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There's more to the concept of choice overload than you may think. I found this talk to be quite interesting.

Haven't you listened to the TED talk (cf: http://ted.com/
on Spaghetti Sauces, which refers to Moskowicz's idea that:

  There isn't a (one) best , only best

eg, best spaghetti sauceS, etc.

Some find one best, others find another best [for them]...

Whatcha think?

There are various possible explanations why violence has declined over the course of human history given in this TED talk by Steven Pinker.

Some more evidence in support of your comment: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/163

So, everyone is convinced that a true understanding of life and consciousness is still a very long way away at this point. It certainly looks that way if all you do is look at technology and social trends, however there is one very important thing people seem to be overlooking in this discussion.

Humans have become pretty decent with code. You are reading this through basic addition - that's all computers really do, you know. They aren't even as fundamentally mathematically complex as an abacus, yet we make them perform miracles with something as simple as addition.

Well, we are now reading the source code of life itself, and putting it online for all to see and read and use however they see fit. In some few years you'll find the genetic source code of every living thing stored in an encyclopedia of some sort, and it'll cost you some hundreds (then tens) of dollars to get your entire gene sequence on a CD-ROM. That's you - 100% of everything about you in the physical world. The secret to intelligence lies in that data. We just need to figure out the programming language it is written in. That's how we crack the problem of intelligence.

Even before we crack the code for thinking, the genetic code for every one of mother nature's tricks in every species living on this planet will end up in that database, just waiting for engineers and scientists to take lessons from nature. What will we do when every single trick of evolution is at our fingertips, and we can rewrite the genetic code of any living thing with a simple pill or injection? What will we do to computers when we make a microchip that mimics evolutionary code found in nature? Even the housefly's brain makes a better flying computer than anything we've built to date.

I'll point you in the direction of some of this knowledge so you don't get the impression this is all fanciful thinking.

Juan Enriquez has a great talk about how far we've come at sourcing genetic code here.
Janine Benyus also has a good talk on the kinds of ideas this will produce.

We're a long way from a science of mind or any true understanding of consciousness right now, but we are certainly at a time when all of its physical properties and mechanisms are about to be understood in detail. With that out of the way, most of the ambiguity preventing mind science from getting a real start will also disappear, and we'll finally have a path to follow from the bottom up into intelligence. That will lead us to our first AIs. We don't need any top-down genius insight into intelligence to get us there (though it'll certainly help).

So, everyone is convinced that a true understanding of life and consciousness is still a very long way away at this point. It certainly looks that way if all you do is look at technology and social trends, however there is one very important thing people seem to be overlooking in this discussion.

Humans have become pretty decent with code. You are reading this through basic addition - that's all computers really do, you know. They aren't even as fundamentally mathematically complex as an abacus, yet we make them perform miracles with something as simple as addition.

Well, we are now reading the source code of life itself, and putting it online for all to see and read and use however they see fit. In some few years you'll find the genetic source code of every living thing stored in an encyclopedia of some sort, and it'll cost you some hundreds (then tens) of dollars to get your entire gene sequence on a CD-ROM. That's you - 100% of everything about you in the physical world. The secret to intelligence lies in that data. We just need to figure out the programming language it is written in. That's how we crack the problem of intelligence.

Even before we crack the code for thinking, the genetic code for every one of mother nature's tricks in every species living on this planet will end up in that database, just waiting for engineers and scientists to take lessons from nature. What will we do when every single trick of evolution is at our fingertips, and we can rewrite the genetic code of any living thing with a simple pill or injection? What will we do to computers when we make a microchip that mimics evolutionary code found in nature? Even the housefly's brain makes a better flying computer than anything we've built to date.

I'll point you in the direction of some of this knowledge so you don't get the impression this is all fanciful thinking.

Juan Enriquez has a great talk about how far we've come at sourcing genetic code here.
Janine Benyus also has a good talk on the kinds of ideas this will produce.

We're a long way from a science of mind or any true understanding of consciousness right now, but we are certainly at a time when all of its physical properties and mechanisms are about to be understood in detail. With that out of the way, most of the ambiguity preventing mind science from getting a real start will also disappear, and we'll finally have a path to follow from the bottom up into intelligence. That will lead us to our first AIs. We don't need any top-down genius insight into intelligence to get us there (though it'll certainly help).

In the video the guy says there is no computer or operating system. Maybe its all embedded, but obviously it has a CPU running their software.

