Slashdot Mirror

Here: http://www.ted.com/talks/bonni...

Not being an expert in the field, I cannot vouch for its accuracy.

I know it's too late now, but I would have looked into this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/yoav_...

I know it's too late now, but I would have looked into this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/yoav_...

1. Yes? Cheaper way of putting people in 0g for a year or more at a time?

2. What did Russia do? NASA stopped cooperating on everything non-ISS first. US puts sanctions on Russia.

Who was the first to pull the "protecting civilians" crap in Libya that somehow was equivalent to close air support for rebels?? Russia is not doing anything even remotely as outlandish as the US.

Russia is just retaliating on US sanctions. You might as well say "Don't trust US", same thing. Based on how US acts regarding IP laws (see Mega and Dotcom, for one), drone used for extrajudicial killings, etc. not sure who is more trustable anyway.

3. So who allowed US space program to deteriorate to this level?? Go ahead, look at yourselves.

4. There are alternatives, just Space X is the only one this much progressed.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=space+x+c...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

It goes without saying that the US is run badly these days. The politics being what they are about half the population will never admit it but such is the reality. As a people, we need to grow beyond our factionalism, find common ground, and hold our leaders to some reasonable standards.

Spot on on this one at least. Too bad the system is rigged that only "acceptable" candidates to maintain the status-quo are ever nominated.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...

How shoelaces work to keep our shoes on our feet

Ted already did that one.

Ignoring the known effects of certain drugs, there is more than I expected: specifically with toxoplasmosis and increased risk of car accidents for humans. Mind control is a fact for some insects and rodents, how much more exists is an interesting question. This entertaining talk goes into it a good deal.

https://www.ted.com/talks/ed_y...

By your comment I gather you are an American and so, I'm happy to hear you support returning their land to the Dakotas and Lakotas, which was taken forcefully by the U.S. government despite a treaty to the contrary.

Perhaps instead of criticizing other countries, you should get your country to honor their agreements with other nations.

Tell me, how is Ukraine different from the Lakiota/Dakota land? How is the U.S. position different from that of Russia?

I think we should be looking into our own eye for the beam instead of looking at the mote in our brother's eye.

At a certain point it gets less funny; maybe in 50+ to 100+ years once the ice caps are gone. Or maybe in 20+ years after the central United States aquifers are "inevitably" tainted with fracking side effects (Sorry everybody, move away from the former coastline... also, move out of the middle... it was inevitable you know).
So it seems appropriate that this story showed up near thorium-the-wonder-fuel-that-wasnt article trashing thorium (though the comments there are actually pretty informative).
So... I'll just leave this here: https://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel.
*shrug* Our species may evolve some long term planning capability; or it may not.
Then again, the we don't need 100% of humans to be capable of long term planning... just enough to make a difference. Which may not need to be much at all, given that most will be distracted by famine or disease or economic collapse or reality tv. Maybe it only needs to be 0.1% that consider the long term and are worried enough to act. (Maybe, at the risk of being too obvious, we can make a difference.)

I think I remember a Ted talk where a PC connected to the internet was just "appeared" in a hole in the wall in a small village and with no instruction the locals could use it to browse the web and skype (or similar) to british retiree volunteers. They quickly picked up a range of skills entirely self guided including a knowledge of english. I think it might have been this one

Having more people dying will not stop population growth. Even in Africa AIDS treatment works enough that they can just have more children to compensate for the people dying with AIDS. We need children to stay alive so that people will not want more then two children in their family. This has happened in Asia and it can happen in Africa.

And Africa will have 4 billion people. There are already so many kids there that it will happen and nothing - especially AIDS - can stop it.

Look at the presentations of this guy for more info:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_...

It's 18 minutes, well worth a viewing.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...

We keep voting for these politicians - BUT - the politicians who make it through the primary process are the only ones we are allowed to vote for, and they are already beholden to those special interests which facilitate their victory. 3rd parties are aggressively suppressed.

Very interesting TED talk by Lawrence Lessig on the issue: "There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig."

