Archive for July, 2007
The Web’s Secret Stories
Jonathan Harris wants to make sense of the infinite world on the Web — so he builds dazzling graphic interfaces that help us visualize the data floating around out there. Here he presents “We Feel Fine,” a project that scours blogs to collect the planet’s emoti(c)ons, and the “Yahoo! Time Capsule,” which preserves images, quotes [...]
Brain Science and Computing
To date, there hasn’t been an overarching theory of how the human brain really works, Jeff Hawkins argues in this compelling talk. That’s because we still haven’t defined intelligence accurately. But one thing’s for sure, he says: The brain isn’t like a powerful computer processor. It’s more like a memory system that records everything we [...]
How Technology Will Transform Us
Prolific inventor and outrageous visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why — by the 2020s — we will have reverse-engineered the human brain, and nanobots will be operating your consciousness. Kurzweil draws on years of research to show the speed at which technology is evolving, and projects forward into an almost unthinkable future [...]
Learn From Spaghetti Sauce
In this witty monologue, Malcolm Gladwell follows the career of a food industry consultant who uncovered a key secret to what eaters like. Running huge focus groups to find customers’ truest tastes, Gladwell’s hero draws a radical conclusion, an epiphany that has defined food marketing ever since. About Malcolm Gladwell: Malcolm Gladwell specializes in surprises [...]
How Stats Fool Juries
Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly explores the common mistakes we make in interpreting statistics, and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials. Statistical uncertainty and randomness, he says, confound many of our assumptions about the world. He shares the case of a British woman wrongly convicted of murdering her two [...]
