TED Blog

Cindy Gallop begs to differ; she delivered the "no, I do not want you to come on my face" Ted Talk (Make Love Not Porn) https://blog.ted.com/cindy_gallop_ma/

Always be kind, and say it’s your fault. If you don’t do it for the sake of the person you are asking for help, do it because it works better. That’s the most practical advice [0] ever given by Hans Rosling [1], the Fact master himself: > In fact, I have the secret to how to get the best help immediately from any customer service, like the phone company or the bank or anything. I have the best line, it always works. You want to know what it is? When I call, I say, “Hello. I am Hans Rosling and I have made a mistake.” People immediately want to help you when you put it this way. You get much more when you don’t offend people. [0]: Unless you are in charge of a developing country’s budget and have to decide between education and healthcare. [1]: https://blog.ted.com/qa_with_hans_ro_1/

The best talk I've ever seen on this exact problem is this talk http://blog.ted.com/james_howard_ku_1/ And I find myself strongly agreeing with Kunstler on a great many of his points.

Thanks for the great feedback! An actual recommendation engine would be a lot of fun to build. It would be awesome to recommend products based on subreddit clusters, and similarities between users. But I don't really want to build a giant AI that sifts through the entire Amazon catalog. I feel that it's a nicer user experience when you just offer a small selection of manually curated products, and some studies show that limiting the number of choices can make people more likely to buy something [1]. I used to list a few CDs and MP3 downloads, but deleted those after I decided that there are already much better music recommendation engines, and they're subscription based. My line of thinking is that I should just start doing a few categories really well, and then expand later. [1]: http://blog.ted.com/2012/07/18/does-having-choice-make-us-happy-6-stud…

This is a very interesting topic, I recommend you read: "Generalizing from one example" - http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ and watch Temple Gradin's TED talk "The World Needs All Kinds of Minds"- http://blog.ted.com/2010/02/24/the_world_needs/

Just check his TED talk. http://blog.ted.com/2006/08/29/jimmy_wales_on/ He basically says it's dirt cheap to host and operate and that it's one of the best things about it. At the time of the video their bandwidth costs per month was just 5000$ and one paid programmer. Aka you don't need millions to run it. So I was a little baffled when I saw his first big campaign to raise money.

see "In praise of cooperation without coordination: Clay Shirky at TEDGlobal 2012" "The result is Git, distributed version control, which Shirky is here to explain to us. It’s a distributed workflow that brings chaos back into the system. Yet there’s a beautiful innovation to ensure that said chaos doesn’t promptly override said system: a signature that creates a unique identifier for every single exchange. This enables cooperation without coordination. “I tell you this not because it is great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working,” Shirky says. “I tell you all of this because of what it means for how communities come together.”" http://blog.ted.com/2012/06/29/in-praise-of-cooperation-without-coordi…

Math? Instead of teaching kids to memorize formulas and just apply to them to contrived examples, teach kids how match actually works in the real world and its applications. Great TED talk on this very matter: http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/13/math_class_need/

Wow, impressively detailed and photographed article. If you are interested in such things, you should also follow the included link to Dan Barber's TED talk. Here's a version that doesn't automatically launch the video: http://blog.ted.com/2008/11/25/a_surprising_pa/ Also interesting that all the ducks are male. I've seen some recent commentary regarding chickens about how millions of male chicks are put to death since they can't lay eggs and there is no other market for them. Strange that ducks are the inverse. Seems like an opportunity for some enterprising duck egg farmer! Edit: Oops, just read the section about the Moulard being a sterile hybrid. Maybe not a good plan to breed them. And wow, the comments on that page are truly excellent --- one of the best and most civil discussions on the morality of meat eating that I've seen online.

You've not been following your TED. http://blog.ted.com/2010/09/15/how-to-sleep-jessa-gamble-on-ted-com/ Lots of folk live happily on way less that eight hours. Whether the folk who mandate that they must have their eight hours are deluding themselves is unproven. I know it's a very touchy subject for those that believe they do.

Classic 'Mystery box' storytelling à la http://blog.ted.com/2008/01/jj_abrams.php

Easily my favorite is Dean Kamen's "The emotion behind invention." He has at least two TED talks, this is his longer, more complete one. http://blog.ted.com/2010/04/the_emotion_beh.php

Users can just buy the app, try out the full version, and return it if they aren't satisfied. Which is a safer bet than letting users think a thousand times if the app is worth the money, buy it and end up with a real crap app. Thus leaving the process of reviewing the app to the user. A safer bet for who? If you have no return option you will be happier about your purchase... http://blog.ted.com/2006/09/happiness_exper.php

I recommend reading up on behavioral economics, particularly the works of Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahnemann, and Dick Thaler. This is not pop psychology with truthiness like "money doesn't buy happiness" and "meditation is the way." Rather, it's well-researched works on happiness, fairness, and economics. Start with this great TED talk: http://blog.ted.com/2010/03/the_riddle_of_e.php and then consider Thaler's book "Nudge". You can also look at it from a marketer's perspective by looking up Rory Sutherland, starting with his TED talk http://blog.ted.com/2009/07/session_2_runni_6.php