As far as being just a toy, this thing could actually be quite useful. It could be used to enhance vision, sort of like Geordi's visor in Star Trek. It could display things outside of human vision, or amplify small differences to make them more apparent. Of course it could be used for night vision too. Personally, I would be interested in the hardware if I write my own software / filters for it. The point is, with this type of augmented vision, the sky's pretty much the limit. Imagine if it was OCRing what you look at real-time, so that you could look at something, and the system could display additional information about uncommon words (nouns like place names, product names, etc).

How about the Photosynth demo Microsoft did, where they would take many 2D images of buildings, and reconstruct them in 3D, allowing the user to zoom in in massive detail (if someone had taken photos of that particular place). If that type of image recognition could be done real-time to match what you are currently looking at, then you could look at the inside of a building without entering it. Or zoom in or out, or pan or change your POV entirely, without actually moving your body.

Dan East

"The only miraculous thing here is that they are doing so poorly despite these and other things massively in their favor."

But poorly on which count, there are many things to evaluate! they seem to do reasonably well all in all, like at quickly industrializing and urbanizing, and also improving their life expectancy which is now is now 71 years old. They also seem to catch up quick in the personal income area, as you can see in the first of the following links when it is compared to US incomes:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140
http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

They seem to do reasonably well in many areas given where they come from, but maybe I'm only noting this because there's not many positives outlook on China in our, I believe, fearful societies, and I'm finally surprised by the relevant statistics.

"The only miraculous thing here is that they are doing so poorly despite these and other things massively in their favor."

But poorly on which count, there are many things to evaluate! they seem to do reasonably well all in all, like at quickly industrializing and urbanizing, and also improving their life expectancy which is now is now 71 years old. They also seem to catch up quick in the personal income area, as you can see in the first of the following links when it is compared to US incomes:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/140
http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

They seem to do reasonably well in many areas given where they come from, but maybe I'm only noting this because there's not many positives outlook on China in our, I believe, fearful societies, and I'm finally surprised by the relevant statistics.

Our chief insight is that while the space of images is effectively infinite, the space of semantically differentiable scenes is actually not that large. For many image completion tasks we are able to find similar scenes which contain image fragments that will convincingly complete the image. Our algorithm is entirely data-driven, requiring no annotations or labelling by the user.

What are the "semantics" here?

Is this like google images, where the nearby HTML text determines the classification of the image [i.e ASCII-text as meta-data for images]?

Or is this a great big neural net of wavelet data which classifies the images mathematically?

PS: I have the same question about that infamous Photosynth/Sea Dragon demonstration:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

You can produce highly accurate maps, or details of architecture without having one specific person on the ground collecting all that information. I refer you to the Open Street Map project in the first instance, and Sea Dragon in the second. In the Sea Dragon demo, take special note of the discussion about Photosynth, where they construct a surface model of Notre Dame cathedral using hundreds of photos from Flickr.

So how does this apply to Second Life? Well... take the smarts behind Photosynth, the multi-author sythesis of maps from Open Street Map, the shared envrionment of Second Life where multiple people can contribute tiny pieces to one project, and you end up with a means to produce highly detailed maps of places you want to explore. Is it really that great a leap to presume that some groups might be organising this kind of activity? Is it possible to make models of buildings and cities in Second Life that have exactly the detail you need to plan your special operation? Is the detail you need something that you can put into a public space and not raise too much curiosity?

On the other side of the argument - why would terrorists go and set up their own virtual worlds (the hosting! think of the hosting!) when they can use someone else's virtual world, where the work they do adding features into the game is expected as part of the social contract of that game world?

In World of Warcraft, they can work on training the organisational structure. Everyone who has run a raiding guild knows that it's almost like running a business. You train in recruitment, skills, discipline, project planning, dispbursment of funds, resource planning, supervision and follow up reporting. Again, why would they go to a special "terrorist only" space when they can practice these skills where they are expected to have them? Why invest in all the traceable hardware using traceable funds, when they can just be part of a world where all the stuff they want to learn is already expected to happen?

No, I don't expect that terrorists will be trying to fly netherdrakes into buildings any time soon. If you can dismiss that part of the report talking about "World of Warcraft" and "realistic weapons", and accept that these virtual worlds provide excellent grounds for training specific skills, then the whole idea of "terrorists r in UR raid, setting U up the bomb" becomes a little more believable.

Then you have to start asking questions like... "how can we distinguish would-be terrorists from the normal populace in these virtual worlds?"