There are many countries in the world where a de facto "Supreme Council" determines which candidates are allowed to stand at election. They are sham democracies. We are falling into that model more and more.

I've never even heard of the "Expanding Vacuum theory".

He may be talking about Dark Energy? Great ted talk on this at 9min30sec http://www.ted.com/talks/patri... although i think it goes hand in hand with the big bang.

We absolutely, positively need petroleum right now in order to exist. Without it, we'd have to fall back to an 1800's agrarian existence

Sure. Right now today. But what about 10 years from now if we make an effort to change? The problem is, no one is starting to change. No politician has created a national plan with milestones. And Deniers keep throwing up their hands and saying, "it is impossible to get off petrol".

Right now, techniques exist to apply nitrogen to crops without being petroleum based, and it is cheaper than conventional nitrogen. I know, because I sell it. http://www.mabiotec.com/main.php?page=twinn1 It also provides disease resistance, increased soil carbon, and is 100% nitrogen neutral. The product is a living organism that sucks nitrogen out of the air and fixes it to the roots of a plant.

Right now, battery technology exists that could power a tractor or combine. Or if not 100% electric now (or in 10 years time), at least Hybrid http://www.complex.com/rides/2014/03/walmart-getting-behind-electric-semi-trucks. Farms could continue to use petroleum products in reduced amounts. Besides, the VAST majority of the petroleum c02 pollution is from commuter cars.

best methods to obtain petroleum based products, fracking, to keep costs down so we have enough research money to throw into things

Yeah, because the profits of the oil and natural gas companies is being used to drive green research, or the cost savings in my personal electric bill is being channeled into green energy research... The two are not linked.

There are a lot of very painless transition plans to move off oil. Like this one Winning the Oil Endgame . The problem isn't that it is impossible, the problem is that we are not starting at all.

This too:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...

So chronologically ...

2012-06-?? Video filmed
2014-03-05 arXiv.org submission
2012-03-07 Video published on TED
2014-03-07 wired.com article
2014-03-08 pipedot.org story
2014-03-10 slashdot.org first story
2014-03-14 economist.com article
2014-03-15 slashdot.org second story

So, someone may have filmed the video a few years ago, but the video was only posted online recently. Afterwards the story made the rounds on various news sites over the next few weeks. Hardly that old of news...

this is of-course a dupe, but hey, what else is new.

Ted talk on this device.

Efficiency in private sector is defined to be maximizing the return on investment. Private sector efficiency is NOT delivering goods and services at the least cost to most people. If that is the *only* way to maximize the return on investment, they will do it. It happens on simple products like cereal, bread, milk etc.

It doesn't even work entirely for those. Civic duty used to be an important part of American education. Now we have mega-banks that capture markets and suck the value out of everything they can.

Commodities Speculation: A Cause of Food Crises? A Crime Against Humanity?

How Morgan Stanley Has Raked in Billions by Manipulating the Prices of Everyday Commodities

Sasha Breger: How Commodities Hoarding Distorts Food Prices

There was an article I read with an evocative image of grain rotting in rail cars while crises erupt in the Middle East, but I can't find that article right now.

"This is why its better to have elections"

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...

In an ideal world, yes.

In the interim, I like what Larry Lessig has to say.

What would maximize the placebo effect?

Ben Goldacre has some things to say about that, the placebo effect part starts at 6:20 but the rest is worth watching:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_g...

The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say, "My God, what are these people doing to themselves? They're killing each other. They're killing themselves while we watch them die."

https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey#t-6523

Bob Metcalf dubbed him "Darth Cerf".

Some people do the right thing and damn the personal cost.

http://www.ted.com/talks/edwar...

Maybe just change how you elect your politicians.

We the people and the republic we must reclaim - Lawrence Lessig

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...

You ignore that although we do not let just a single person define what is beneficial, we have built our current civilization via the means to discover benefit and disregard harm. It is not the people who decide what's valued, but Humanity as a whole: Nature itself provides the environment which contains the facts of all actions. We need only look through the unbiased lens of reality that our method of science affords. We can come to know what is beneficial or not without guessing, but there are those who oppose the investigation itself.

