Innovation
Innovation at Google
Innovation for its own sake is useless. Period. And no one knows this better than the company who redefined the rules of information search. In this interesting 50 minute presentation, Google CIO Douglas Merrill tells us about innovation at Google. He highlights the importance of speed, the user experience, machine translation, defining innovation, relevance and [...]
Cars off the road, data into the skies
Robin Chase rose to fame by founding Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business, but that was one of her smaller ideas. In this presentation she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a no-fee mesh network as sprawling as the United States Interstate highway system. But how could [...]
Journey to the center of the Earth … and beyond!
Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth’s deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. The plan is to send the machine to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid underworld that may harbor [...]
Journey to the center of your mind
In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family [...]
Why can’t we “grow” new energy?
Juan Enriquez offers a glimpse of some ground-breaking research to explore the potential of bioenergy. Our current energy sources — coal, oil, gas — are ultimately derived from ancient plants — they’re “concentrated sunlight.” He asks, Can we learn from that process and accelerate it? Can we get to the point where we grow our [...]
