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There is a TED talk by Hans Rosling which demonstrates Africa is actually making insanely rapid progress, but it isn't apparent to us because they started at so far behind.

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

To all of you who mention "delayed gratification" or "self-discipline", go to the head of the class...:-)

Take a look at this 5 minute video clip of "The Secret of Success" or..."Don't eat the marshmallow yet"

I believe that you will thoroughly enjoy it ;-) As well, it includes a long term study (Follow up 15 years later, etc.)

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

Grading paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.

Fixed that for you.

Studies show that conditioning human beings with treats (and threats) does not instill values, but results in modified behavior that goes away if the pattern of rewards is stopped. Seems to work with dogs, tho.

The current education system is highly oppressive and does not cater to the children's needs for activity, play and natural way of learning. Let's not call mandatory children camps schools.

For more info check Alfie Kohn's work and Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk on schools and creativity.

The competing theory is right here. AND it will be testable as soon as CERN is up and running.

Whether it pans out or not, I exceptionally like this part of the introduction to his paper, which I believe highlights the weakness of string theory.

Hundreds of years of theoretical and experimental work have produced an extremely successful pair of mathematical theories describing our world. The standard model of particles and interactions described by quantum field theory is a paragon of predictive excellence. General relativity, a theory of gravity built from pure geometry, is exceedingly elegant and effective in its domain of applicability. Any attempt to describe nature at the foundational level must reproduce these successful theories, and the most sensible course towards unification is to extend them with as little new mathematical machinery as necessary.

The further we drift from these experimentally verified foundations, the less likely our mathematics is to correspond with reality. In the absence of new experimental data, we should be very careful, accepting sophisticated mathematical constructions only when they provide a clear simplification.

And we should pare and unite existing structures whenever possible.

Democracy means if you have a group of a hundred people, fifty one can vote to piss in the Corn Flakes of the other forty nine and if everyone believes in Democracy there can't be any objections if the votes were counted properly.

Even though I am an outspoken critic of our current democratic systems, that is a very simplified view.

You have to view a democracy as an entity that exists in time, and - like a game of Nomic - can change its own rules. As such, it is likely that someone has thought of this problem before, and proposed to add a rule to the record that says something like "votes of pissing into other people's corn flakes need a 2/3 majority to pass".

Now you'd counter that then 2/3 of the people will vote "yes" and piss into the other 1/3rds breakfast. However, then you forgot that the acting entities are human beings, and there are fairly well-established thresholds of ethical behaviour. There's a fairly good chance that more than 1/3rd of the voting people here would vote "no" for moral reasons.

But, they can be fooled, tricked, manipulated, etc.

The main problem of modern society is not that half the people vote to take the other half's stuff. The main problem is that over and over again, 3/4 or so of the people vote for things that they
a) don't understand
b) misjudge
c) have been misinformed about

And this happens both at the base and in the parliaments. We just had a law defeated here in Germany. It was a lucky and narrow defeat, in a case where everyone who is even remotely an expert on the topic in question strongly opposed it.

Economic theory doesn't cover democracy because people are seldom less rational than in decision making. There's a great TED video about that.

I should have added a link to my original post.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_dennett.html

Dennett tries to talk intelligently about the problem, but it's not easy, and in my opinion, he doesn't always compel.

He's right about the vulnerability of children. By that token, the breakfast cereals industry is also treading on culthood through their television advertising tactics.

I would be much happier with society if we eliminated advertising targeted at the malleable minds of young children. We could introduce our children to the joys of commerce at puberty, along with pimples, and their myriad treatments.
 

Sadly, this isn't realistic. Exspecially with our current concern with education (none), I doubt this will happen anytime soon. This scheme would be amazing for more than just the warehouse problem, including the return to creativity. If you follow some great minds out there, maybe you can find a movement towards better education and help out your neighborhood or local town, which would help us all.

Sadly, this isn't realistic. Exspecially with our current concern with education (none), I doubt this will happen anytime soon. This scheme would be amazing for more than just the warehouse problem, including the return to creativity. If you follow some great minds out there, maybe you can find a movement towards better education and help out your neighborhood or local town, which would help us all.