Show me evidence that HFT provides overall benefit to society; Otherwise, your subjective conclusions as to value are meaningless. The needs of the many outweigh the greeds of the few.

You have a right to hold your own opinion, but not to be correct simply for holding it. Nature does not to care of opinion. The stock market is a means to assist with investment in businesses. The stock prices should be affected by the business's worth. If we allow the subjective valuation of businesses then we have created a market decoupled from what a business is worth to society and instead trading in only opinion.

In the opinion market the prevailing opinion is valued regardless of reality. When rumors of Microsoft's purchase of Yahoo surfaced, Yahoo did not begin working extra hard over night to supply worth to our economy, and yet Yahoo's stock price soared. When the rumors and negotiations fell through, Yahoo's price sank, yet they did not change their business or benefit to society; Their worth to reality apart from the stock market was unchanged. The opinions of Yahoo drastically affected its business and shareholders cried out their opinions loudly. Microsoft and Yahoo entered talks again, and a partnership was formed. This is disgusting. Propaganda used for extortion and a system built first accidentally, but now expressly to facilitate it.

Those who hold majority opinion control the opinion market of stocks. Thus a poor opinion can devalue or destroy a business regardless of its actual worth to society as a whole. This is ridiculousness and demonstrably dangerous to the utmost degree! Science has shown that humans are severely biased, and need assistance in decision making! If propaganda is encouraged to control the stock prices then the investors can not invest in what is worthy to society as a whole unless the propaganda agrees -- And it most frequently does not. This means the contract between the society as a whole who's worth is at jeopardy and the market wherein that worth is sold has been broken.

Though the stock market originally meant grant investment opportunity to all, the economic future of society as a whole is now decided by prevalence of opinion, and is not reflective of the reality external to the stock market. As TFS illustrates: Making large trades shouldn't move the market: High frequency trading is only an acceleration of the same game. It further decouples stock price from the value one can extract from a trade itself by exploiting the fact that some systems have more access to information and needs less time to trade. It is essentially a tax on trading which sets a ridiculously high barrier for the degree of awareness one must have to compete. It is folly for man to compete with machine: Since the first stone tool was shaped, man and machine prospered as we helped each other and suffered as we were pitted against each other.

Cybernetics was invented before the explosion of computing to analyze business. Using information theory I have analyzed HFT cybernetically. High frequency trading is a means to capitalize on the fact that information takes time to propagate. HFT makes money by using its greater information and faster ability to trade against those who can not become aware of as much information as quickly. It is profiting via information disparity, and thus cybernetically it is no different than lying. An inves

The result is that by elimination of dominated strategies, the best strategy in a world without patents is to not actually come up with anything new, but instead to just copy what everyone else is doing, as it gets you the same result with much lower cost.

It's not an unreasonable first guess, but that turns out to actually not be how people behave when the constraints are lifted.

Here's an interesting point of view about that : Does money make you mean? ..arguing by analogy via a rigged monopoly game, that the newly-rich person would attribute his success to his work (monopoly strategy), while at the same time failing to admit his success is mostly due to the rigged inequitable rules set at the beginning of the game.

I get it, but that's no excuse. You're right, though, that it's hardly the only consideration.

Since the point of this article was to bring up crazy ideas to reevaluate our current systems, why we use them, and what we might do instead - I have a crazy proposal for evaluation. This isn't something that I know will work, but something I'd like to see thought through. It does have a controversial aspect.

There has already been some research done into treating crime like an epidemic. Why not study it like an addiction? People participate in both because they get something out of it emotionally. They are less likely to feel shame and reform if their peers/family accept the behavior. They both breed distrust for societal norms which disapprove of the behavior, socially isolating them from those who might help.

So, how do we deal with addiction? It's not easy to do, but it is something that we have made progress with over the years. Locking people up in rehab for a period of time does help. But it is wholly insufficient on it's own. One of the best ways to quit is some type of 12-step-like program. Criminals today are told that they cannot associate with other felons, as a condition of their parole. This makes sense, but is it really the best way? What if there was an semi-anonymous sponsor program? Felons helping felons to stay out of jail by staying straight?

