Why are we happy? How to fix the legal system and the science of motivation
Three TED talks selected by Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational and the new Upside of Irrationality (launched on the 1st June).
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Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?
Jeff Jarvis: This is Bullshit
As you know there are few books that I keep mentioning because I love. One of them is “What Would Google Do?” from Jeff Jarvis. I also listen every week to Jeff (Gina Trapani and Leo Laporte) in “This Week in Google” or TWiG. I follow him in twitter… so basically I like the way he thinks.
Here you have a video from one of his chats called “this is bullshit” at TEDxNYED.
It talks about lectures as an outmoded form of education and news.
Here are his notes (which won’t match the talk exactly). All the videos are now up at the TEDxNYED site.
JK Rowling: The fringe benefits of failure
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.
At her Harvard University commencement speech, “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling offers some powerful, heartening advice to dreamers and overachievers, including one hard-won lesson that she deems “worth more than any qualification I ever earned.”
What Happens When Malcolm Gladwell And Clay Shirk Can’t Agree On Social Media?
Two of the smartest thinkers when it comes to media and business are Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky
Gladwell is the best-selling business book author of, Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What The Dog Saw and Shirky penned the “must-own” book, Here Comes Everybody along with being both a world-class media academic, speaker and pundit. Both have some of the most progressive business perspectives that have been put forth in the past decade, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that those perspective are not always on the same page.
Watch this..
But this might not be the Tipping Point for Social Media…
On Sunday, April 4th, 2010 the Globe & Mail published an interview with Malcolm Gladwell titled, Malcolm Gladwell: The quiet Canadian. Gladwell isn’t big into Social Media as this article points out: “His blog posts are biannual, his Facebook page is a placeholder and he has never ventured on to Twitter.”
So, what gives? What’s Malcolm Gladwell’s gripe with Social Media?
“There’s only so much you can do in a day. And I don’t feel I lack for platforms for expressing myself. I have books, I write for the New Yorker. If I gave people any more, they’d get sick of me. I have a Blackberry, like any good Canadian. I’m from Waterloo – how can I not have a Blackberry? I’ll leave it in my bag for a while or I leave the office and go and work in a café. I’m right now working on something and I printed it off so I can work away from a computer for a while. There are just all kinds of little techniques one uses to restore alone time.”
Fair enough, it’s not relevant to Gladwell because he already has many popular publishing platforms to spread his ideas, but does Social Media work for others? Can Social Media help bring ideas to a tipping point?
“Do ideas spread through social media? I don’t think they are vehicles. People aren’t spreading ideas on Twitter, they’re spreading observations, perhaps. The point of Tipping Point is that I was very interested in face-to-face interpersonal reactions. If social media or online communication is the means to the creation of a personal connection, it’s a fabulous thing. But if it’s an excuse to not make a connection, it’s ultimately a trivial thing.”
…And they’re both right.
(from twistimage)
5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media
As social media has become a game changer for industries across the board, you can bet the experts at this year’s TED conference will have their sights set on peeling back the hype and getting at the core of what social technology has in store for this year and beyond.
Perhaps the best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the organization’s website. Given the wealth of insight we’re sure to see tomorrow, we thought we’d whet your appetite by highlighting a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.
1. Alexis Ohanian: How To Make a Splash in Social Media
We’ll start things off with a real-life social media parable about how the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the quick and hilarious story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all powerful, and it cannot be controlled.
2. Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History
In this talk, consultant, professor and author Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. From the election crisis in Iran to the massive earthquake that shook China in May of 2008, Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.
3. Evan Williams: Listening to Twitter Users
With a couple of anecdotes building the ultimate social media case study, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.
4. Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet Enables Intimacy
As social media changes our social lives, speculation has abounded for years on how the web may be disconnecting us from intimate interactions in favor of meaningless quests to rack up followers and “friends.” Not so, says Stefana Broadbent, who explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.
5. Seth Godin: The Tribes We Lead
From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.
(from mashable)
sixthsense project: integrating information with the real world
‘SixthSense‘ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.
The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.
Great TED talks on future technologies
Building a techno-sixth sense
Mind control – closer than you think
Will death eventually be a thing of the past?
The ultimate reboot
Embracing an exponentially advancing future
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