Sadly, this isn't realistic. Exspecially with our current concern with education (none), I doubt this will happen anytime soon. This scheme would be amazing for more than just the warehouse problem, including the return to creativity. If you follow some great minds out there, maybe you can find a movement towards better education and help out your neighborhood or local town, which would help us all.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html funny, because most of the time, choice only make people less happy... People think when they chose something, they become more happy, when it is likely... completely the opposite.

because eating your marshmallow later is smart.

Parent site

http://www.ted.com/

Their Youtube Page

http://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector

Worth a look!

(I'm not a shill/sockpuppet)

Intelligence comes in different forms, in different flavours. Our education system is archaic.

No matter what your profession, it seems that working with the hands improves anyone's problem solving skills. Boeing and NASA are now requiring R&D personnel to have experience working with the hands, no matter how strong their academic record is.

Watch this video - http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital.html
(20 minutes)

The research linking the hand to brain development is found in the book - The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. By Frank R. Wilson.

Here's another article about handiwork and education (left sidebar - Why should a kid build a catapult) http://www.catapultkits.com/

In my work I regularly get feedback from teachers who say that nothing has inspired their kids to *want* to study math and physics more than the catapult project they did.

Considering the daunting issues we face as a culture, with Global Warming and the problems with fossil fuels, we need more and better problem solvers in the world than ever before.

If it was up to me, shop class would be mandatory in every high-school, and it's curriculum would be coordinated with the physics and math courses too.

Unless there really is someone out there that thinks drinking crappy domestic beer will make them sexy, and the life of the party. This is the person I fear.

What do the people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars filming and airing those ads believe about this proposition? The customer drinks our crap macro brew because it tastes good? Or because none of his penis enlargers are working too good?

Seriously, advertising memes that stand the test of time (dirt churning monster trucks, herky-jerky bullet-time sorority angel pub-swoop) are most definitely hitting the desired nerve within a large consumer demographic.

Not only that, these ads are shaping entire social values systems regarding consumption and life style.

Another goal of advertising is to cause a momentary amnesia when the customer is standing there in WhizMart eyeing the shiny HP printer under the $30 rebate coupon what it feels like to sit on hold to an Indian call center for 15 minutes and then reach a person who is accountable for nothing except tiring you out while your fancy new printer with the half empty by design chip cartridge completes the 17'th consecutive unnecessary head clean operation.

This momentary detachment needs to last for all of five minutes between impulse and purchase.

The HP brand was revered during the homebrew era the way Apple is now. I had classmates more devoted to their HP41C than your typical iPhone addict. My SAT exam contained the syllogism

HP : engineers :: Disney : children

It was such a deep hook into my psyche, when I walk past a post-Carly HP consumer product display I develop Capgras syndrome.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html

There's a lot of beer loser in all of us. You are what you drink. AdBlock is a tiny little oasis of mental Reinheitsgebot.

There is something in progress like that from TED.

Lets consider what would have happened if you had hit another strong car without crumple zones at 35 mph in a head on collision. Assuming both cars are really strong (which most likely means heavy which makes it worse) the impulse in a crash would be immense. Maybe the cars are OK but the passengers would not be!
The same situation with light cars with crumple zones would mean that the passengers would experience much less of a G force and less damage. The cars will be worse off, but at least you would have a chance of not being injured. Would you rather be the crumple zone or your car?

According to this talk (fast forward to about 8:30) only 5% of the weight of the car is the driver and therefore only about 1% of the energy of the fuel is used to transport you. What a waste!
His solution is to use carbon composites.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

The above video is a workable alternative that you might find interesting. It involves "throwing away an entire working infrastructure with a fuel that makes a great deal of sense" and "slapping a miracle car together by 2010... an entire line of them [that] meet everyone's differing needs while still having the high reliability, safety, and now fuel economy required" in a very short span of time.

That's only one proposed theory, too. If you scour the internet and other resources you'll find a lot of other emerging theories for how to we can switch to a green infrastructure in the limited time we have.

A lot of proponents of alternative energy would like to take a lot of time to transition from one infrastructure to a new one. Yes, this should very reasonably take a lot of time. Unfortunately, time is not a luxury we can not afford. While it would be a very bumpy road indeed to switch infrastructures in a matter of years, we simply have no choice.

The government should keep its grubby mitts off my cars and my guns.