This sound very much like a continuation and refinement of technology demonstrated a few years back that could identify mosquitoes and differentiate between males and females to only zap the females.
I remember seeing this TED talk some time back where they had constructed a working rig. At least working under laboratory conditions. Is that the precursor of this?

This is a good watch, although it is not in relation to the shadow detection of insects. It is discussing the laser based insect control but it is still frequency based for identification:

https://www.ted.com/talks/nath...

If you don't believe Dan667, check out the musicians who aren't able to turn a profit until they start giving their music away for free and asking for donations. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/20...

Also a recent TED talk on the topic

I was always placing my bets on advertising the 5th piece from this: http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_... New slogan: "Gotta love getting some juicy tail at KFC!" Subheader: "For a limited time, get your tail with or without a bone!" Artificial chicken for the foreseeable future is as real as Robot Chicken.

In the Ted Video (link below) he claims to have treated phantom limb pain with a mirror. Yes, a chap mirror. No expensive VR.

Ted Talk: Vilayanur Ramachandran

First, thank you, everyone, for the feedback. There are some wonderful stories that I recognize and others that I look forward to reading.

Second, because the solicited essays and fiction will only be a small part of the course, I will have to rely on short stories (including novellas) instead of entire novels. That is part of what makes it hard to research. It's much easier to find out about novels, which have more readers and are better publicized than short stories, especially recent ones that have not yet been widely reprinted.

Third, to those of you who think I am being too lazy to do my research myself, gathering information is part of the research process, and I'd be remiss in not making use of the hive mind if it has useful information that I might not. I would much rather be called a negligent teacher than to be one. Academics study one another's reading lists and syllabi all the time. Believe me, plenty of work remains in deciding what material to include, how present it, etc.

Fourth, thank you for letting me know the history of the word "futurism". The sense I used it ("concern with events and trends of the future or which anticipate the future") is the first one in some dictionaries and is widely used at kurzweilai.net, The Foresight Institute, and other sites I have used, but I will certainly let my students know that some people prefer the word "futurology". For those who are interested, here's a Google n-gram view of "futurism", "futurist", and "futurology".

Fifth, some commenters suggested using primary sources and biography. Agreed. I was already planning to include Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, and the stories of Khan Academy, Iqbal Quadir, Sugata Mitra, and others.

Sixth, it was also suggested that I look at past predictions of the future. Also agreed. I assembled such a reading list for a previous course. It hadn't occurred to me to include in my question what I didn't need, because I'd already assembled it, but I see now that it would be helpful.

Thank you again for the suggestions and even for the criticisms. Soliciting opinions from Slashdot is always a story in itself.

First, thank you, everyone, for the feedback. There are some wonderful stories that I recognize and others that I look forward to reading.

Second, because the solicited essays and fiction will only be a small part of the course, I will have to rely on short stories (including novellas) instead of entire novels. That is part of what makes it hard to research. It's much easier to find out about novels, which have more readers and are better publicized than short stories, especially recent ones that have not yet been widely reprinted.

Third, to those of you who think I am being too lazy to do my research myself, gathering information is part of the research process, and I'd be remiss in not making use of the hive mind if it has useful information that I might not. I would much rather be called a negligent teacher than to be one. Academics study one another's reading lists and syllabi all the time. Believe me, plenty of work remains in deciding what material to include, how present it, etc.

Fourth, thank you for letting me know the history of the word "futurism". The sense I used it ("concern with events and trends of the future or which anticipate the future") is the first one in some dictionaries and is widely used at kurzweilai.net, The Foresight Institute, and other sites I have used, but I will certainly let my students know that some people prefer the word "futurology". For those who are interested, here's a Google n-gram view of "futurism", "futurist", and "futurology".

Fifth, some commenters suggested using primary sources and biography. Agreed. I was already planning to include Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Vannevar Bush's As We May Think, and the stories of Khan Academy, Iqbal Quadir, Sugata Mitra, and others.

