What I find remarkable about this talk by Ken Robinson is how it manages to be insightful and very funny. You can watch it just for the humour and have a good laugh. But like any TED talk, you will also gain alot by the ideas presented. Goto YouTube and see:
Do schools today kill creativity? (Ken Robinson, TEDTalks)
It’s also a Master class in how to present.
The nytimes.com online has a good article on the problem of captchas are having. It’s a bit worrisome. See A Dog or a Cat? New Tests to Fool Automated Spammers – New York Times
Perhaps it is time to get out the Voight-Kampff machines.
When I watch this video, I feel like two different parts of my brain are working at the same time: one part comprehending the beauty and another comprehending the terrifying content. See it yourself:
Two striking videos on this subject matter, including the famous Dove Evolution ad. The first one, Doll Face, is longer, but it is worth watching.
IBM has a tools called Many Eyes that allows people to create visualizations of day. This is related to my previous entry, but this time it’s Coalition fatalities in Iraq
The New York Times has an article on a show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York which includes many items to show a grasp of the depths of world poverty and ingenious ways to attack it. such as the 20-gallon rolling drum for transporting water, above.
The OLPC is also there, as well as the design of other things.
I thing there are things people need that are essential — whether they be materially well off or not — and things they don’t need. I believe the exhibit focuses on the former. For example, as Nicholas Negroponte says, the point of OLPC is not the laptop, it is the focus on education that the OLPC enables. It is not that every child in the world should have a new thing.
That said, I think some of the design is….cool. Now if someone would design a half decent cart to help me get my groceries home without a car, I would be happy. But I digress.
One of FM’s author is Kevin Kelly, of Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools
He’s much more than this. He has been doing cool stuff for many years, whether he was working on the Whole Earth Catalog (the Internet in a catalog form 🙂 ) or helping launch WiReD (before it became TiReD). His cool tools section of his web site always has interesting articles in it.
It’s a shame the Whole Earth Review isn’t around anymore. But KK’s web site is: soak it up.
Federated Media Publishing says:
FM represents outstanding authors whose sites cater to cultural influencers, technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders. Our first “federation,” focused on digital business and culture, reaches millions and millions of unique readers every month. New federations in the small business, media/entertainment and parenting categories, representing millions of entrepreneurs, upscale consumers and families, are in the process of launching as well.
So check out their author list: it’s a good one.
To quote the WiReD blog:
The idea behind reCAPTCHA is that, as long as we’re all solving these CAPTCHA puzzles, why not throw in some minimal additional data? By adding a second image with an unsolved word from the Internet Archive book scanning project, ReCAPTCHA allows users to channel their CAPTCHA solving skills into real world benefits.
To me, this is an innovative idea of putting the world to work. I wonder how many more companies are employing this approach?
….why not try to get in the middle of these three circles?
The blog, The Chief Happiness Officer, can help.
You can find out here at Get Good Karma.
Hey, you don’t want to come back as a bug, do you?
I think this is fascinating. A professor downloads some Word documents that were posted with changes still in them and his 8 year old son finds them for him.
See the story here: The views of Iraq you weren’t supposed to see | Salon News
Among other things, it is an illustration of how even a common software product like Word is too sophisticated for it’s users
Chris Jordan does an amazing job of depicting statistics. The magnitude is simply….awesome.
Check out his current work here.
For instance, see
a depiction of two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.
ScienceDaily has a good article on how our spaces affect the way we think, feel and act:
Ceiling Height Can Affect How A Person Thinks, Feels And Acts
Smart People I Know 