Is it fair for one human being to feel entitled to something which he does not deserve? When your right encroaches on the rights of others (such as the right of your children and your children's children to live good lives and pursue all of their other rights), then don't you think it's a right you should retain or one that you should give up? We're already passing down enough crap to future generations. Thinking the way you seem to think is a detriment to human progress and you should be ashamed of yourself.

I want to patent THIS!

You make it sound like excessive choice is a good thing. I personally am fine with Apples limited product line that is all integrated.

I suggest you watch this TED video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM]

The reason people like Apple products is because you take it home and it all works together without any effort on your part.

Why link to a copy when you can link to the original?

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html It's down to dopamine, apparently.

The Bonobo can understand fairly complex English, read & write simple ideograms, and play Pac-man.

I may be a meat eater, but any species that can run away from ghosts in a virtual maze and knows to chase them after eating power-pellets is off my menu.

Learn more about "mandatory" spending in the US Govt: an excellent talk at TED.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Banks are in the business of selling trust. This doesn't stop them from raping the golden egg as often as they can get away with. Then there is an orgy of denial and offshore transactions while an outside party intervenes to "restore trust". Their words, not mine.

Elsevier is in the business of selling unimpeachability, aka, no scientist ever got fired for citing a reputable, peer reviewed journal.

Peer review has an especially strong appeal to the CYA crowd. The information in a peer reviewed journal is not necessarily all that great, but you confidently cite the journal without fear for your reputation.

The list of biases in peer reviewed journals would require a journal all to itself. They will tell you that method A (in which they have a financial stake) outperforms method B at half the cost, but they won't tell you that they accidentally discovered method C which will cure you almost for free.

Peer reviewed writing is sometimes so opaque you hardly dare to draw a specific conclusion. Yet you can't overtly find an error, which is mostly the point.

An all-pervading contempt for unthinking appeal to authority was among my first sentient experiences as a child. My hostility toward climbing up the food chain of rational authority to discover infinity squared as the basis step nearly melted my circuits. God the omnipotent, god the omnipresent, god the mysterious, god the unaccountable.

I gained my childhood sentience during the Von Daniken era and its peculiar aftermath.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power
http://www.legendsofhockey.net/html/spot_oneononep198902.htm

Much has been made about the 'Pyramid Power' that Red Kelly used to help motivate his team. The Leafs were under terrific pressure to beat the Flyers. ... Kelly, whose sons had visited Egypt and spoke passionately about the supernatural powers of the pyramid, gave their father an idea. He placed pyramids under the Leaf bench and in the dressing room. "Red put a pyramid in the dressing room. I put my sticks underneath it hoping it might help." It seemed to help, but so did the assistance of something else - "I have a tie I wear when it's a crucial game," admitted Sittler. "I wore it one night when I got three goals. I had it on the time I had the ten points against Boston. I felt this game was so crucial, I went to the cleaners to pick up the tie specially."

Hey, you just don't know.

I was in a Sunday school class, a day in my life I'll never forget, and the Sunday school teacher taught the assorted passel of rug rats about the various magic properties of pyramids, such as the one employed by the hysterically desperate Leafs (check out the team's success rate in the subsequent four decades).

I wasn't sure if I should blame the church, some mind-numbing side effect of the adult condition (which seemed to also effect my elementary school teachers), the frowzy muffin and Kool-Aid Sunday school cult, small town inbreeding, the stultifying effects of the long dark Canadian winter, the near-to-toxic levels of new car smell in our Chevy Bel Air, the sulphur stockpile a kilometre down the tracks large enough to dike Holland, or the town's water supply. God, at least, was off the hook, having in my mind no influence on anything.

It wasn't long before the Kook-Aid theory made the leap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

Here is a recent video that cracks me up about the care and feeding of strange belief systems in children and young adults. I really have to get the rest of it.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/julia_sweeney_on_let

Check out Bill Gates' recent TED talk. He talks about how to improve our school systems in the second half, and how hard it is to fire teachers is part of it. It's really astonishing -- he mentions some teachers actually have obstacles added to their contracts that make it nearly impossible to fire a teacher for poor performance, or even to restrict judging their performance at all.

I guess it's going to be a true test of ideals as Republican conservatives move to block stem cell research ... as they approach age 75.

This is why there will probably be genuine life extension, because the elderly and soon-to-be elderly in our society control so many resources.