Sixth, it was also suggested that I look at past predictions of the future. Also agreed. I assembled such a reading list for a previous course. It hadn't occurred to me to include in my question what I didn't need, because I'd already assembled it, but I see now that it would be helpful.

Thank you again for the suggestions and even for the criticisms. Soliciting opinions from Slashdot is always a story in itself.

The salary of the vice president at McD's isn't taking money meant for the burger flippers pocket....

He absolutely is.

In fact, in the specific case you cite, low-end wages are kept below poverty so that not only is the vice-president of McD's taking money away from the burger flippers, but he's taking money from each and every taxpayer by having the government subsidize his employees.

There are even laws now to codify such arrangements. If a Southeastern state lures a manufacturing plant from say, Washington or Oregon, one of the ways they do it is to agree to allow the company to keep any state income taxes that are withheld from employees wages. The taxes are still taken out of each paycheck, but the money never goes beyond the company's coffers.

Corporations are seeking out this kind of deal, and states, in a rush to the bottom, are giving in so they can show how they're "bringing jobs" to their area.

The issue of sports stars or movie stars is a red herring. There are so few of them as to make it irrelevant, and their pay is directly tied to the profits they are expected to generate for the owners.

CEOs' salaries on the other hand, are entirely a function of a buddy system in corporate boards. Everybody gets a nice income and lifelong security and they scratch each others' backs. You will never hear of the board of directors of a big company or bank asking if maybe they can find a CEO from Pakistan or China who's willing to work for $250,000 instead of $40,000,000, even though there is very little evidence that the CEO has that much impact on a company's bottom line. Despite the fact that it's absolutely the job of the directors to do so. And even if that did ever happen, it wouldn't explain the huge salaries for unproven CEOs for companies getting huge bonuses even when the company is not doing well, which is much more common than most people would imagine. You will often hear, on the other hand, about sports teams deciding not to pay a veteran $40,000,000 if there is $400,000 rookie who can do the job. One of those "minimum wage" players was the quarterback who won the Super Bowl this year, in fact. The guy he replaced was obscenely overpaid and the rookie showed promise and the owners gave him the job.

And there are plenty of other ways in which income disparities directly hurt most people. Just have a look at the work of Richard Wilkinson and co, who have done a lot of work on this issue. Yes, when people at the top make a lot of money and their incomes increase out of proportion to the rest of society, it takes money away from the people flipping burgers and making cars. And writing code.

http://www.ted.com/talks/richa...

One of my favorite TED talks is http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html. The guy knows his mushrooms . I never gave them a second thought until I saw the video. Just thought I'd share.

Please look at this TED http://www.ted.com/talks/maria...

This seem entirely relevant, enjoy. http://www.ted.com/talks/simon...

*shrug* Maybe Wolfram didn't code 100% of Alpha, but it exists because of his vision.
The downside of your hand-waving is that it distracts others away from his ideas and perspective, which is their loss.
So... here is 20 minutes of rather cool geeky viewing; it is well worth watching S.Wolfram walk through his ideas, and talk a bit about WolframAlpha as well:
http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_of_everything.html

So please, 3D printing fans, show me where we can 3D print molecules.

In a lab.

Lend out tools, toys, computers, and other things. The grand idea should be for people to learn for free.

Watch this: http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/18...

Yeah, I think that's a fair conclusion, after reviewing their archives. It really has gotten worse.

Science category for 2013: here. Notable woo includes:
*Could we speak the language of dolphins
*Jessica Green: We're covered in germs. Let's design for that.
*A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager.(Woop woop woop, red flag detected)
*How a dead duck changed my life

Going back to 2003 here. The only item that draws my eye as bad is
*Tierney Thys: Swim with the giant sunfish. (and it's possible that's not as bad as the name implies)

With plenty of legit topics like:
*Life in the outer solar system
*Birth of the computer
*health and the human mind (...maybe)
*The face of AIDS in Africa

It's gotten worse.

I watched a TED talk about someone who did something similar.

http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_w...

