Thanks to Liz, I found out about this great TEDxBoston talk by Andrew McAffee on robots and jobs. It’s a nice companion piece to the recent news/announcement about the automated Amazon Go grocery store.
“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.”
Ron Finley, longtime reside of South Central LA, talks at length about why he likes planting vegetable gardens wherever he can – abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs outside houses. He’s an incredibly effective and charismatic speaker, and his talk is a great balance between insight, information, and humor.
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.
I was in the grocery store earlier this morning, and as I was choosing my orange juice… I was suddenly reminded of Malcolm Gladwell.
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.
Whenever you’re filling out a CAPTCHA (those blurry, wavy words they sometimes force you to type on web pages), you should think of Luis von Ahn. He was involved in the early days of CAPTCHAs, but ended up starting a company called reCAPTCHA that revolutionized this seemingly mundane task.
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…
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…
I was in bed a bit early last night, and ended up installing a TED app for my iPhone. I’m a big fan of the TED talks, and ended up spending some time just watching a few videos, straight from my phone (which was pretty awesome). The one I wanted to share here was by…
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…
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…
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…