From Julian Treasure’s TED talk: 5 ways to listen better:
The acronym RASA to help you become a better listener:
Receive: Pay attention to the person talking
Appreciate: Making noises that lets the speaker know that you are listening and receiving their message (oh! ok! yes!)
Summarize: Saying “So….”
Ask: Ask questions afterwards
An animated version of a talk given by Steven Johnson “Where good ideas come from”
I have watched many videos on TED and I have enjoyed many and learnt a lot on a variety of topics. But this one by Mike Rowe was one that had many teaching moments in it that apply to everyday life. Very appropriate for this Labor day weekend!
A must watch.
Sir Humphry Davy
These were the words that Humphry Davy said in defense of his protégé's useless science experiments.
His protégé was Michael Faraday who invented/discovered the following (amongst other works):
- first dynamo (From his discovery of electromagnetic induction)
- discovered the compound benzene.
- researched electrolysis, formulating Faraday's law.
- laid the foundations of the classical electromagnetic field theory
A Discourse introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, Delivered in the Theatre of the Royal Institution, on the 21st of January, 1802.
http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Davy/davy2dis.html
I came across the quote in the TED presentation by Brian Cox on the state of the LHC in 2009.
This is a very cool video of a new wearable computer that was demoed at TED.
The project is called “Wear Ur World” (WuW) and is the brain child of a guy called Pranav Mistry. Read more about it at his home-page.
Home page for MIT Media Labs: http://www.media.mit.edu/
A very good video on how to picth to Vecture Capitalists (V.C.s). David gives the most important aspects about you and your company that VCs are looking for in your presentation.
Some of you who have been regular readers of my blog - would have seen my previous posts about Microsoft's PhotoSynth technology. PhotoSynth is truly a ground breaking piece of software that is not just awesome for what it can do (create 3D scenes from a set of your 2d photographs), but also in how it represents the shift in how Microsoft does business. Just 5 years ago all the research that Microsoft did would find its way into some commercial piece of software. (For example a lot of the research into image manipulation would end up into Digital Image - a now discontinued product). Today a piece of software such as PhotoSynth which truly has huge commercial value, has been released to the public totally free of cost. (To boot MS is giving 20gb of space to everyone who signs up for a Live account - a prerequisite to creating PhotoSynths). A lot of this paradigm shift in how Microsoft is operating, I am sure is in no small part attributable to Google. (Though, it does feel like the amount of cool stuff coming out of Google is slowing down and Microsoft is quickly gathering the speed needed to over-take it).
The website itself has much to be desired off. (it is nice for a 0.5 version, but needs more work). It is hard to find cool PhotoSynths and I wish we could geo-code our images - so that people would know which location they represent. What would be even cooler would be that once multiple PhotoSynths for a location are created - they are all merged into one seamless representation of that area. Never-the-less, even in this iteration - this software is truly AWESOME!
Here is a MS Research paper on PhotoTourisim - a precursor to PhotoSynth: http://research.microsoft.com/IVM/PhotoTours/
Also - check out this truly cool video about PhotoSynth that was shown at a TED conference just a little over a year ago.
And here is my first ever PhotoSynth. The PhotoSynth was created with 7 photographs that I took of the Denver City Building while walking home. It took less than a couple of minutes for the PhotoSynth to be created and uploaded to the website.
Check out this point cloud that PhotoSynth creates from my pictures, which are used to "stitch" the images together.
Everytime I take a look at a PhotoSynth and the point cloud that sits behind it - I am truly awestruck. The problem that PhotoSynth solves is not a trivial one and to boot - they have made it work fast as well as accurately. It is truly amazing. PhotoSynth definitely takes photographs to a whole new level
Highlights from the top 10 TedTalks. (http://www.ted.com/talks/top10)
And here is the list of the top 10 talks:
Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks 
Jill Bolte Taylor's powerful stroke of insight 
David Gallo shows underwater astonishments 
Arthur Benjamin does "Mathemagic" 
Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Photosynth 
Jeff Han demos his breakthrough touchscreen 
Tony Robbins asks why we do what we do 
Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen 
Al Gore on averting climate crisis 
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
Robert Full talks about how engineers can learn from evolution seen in nature.
Examples include Sagittal Leg Spring (how motion of 2, 4, 6 and 8 legged animals can be described in exactly the same way - they bounce like pogo sticks).
SPRAWL robot made using Shape Deposition Manufacturing (SDM) by Stanford. (The material mimics organic materials)
RHex (Robot Hexapod) a bouncing autonomous robot from McGill university.
The demo of the robots starts at about 10:30 minutes into the video. RHex motion is definitely impressive and shows that probably a lot of robots in the future will have insect like motion as it makes it easier for them to negotiate different obstacles.
Mecko Geckos is a robot that uses motion inspired from lizards. Mecko Geckos can climb walls and also on ceilings. (Built by iRobot - how long before our beloved Roombas turn into insect looking vacuum cleaners, that dont only clean our floors but also our walls and ceilings of cobwebs and dust?).
Did you know that the ability of lizards to walk on walls and ceilings is not because of glue like substance or velcro like mechanism, but by Van der Waals forces! (That is intermolecular forces, which is possible because of nano sized spatulas and hairs present on the foot of the lizards. Sticky Secrets of the Gecko
The study of the structure of the lizards feet is leading to the first ever "synthetic, dry, self cleaning adhesive".
Did you also know that Berkeley has built a 6mm robot (That doesn't move very well, but should improve as they figure out how ants move).
TED | Talks | George Dyson: The birth of the computer (video)
An interesting look into the history of the computer. Mainly straddles the time during which the A-Bomb was being developed (1940s to late 1950s), which was the main impetus driving the development of the computer at that time.
TED | Talks | George Dyson: Let's take a nuclear-powered rocket to Saturn (video)
This video talks about the first ARPA project (funded with $1 million to General Atomic) - which was to be used to build a nuclear powered spaceship that was to take Americans to either Saturn or Jupiter in the late 1960s. NASA didn't care for this project and at the end it was canceled. The US Air-force was the one pushing for the project as it did not just have applications in space flight but also in weapons systems.
Using nuclear bombs and directing their energy so as to be able to drive a vehicle is still an actively researched topic.