Once there is an upsurge in life extension, this should be followed by an upsurge in curing cancer. Why? Because if you extend the lifespan of a mammal long enough, it's going to die of cancer.

http://www.sens.org/

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html

I know that terrorism is the only major concern of the western world together with the Swine flu and Obama's puppies + the funniest tricks cat do.

What I meant is it is hard to stumble upon the things like western debates like those presented on http://www.youtube.com/user/HauensteinCenter while walking around Hong Kong. You would have to fly to the U.S. and attend debates if youtube was cutting you out.

Also the West is taking more and more advantage of Internet to share their much better funded research like what you can find on:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

Also access to Nietzsche's or Socrates work in a digitally divided world is simply more difficult. Western philosophers are not studied much at all in most of the world's schools. You don't just stumble on them in every bookstore out here. And if you do order them, they are overpriced and take weeks to access.

So let us be clear:
- There are more than two civilisations on the planet
- Very few people on the planet care about Obama's puppies or the Bailout of AIG
- Internet is bringing us a much wider range of information much less filtered than through just CNN and BBC. It does mean there are flying cats on youtube which are probably as popular to watch in Beijing than they are in NYC. But there is such an amazing opportunity building up that should ideally not be cut between whether you are in Europe/North America or not.

I wish we could find a way to fund this new digital world in a way there are not "mini-Internets" where depending on where you are, you will only have a restricted access to your areas information.

Amazing.

Our oversized ape brains allow us to take control of our evolution to some extent. It's kind of another watershed moment in our evolution I think. There is an awesome TED talk about this, here you go. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science.html

Dr Dean Ornish recommends incorporating this along with other things to grow your brain. 47seconds into this clip http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dean_ornish_says_your_genes_are_not_your_fate.html

There is a nice TED talk about Pleo. Unfortunately the thing comes with proprietary software and you can only customise it using motion profiles and sounds. I am not sure how much this has affected sales, but you can get much more hacker friendly robots from Robosavvy.com. I am still waiting for a walking robot with onboard ARM processor and Linux, actuators with hackable controllers, sensors (resolvers, accelerometer, maybe gyroscope, contact sensors). It doesn't even need to be able to pick up objects. There are several robots listed on Linuxdevices.com (even Pleo although I think Pleo OS is not based on Linux) but they are either not that powerful yet or they are somewhat expensive.
But it is certainly not easy to get your act together and do a proper design including mechanics, electronics, and software.

see: 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

The face is 100% cg, with facial animation done using a similar setup as half-life2's (only amazingly more detailed)

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

Ever see Benjamin Button? Sure they created a digital version of Brad Pitt for the entire first half as he aged backwards, but it's not like he wasn't involved in that process at all. S1M0NE isn't exactly possible yet, they're still a human under those bits.

There is a good video of this concept at ted.com

I didn't see this posted, so... http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html

Where do creators get the right to deny others from copying their work?

Indeed, after a certain period of time creators lose that right, they are only granted it temporarily. Copyright law is just an arbitrary legal mechanism, not a "natural law" whose purpose is to help creators get paid (enough times, not every time) for their work (so that creators have the time and incentive to create). If there were other mechanisms available that ensured that creators got paid (as well or better then they are currently) that didn't restrict distribution or copying - we'd use them.

Many /.ers feel that alternate mechanisms are here or very close and, more importantly, that creative work should be a service rather than product-based industry. Many people, like Clay Shirky, understand that we've developed better solutions (digital networks and P2P, etc) to the manufacturing and distribution problems that copyright and copyright industries evolved to solve. What TPB is doing is legally dubious, but there is a great deal of sympathy for them because using TPB feels like what will be mainstream, legal practice in the future. The is no escaping the reality of digital networks and the shift to digital work as a service.

This change is inevitable because the freedom to distribute and copy is so immensely valuable to the world as a whole (this is already recognized even for physical goods which is why creators control over copying is already limited). In industries like software development where creative work generally results in valuable tools it has already been recognized that more freedom is (on the whole) more valuable then any temporary monopoly rights. i.e. Freedom to use/access/modify every other tool is more valuable then charging for access to your tools, especially when you are trying to make another tool. (*ahem*)

Obviously, tools != entertainment/cultural work but as the great Hans Rosling (http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/hans_rosling.html) said, "Culture is what makes life worth living." Applying similar freedoms to cultural work should see different but equal or greater value for all of us.

