March 28, 2024   11:28am
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As promised in my last post TED 2009 – The full range of emotions, here’s one of my favorite speeches and a few websites referred to by TED speakers at the podium …

Practical Widom and the Remoralization of Professional Life, a talk that resonated with the TED audience (and I hope will be circulated to many audiences).   Given by Barry Schwartz, a psychologist and author of The Paradox of Choice and prior to that The Costs of Living, this speech according to TED, “makes a passionate call for ‘practical wisdom’ as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.”

Websites to explore:

www.hansonrobotics.com
Be amazed by the extraordinarily real human facial expressions robotics now brings you (and other robot-y breakthroughs as well) — Artificial Intelligence is definitely getting less artificial-like.

www.Garriottspacechallenge.com
A portal being developed for “visionaries who realize the role of private space exploration in charting humanity’s course to the stars.”

The BigDog robot
A quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads.  It will, most probably, freak you out …

www.kurzweilai.net (from Ray Kurzweil)
Accelerating Intelligence news (sign up for the newsletter).  So what if I don’t understand most of it; the bit I do is worth the trip.

www.gapminder.org
Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.  You have to play around a bit on this site, but it’s fact, figures and display are guaranteed to surprise you.

www.thetimeparadox.com
A book on how “the new psychology of time will change your life.”

www.flong.com/projects/snout/
The artist Golan Levin and his collaborators create a “snout” — a seemingly friendly creature who likes to “eye” students as they go in and out of art school.  Enjoy the students’ reactions (or lack thereof) …

www.Tinkeringschool.com
A learning place where kids can go and figure things out by fooling around.  This is a young kids’ paradise where they actually accomplish things you (and, possibly, they) never thought they could.

www.instructables.com
How to do everything from knit a hat without a pattern to body casting with chocolate to solar hot water kettle.  Have fun exploring.

www.makelovenotporn.com
One woman’s answer to educating young men (and those men who haven’t grown up yet) about sex. Your comments welcome.

International canopy network: ICAN
A group devoted to bringing people together who are concerned with forest canopies and forest ecosystems around the world.

6billionothers.org
Personal accounts from people all over the world.  A project that you can help translate from photographer/filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand and goodplanet.org.

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