Since we're all about analogies here, I'll arrange for exactly three haystacks to be set up in a field right off a busy highway. Then I'll put exactly three needles in those haystacks for you to go find, which is very much akin to asking the Slashdot community to go find the most abused three lines of code in the known universe.

Those would be context-free haystacks. But you're right, this is the kind of question where the last quarter mile becomes exponentially more inane.

I'm pretty sure it was Kahneman's book that had a section on how the human mind is remarkably able and willing to make heuristic comparisons of superficially incomparable magnitudes. Is French vanilla better than French kissing? Surprisingly, the human brain puts this kind of thing into a fairly robust order, across individuals and populations, IMDRDDM (if my dim recollections don't deceive me).

More interesting is the question about the subroutine longest embedded and most frequently invoked which turns out to return wrong values for common operations, only the code which calls the subroutine nevertheless does the right thing with the wrong value, because it too contains a weird bug which is not superficially obvious when glancing through the source code, such as dependence on an uninitialized value.

The trope here is two sides of a formal interface, one where the formal requirements are obvious and well understood, which manage to collaborate to turn two egregious coding booboos into a paragon of durable and stable deployment.

Then one day a programmer notices the dependence on the uninitialized value, which would clearly produce a severe failure if fed the correct inputs, and he thinks "surely this hasn't been running for thirty years deployed on hundreds of thousands of nodes, and never triggered a fatal anomaly" and yet there it is.

Then he could author a genre sequel in the Thompson tradition entitled On Trusting Time and Track Record. Inside a black box, no one knows if you're a cluster fuck.

Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action

Janine Benyus has a message for inventors: When solving a design problem, look to nature first. There you'll find inspired designs for making things waterproof, aerodynamic, solar-powered and more.

What you won't find in nature are formal interfaces. Most of mother nature's cleverest hacks were discovered by pillaging haystacks.

> is that pesky concept of Money.

Actually, there are three levels to understanding the definition of Money.

1. Token of exchange (aka barter)
2. Token of time, knowledge, and/or skill.
3. Token of energy

Each definition "solves" a problem that the previous level is unable to.

Let's go over some examples:

Past: Physical barter; I have 2 cows, you have 10 sheep. We could do a simple 1:1 exchange of 1 cow = 1 sheep. However if say cows are more valuable then sheep, you can't easily trade 2.25 sheep. Since we are trading physical objects sub-dividing the exchange rate is rather difficult. We need a finer granularity.

Current: Let's replace all the physical objects with tokens that symbolize wealth. Since the symbols are mathematical numbers we can sub-divide down to our hearts content. Plus things are a heck of a lot easier to trade for now.
I don't have the skills or knowledge or hours to build a house so I can pay someone to do that for me. Likewise I can trade my time, knowledge, and skills for a common token which I can then in the future exchange for something I want / need.

The old problem of the 20th century was production.
The current problem of the 21st century is distribution.
The next problem of the 22nd century is society adapting to letting go of the false concept of the past thousands of years of "There is never enough" to the new truth: Abundance: Having enough when you need it

Future: Eventually we will get to the point that:

a) We have Free Energy -- as long as we don't pull too much energy at once from the Lattice of the universe we have as much energy as we want, and
b) Einstein showed us that we can convert matter into energy. Once we have mastered the reverse process of Energy -> Matter (aka the Replicator in Star Trek parlance) what will give items their worth if we can simply just crank them out for free? Their unique design. (The Fashion industry is already laying the foundation with this approach.)
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

> eliminate the concept of money

That is impossible given the definition of what money actually is.

--
I have professionally shipped numerous games on DS, PS1, PS2, PS3, PC, and Wii.

Farming is something that needs to be done locally in order to be naturally efficient. Otherwise, you end up with a few huge farms, all trying to cut all corners (in order to be efficient) as much as possible - usually by using fertilizers and insecticides that are bad for the environment. After that comes the need to modify plant DNA to grow bigger/faster/bug-and-weed-resilient crops.

Here's a good Ted-talk on this very matter. Feel free to mock Ron Finley too. I mean, omg, he's so ghetto! (tongue-in-cheek)

You should watch this. Livestock may end up saving us.