It isn't the end of the world to shift from products to services, and in the bargain you get freedom to (access, modify, redistribute) every digital tool that helps you create new tools and every digital cultural work that makes your life worth living...
1) Get paid for your services
2) Freedom to (access, modify, redistribute) everything digital
3) Profit!

I would think that the successful tribes were all extremely friendly and peaceful in nature.

There is no reason to believe that. This might be of interest to you.

Prevent local warming

Humans (just) human idea also referred to by Bonnie Bassler in excellent talk here:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

This is a really cool video (at least I thought it was really cool) with some more details on the clock of the long now.

battery swapping is the key.

You mean like Better Place is suggesting? :)

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html

He brings up exactly this kind of geoengineering solution, talks about the good parts and the bad parts and the side effects of the idea. Then he suggests even if we don't do it, maybe China (or someone else) will do it in 50 years and we won't be able to stop them at that point. And we won't even have a good idea on what our response should be if they are planning to do it, since we won't have any idea of the consequences for a particular method.

He concludes with the idea that whether geoengineering is a good idea or not, we should start thinking the various ways it could be accomplished now, rather than waiting, even if the purpose of thinking about it is to decide not to do it.

I really hope they publish the stuff as Linked Data.

I have similar opinions. Cap and trade will only work if what you are trading can be measured accurately, in my mind currently this means the large emmitters coal, oil, gas, concrete. The other large contributor is land use and as much as I like trees I think the only accurately measurable way to use land as a sink is to plough biochar into it, permits and credits should be based on a physically auditable ton of carbon and currently most land use schemes do not offer that level of certainty. That may change in the future. Of course if a coal plant can work out how to scrub it's emmissions and point to the stored carbon then they can use it as an offset.

Look at Saul Griffith's TED video Kites can reach higher altitudes and sweep more sky than turbines, so they can (theoretically at least) generate more power than the turbines.

100's of sets of tourist photos randomly scattered across the internet

Have you seen Photosynth? Takes those random photographs and constructs locations in 3D- all photographs are made public on it too. Much more thorough than Google earth/maps.
(http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html)

100's of sets of tourist photos randomly scattered across the internet, being added and removed and reorganized by their takers at their whim is not remetely the same thing as a single permanent indexed geo-tagged database filled with photos that were carefully and systematically taken and stitched together.

A random collection of photographs of a public space, tagged with vague location info can easily be converted into a 3D model you can virtually walk around. Have you seen Photosynth's Notre Dame Demo?

Watch this guy explain it and be amazed. The phantom Limb part comes in at around half way if I remember correctly. This was filmed in 2007 so ya old news. Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/184

They might try to tailor their junk for these environments, but it's like the difference between a normal car (windows) and a car coated with teflon with a motion sensing machine gun on top (OSX/Linux), with the worms/viruses/malware being a type of graffiti paint.

Graffiti will stick pretty well to a normal car (and if you tend to stop in the more seedy parts of town than others, you have more of a chance of having your car "tagged" too), but it's not going to be very effective on the teflon coated ones and the owner is going to have to be silly enough to log in as root to disable the guns so the criminals can get close enough in the first place.

The argument that the reason why windows is being attacked is because it has a majority share is an ass backwards way of thinking about the issue.

Windows is targeted because it's "security" is inherently flawed, it's security isn't flawed because it's being targeted. The fact that it has a majority share is just an added bonus for these people, but it has nothing to do with the underlying problem, (though it certainly does help the problem grow by orders of magnitude).

I'm reminded of Dan Dennett's Ted Talk where he insightfully points out that, we don't like chocolate cake because it's sweet, it's sweet because we like it.

Another way of looking at it is like this... Houses aren't unoccupied, unalarmed and filled with artwork, expensive stereos and silverware because someone wants to break into them, someone wants to break into them because they are unoccupied, unalarmed and filled with artwork, expensive stereos and silverware.

If OSX or Linux took a majority share of the desktop, the problem wouldn't shift like you are thinking it would. Granted, there would be an uptick in attempts and there will inevitably even be a few holes to patch up that were previously unknown, but there certainly won't be an equivalent to the 100,000+ viruses that exist for Windows.