and a lot less cries of burn the heretics. We are talking about science, not religion.

BTW, if anyone knows of a climate model that correctly predicts past, known weather, please post a link.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us.html

Have you seen this TED talk? I think you'll find you agree with the speaker's opinion.

As far as I've read, the world's population expansion will slow and eventually barely stay above replacement rates and fall below in most places as they become industrialized. There was a good TED talk about this very thing. Here it is

My first thought was this TED video: http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/sixth_sense_demo.php. It would be interesting to have a heavyweight like Google developing tools to bring such a product to consumers.

Humans will certainly be around, there is not much doubt about that. However, our way of life, the way we do things and live our lives ie. civilization will suffer a massive shock which it will not survive unchanged.

I think the article strikes a general note that is true. The continuation of our civilization (way of life) is strongly dependent on the availability and the price of energy.

Here's an interesting talk from a man who studies the collapse of civilizations, Jared Diamond.