I see that some people don't know much about Burt Rutan and his goals and how he hopes to accomplish them. This talk should clear that up. If you think a government space program has any chance of accomplishing anything, then you should watch this video and get a bit wiser.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/4

This accident is a miserable development. Rutan is working very hard to provide us with that slice of 'west' the world hasn't had since California was settled. I hope this doesn't set back that dream.

"Why does poverty still exist despite decades of development aid? In this talk, Iqbal Quadir explains why "aid does damages: because it empowers authorities instead of people," and advocates a new approach to development from below, "by the people for the people." His own experience as a child in Bangladesh and later a banker in New York brought him to realize that "connectivity is productivity" -- and that a simple cell phone has enormous power. Now his telecom company, GrameenPhone, offers service to most of rural Bangladesh, creating new opportunities by connecting villages to the world."

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/79

I think there's another talk where they explain how thanks to mobile phones some African fishermen can now make a few more miles to sell their fish were there is the most demand. Finally Internet profited to my life, I don't see why African people could not make sense of it. It's easy to discard something as not useful for other people when you're already benefiting of it.

Your misuse of your anecdotal experience is a logical fallacy. It's unfortunate for you that you've had problems activating a few iPhone. However, every single report of experiences with iPhone activation that I can personally verify had no trouble at all, or minimal trouble which was easily overcome. You see, my anecdotal evidence simply doesn't match yours. Perhaps you are an outlier case. The sample does not include random reports posted to Slashdot by Anonymous Cowards, who, for all I know might well be paid by someone (Verizon? Microsoft?) or otherwise motivated to trash talk iPhone (a deep seated loathing for Steve Jobs because he once fired you?) or to pollute discussion forums when iPhone is the topic (stuck using a Motorola RAZR with hobbled bluetooth on a Verizon contract for another year?) or to preach the controversy to generate traffic and revenue (Engadget? Slashdot?). No serious problems *at all* were observed in the sample that I can verify. That suggests to me that perhaps the journalist isn't just parroting lies and the problem rate is actually relatively low.

"OMG! Somebody had trouble registering their iPhone!!!" is only one of many examples at Slashdot where it is clear that the participants in the discussion could benefit from an improved understanding of basic logic and basic statistics.

You might enjoy watching this short video clip of Michael Shermer @ TED where he says, "In science, we have to keep track of the misses, not just the hits." He has a marvelous example here of priming our audio circuits, playing part of Stairway to Heaven backwards.

You might also enjoy the book Why Flip a Coin: The Art and Science of Good Decisions .

P.S. I'm not laughing at your ignorance. I suspect you are merely frustrated and venting. Please do take about 10% of the time you spend reading slashdot, and use that time to hone your logical reasoning skills and understanding of statistics. It can be fun!

Front and side, concept multitouch iMac mockup.

Perceptive Pixel demo by Jeff Han, TED talk, research homepage. Fingerworks, purchased by Apple, 2005.

I think MS is about to pass google when it comes to image searches... I know this is way off topic...but this is a pretty kick ass piece of software that MS bought... http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

I'm not known for liking Microsoft, but check Photosynth:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

"...what I'm going to show you...is some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition..."

Fuck Microsoft. Fuck them and their can't-beat-em-then-buy-em business model. Fuck their complete lack of innovation, and fuck the douchebags who sell out to them. This Gary Oldman-looking motherfucker just got assimilated and all he can say is thank you. Newsflash, Commissioner Gordon: You know all the blood, sweat, and tears that you personally put into this project? All the birthdays you missed and the bridges you burned and the times you could have been getting laid? Microsoft gets to call it their own now. You're a footnote, the answer to a trivia question now, like Seattle Computer Products or Spyglass, Inc.

Unethical business practices? Monopoly? Clueless donkeys who lap this shit up year after year? It doesn't matter. The fact is that Microsoft has sufficiently integrated itself into any and all aspects of technology that nothing-- not Google, not Linux, not whatever the fuck the bloggers can come up with-- will make it go away.

The video is of a presentation at TED:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

I submitted this exact story about PhotoSynth and SeaDragon to Slashdot a few days ago and it was rejected. Boooo!

TED is definitely a site worth visiting away, as this presentation is probably among the less interesting ones you can watch there. More people should check it out.

Here is a better link to the video demo. Pretty Amazing stuff
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

Better Link to the video demo.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 Click Here

I think the objection is to Microsoft claiming the invention i.e. "Microsoft Surface". The first speaker in the video says "it's the first of its kind..." which is simply not true.

