Posts Tagged "TED"

TED: Apollo Robbins on the Art of Misdirection

“They have fancy models of attention, Posner’s trinity model of attention… For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. It’s kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. For me, I like to call him Frank.”

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Joe Smith: How to Conserve 571,230,000 Pounds of Paper Towels in Twelve and a Half Easy Steps

Every year, we Americans use over 13 billion pounds of paper towels. That’s right – billions. That is not a small number.

And you know what? I have a confession to make – I’m not helping with that number. I’m someone who’s in the habit of grabbing multiple paper towels to dry my hands. I’ve done this for a while, always with the belief that I needed more than one to fully dry my hands.

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Clay Shirky Video: Why SOPA is a Bad Idea

Shirky does a remarkable job articulating the history and the problem of copyright violation, and why measures like SOPA/PIPA are incredibly problematic. He is clear, concise, and is able to summarize a complex topic and make it digestible. More than that, he’s able to describe the inherent problems way better than anyone else I’ve read or heard.

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Jane McGonigal on Saving the World Through Games

I saw Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on gaming last week, and it really just dropped my jaw. I’ve been thinking about it ever since then, and definitely have a drastically different point of view towards games. Here’s a dizzying number: McGonigal researched and found out that we spend, collectively, about 3 billion hours each and every week playing games online….

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Augmented Reality Maps, TED 2010

I’ve seen some online mentions of the TED 2010 talks, and I’m excited to see more of them coming online now. The talk I’ve posted here is a pretty fascinating presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who is most known for his creation of Seadragon and Photosynth (a pretty stunning bit of software that stitches multiple images together seemingly like…

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Clay Shirky Video: How Technology is Shaping Groups and Conversations

I’ve just spent the past 20 minutes totally sucked in to this video of Clay Shirky, talking about the ways technology and the Internet are changing the way we communicate. Here’s a taste: “What matters here isn’t technical capital, it’s social capital. These tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. I tisn’t when the shiny new tools…

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Exploring TED Talks: On Motivation, Brain Magic and Collecting Stories

Recently, I’ve taken to watching more TED talks online. It started with a post on Lifehacker about Tony Robbins’ talk on Motiviation. From there, I started looking around at others: Keith Barry: Brain Magic, Martin Seligman: What Positive Psychology can Help You Become, Jonathan Harris: The Art of Collecting Stories, Jaokb Trollback: Rethinking the Music Video. Note: Jonathan Harris is…

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TED Talks, on DVD – Free Download

It’s been a busy week, so not a ton of personal stuff to post about. I’m continuing the linkfest for the time being. A semi-recent post to MetaFilter Projects: TED talks on DVD. MeFi user Adrian McEwen compiled several presentations from TED.com, burned them to DVD, and has made the files available via BitTorrent. There are six talks on the…

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