  TED, where I first saw the photo enlarging/spinningidea shown, isn't an obscure venue. The idea of putting objects on a touch surface and having them interact I believe was Reactable's The Reactable interface showed up at a Bjork concert. Again, not an obscure venue.

What tweaks a lot of people isn't that ideas evolve but that Microsoft gloms onto them and then claims they came up with the idea and patent it. Microsoft deserves credit for bringing the ideas to market in a different guise but not for innovating.

This is actually quite interesting technology. It has been conceived before - but only that - conceived. This is one time Microsoft gets kudos.

Not quite. Even tho Microsoft was the first to market with something in the $10,000 range for places like Vegas. I wonder what the Blue Screens look like?

More info the MS product here, here and here.

I imagine that Jeff Han's own Fascinating multi-touch system just might not use Windows as a fundamental foundation. Don't forget about the 16 foot long interactive wall So I can imagine several patent fights coming out of this, even though the research lines are likely independent. Microsoft might even get accused of stealing somebody else's research, regardless of the facts.

Of course, this happens a little while after Apple revealed their own multitouch interface. Microsoft must hate that. After all, Microsoft can't get a patent on the use of fingers, even tho they can try.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65
It's all Jeff's work, the zoom, the rotate all the gestures...

His company is here:
http://www.perceptivepixel.com/

Looks like they've simply licensed it and removed all mention of the original designers.

This was exciting and appeared to work much better when I saw it for the first time last year.
Check out the Jeff Han video from last year then watch the MS video.. The original is a much smoother interface.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65

Yeah MS added some fluff by making it interact with devices placed on top the the basic idea is not some new "Top Secret" project

It is just about nine months since: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65

But like rearing a child, we'll see the person in 5 to seven years... Or, in a month when the iPhone is released.

This is also a major hurdle to people. How is Joe User going to know which of the 30 browsers he should use, or 20 file management utilities, or 20 calculators? Distributions come with standard software, generally, but even Ubuntu still requires you to connect to dubious quasi-legal repositories in order to get mp3 working. What Joe User is going to scour the internet for an obscure how-to on getting that to work?

Because then that would be a flawed comparison, bonobos are obviously too civilised for us.

E. O. Wilson got the TED 2007 prize for this purpose.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/83

A truly visionary project that might change education on a global scale. If they succeed, the XO-computer and/or Sugar will be as natural in the learning process as books, pen and paper are today. I realy belive it is the way to go in education. It is open source and much much more. Check out: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41?gcli d=CK7El-aP4IsCFSayEAodJSKiYA , http://wiki.laptop.org/ and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Gui delines

Not to say that your view is unfounded, but you are ignoring at least 2 other important aspects.

>>"Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Yes. They are torn by wars. Beside fertility rate, there are such things as child mortality rate and life expectancy.

Check out http://tools.google.com/gapminder/ for data views. Basically we get around 200/1000 child die in Niger, versus around 7/1000 in the US and Estonia. Niger also has about half the life expectancy compared to any of them. If those people didn't breed at that rate, they'd be extinct by now.

It has always been that nations with low life expectancy and high mortality rates have high child birth rates. Else they wouldn't be around.

As regards the more peaceful parts of Africa and Asia (and the world in general) check out http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92 , as well as http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/presentations/h as-the-world-become-a-better-place-2005.html

Apple's decision to close the iPhone is a bad, bad move.
I believe this is, in part, addressed by Barry Schwartz in his talk on "The Paradox of Choice".

It integrates so well with my Mac!
I don't believe Apple has stated whether or not the iPhone would work with Windows.

That one bug in the email sure is annoying. Too bad I can't try a different email app.
Good thing all the email apps available for Windows Mobile don't have any bugs.

I wish this thing played videos.
I believe the iPhone will play any video content currently playable on current G5 iPods.

Will this thing ever support Flash?
Who knows. Apple hasn't said one way or the other. It does integrate very nicely with Google maps though.

I contacted Apple for the 4th time about my need for PowerPoint support.
Do you honestly watch Powerpoint presentations on your cell phone? Egads, man!

I'm so tired of them ignoring me.
This point is just flat out stupid, illogical, blah blah blah as the device hasn't even been released. Apple has consistently been rated as one of the best tech companies for customer support.

I particularly liked Jacalyn Duffin's lecture about the history of medicine during the Rational Movement and it's relation to the scientific method in making a diagnosis.

If anyone knows of any other good webcast sites (other than the MIT open courseware project, which I already have.) please let me know.

TED

Rosling gave a 20min presentation of Trendalyzer at the TED 2006 conference, using it to debunk some of the prejudices we have about the world. Turns out chimpanzees beat swedish professors when making claims about the world. Worth watching, as are many of the presentations at TEDtalks.

Rosling gave a 20min presentation of Trendalyzer at the TED 2006 conference, using it to debunk some of the prejudices we have about the world. Turns out chimpanzees beat swedish professors when making claims about the world. Worth watching, as are many of the presentations at TEDtalks.

I think one has to see Rosling work with Trendalyzer to appreciate what that piece of software can do. He got standing ovations for his presentation at the TED conference in 2006. Very cool.

Hans Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, he debunks a few myths about the "developing" world.[from the TED site]

It is if you don't support the FAITHFUL. That's the problem with this debate. We've been told all of our lives that within a decade the oceans would drown all costal cities, and NY, Miami, DC, etc. would all be under 10 feed to water. Well, I'm now almost 30 and as far as I know, the worlds oceans haven't increased to any measurable extent. If you want a really good explanation for why this debate isn't getting anywhere, and how it got as big as it did considering the lack of consistend scientific evidence check out this article http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-03-04-1 .html. At the end he gives links to the relavent books, and data. I think that considering the significant scientific leanings of the slashdot crowd, you would all appreciate the fact that for once you can actually get your hands on a data set.

Even if that isn't enough to convince you, take a look at this http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key =b_lomborg, it's a video of a talk at TED. A meeting of rich, influential, and often famous people with the intention of saving the world. One of the topics that is always huge at the meeting is global warming, or as it is now called "Climate Change" since the global temperature is actually fluctuating and has recently gone down. This won't provide evidence either way as to the validity of the belief in global warming, but it'll put the "problem" into perspective.

If you have not intentions of RTFAs just think about this point from the first link. The whole reason there is a global temperature much above that of absolute zero is the sun. The amount of radiation hitting the earth from the sun fluctuates on various cycles. What is a simpler, and more probable expalanation of changes in the global temperature. Increases in the amount of radiation stricking the earth, or human activity. Especially since the vast majority of the increase in global temperature since the 1800's occured during the middle ages, prior to industrial revolution and significant increases in "Greenhouse gasses" as a result of human activity.

Actually, smallpox was eradicated by the WHO in the 80ies. It was a worldwide campaign- the first of three previous campaigns that succeeded in the deliberate removal of a disease. At least that's what Dr. Larry Brilliant says. He lead the project. He's now the executive director of the Google Foundation. You can hear him talk about the campaign here:

http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key =l_brilliant

An economist gives an interesting view on the cost versus effect of reducing CO2 emissions: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key =b_lomborg

What point is one supposed to get from Minority Report? Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ Above clip is Jeff Han give a demo at TED about multi-touch sensing. Combine this with "Wii UI" and one has Minority Report UI. (TED - Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference http://ted.com/

Hans Rosling dispels some interesting myths about poverty and health in the following talk

http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key =hans_rosling&flashEnabled=1

S.

This connection between stem cells and cancer is touched upon in the TED talk with Eva Vertes, a young researcher. Very interesting stuff.

The video is available at the TEDTalks webpage. Look for Eva Vertes.
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/

I'm replying, so I obviously didn't mod it as such... but I'd have to say because it's an assinine comment. I'm just getting immersed in my M.Sc. in CS and so far it's like going from night to day.... I would strongly argue that in the CS realm you don't start really getting into CS until you start working on your thesis. I got strong marks in undergrad, took a boatload of theoretical courses as well as a large number of coding projects, and none of them come close to what I'm working on now in terms of sheer theoretic complexity... Saying that theoretical CS work beyond the B.Sc. level is superfluous is just uninformed. I mean, cripes, this wasn't done by undergrads, and I'd say it's some cool shit... so yeah... the GP looks like a cleverly disguised regurgitation of a number of other trollish posts about the subject.

For your perusal: (Guessing the editors couldn't pick just one)

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin's_Dangerous_Id ea

Video Pesentation at TED
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key =d_dennett&gclid=CJvOo4LXo4gCFR4IUAodOhKBVQ&flashE nabled=1

Book
http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Dangerous-Idea-Evolu tion-Meanings/dp/068482471X

HomePage
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/~ddennett.htm

There are 38 more available, on a wide range of subjects.

I just finished watching an extremely impressive talk by Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan. Dear President Bush, please listen to this guy.

I've already selected and downloaded 3 more videos which I plan to spend the next hour watching.

-

I will live forever and never shave, Aubrey de Grey http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/index.cfm?flashEnabled =1