MakeLoveNotPorn / Full Stack Developer / Full time / New York or remote / https://www.makelovenotporn.com/ launched in 2009 with this TED talk: https://blog.ted.com/cindy_gallop_ma/ The extraordinary global response led me to turn MLNP into a business. We're the world's first user-generated human-curated social sex videosharing platform (kind of what Facebook would be if it allowed you to socially sexually self-express and self-identify), celebrating #realworldsex as a counterpoint to porn - we're 'Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.' We're socializing sex to make it easier to talk about, in order to promote good sexual values and behavior. We operate a revenue-sharing model: members pay to rent and stream social sex videos, and half the income goes to our contributors, or as we call them, MakeLoveNotPornstars. In the era of #metoo, everyone's talking about consent, but nobody knows what it actually looks like in bed: every video on MLNP is a demonstration of consent, good sexual values, good sexual behavior in action. We're spearheading the Social Sex Revolution: the revolutionary part isn't the sex, but the social. More info on what we're doing here: https://nowthisnews.com/videos/future/make-love-not-porn-founder-on-st… + TechCrunch on our funding round last year: https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/sex-the-final-frontier-cindy-gallop-… Our developer job spec and how to apply…

tl;dr, people often claim that greater variance in mathematical ability accounts for lower numbers of women in high level scientific positions. this is doesn't match the data: one can't mathematically fit a gaussian curve to explain the distributions. thus the supposed scientific explanation for why women are underrepresented is actually faulty science. likewise, genetic explanations cannot account for the recent and rapid ascendancy of woman in such technical areas (though we have a long way to go). participation at the highest levels of academic competition has increased dramatically. given the holes in these, and other, explanations, it is both scientifically and morally irresponsible to posit innate differences as the governing factors. yet despite these arguments, many people still feel they have the station to proclaim some scientific basis for what would otherwise be evidence of continued unequal opportunity. the scientific claims of a human group's inferiority must withstand scientific scrutiny far beyond that expected in physics for, say, proving faster than light neutrinos. yet the scientific rigor of studies of human inferiority is actually far below that of physics. i ascribe the difference to politics. an actual big problem preventing women from advancing: being successful, as a woman, is anticorrelated with being liked. this is far from the fault of men alone -- it is a pervasive cultural bias. see Sheryl Sandberg's TED Talk: why we have too few women…

#teamtrees and green walls don't scale. First things first.. we need soil. Good soil requires large herds of free animals (not CAFOs). We need this. Not for meat agriculture, but for soil and ecological management. https://blog.ted.com/fighting-the-growing-deserts-with-livestock-allan… (video, 2013)

2013 https://blog.ted.com/reading-minds-with-a-brain-scanner-its-happening-…

There have been several studies on the correlation between income/wealth and empathy. https://blog.ted.com/6-studies-of-money-and-the-mind/

I mean she starts out by saying she is quitting comedy. See also https://blog.ted.com/how-hannah-gadsby-broke-comedy/

https://blog.ted.com/what-will-the-future-look-like-elon-musk-speaks-a… @34:15

The article says nothing about technologies formulated for larger scales (literally "cheap as dirt") like molten salt. https://blog.ted.com/reinventing-the-battery-donald-sadoway-at-ted2012… We may have to wait for utility scale storage using Li-ion to become big, to spur investment for alternative utility scale storage which could beat Li-ion cost at scale.

> I hate to break it to you aspiring numbers jugglers, but no human will ever juggle 100 balls. I hate it when the in first sentence author makes a categorical sentence and then half a page later cites "a - acceleration of gravity = 9.81 m/s^2" as if it's a some sort of fundamental constant :) . Here is an example of juggling under simulated different gravity: https://blog.ted.com/athletic-machines-raffaello-dandrea-at-tedglobal-…

Ted blog link: http://blog.ted.com/the-quotable-linus-torvalds-live-onstage-at-ted/

Now they want to define "meta-research" as stealing, too. I can't imagine how would someone buy that. Knowledge is something you cannot capture, that's why they have to try to "protect" the symbols. And they can go this far with that deed. Why activists can read and handle degrading words from rich publishers (theft, stealing..), but ignorants cannot read the argument of activists? This is far too confusing to me. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html (I think publishers are feeling threatened as the free culture grows) edit: the speaker explains copyright maths (a special kind of maths used by media lobby experts), very enjoyable :D http://blog.ted.com/the-numbers-behind-the-copyright-math/

Such a situation did happen, Randall answered how many punch cards it would take to store all of the data in google datacenters (https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/). In response, google sent him punch cards (http://blog.ted.com/using-serious-math-to-answer-weird-questions-randa…

Most importantly is that many of those people shouting about the virtue of work are enjoying anti-work on the backs of those working harder than ever. I don't know if it's actually malicious, or just an echo chamber (there have been plenty of studies that show that the more money people have, the more they feel they deserve to be in the position they are [0] - this of course being a generalization and not an accusation of parent), but it certainly seems like a degree of Ostrich Syndrome when it comes to acknowledging how the efforts of many often benefit the few. Edit: forgot link [0] http://blog.ted.com/6-studies-of-money-and-the-mind/

Warning. That is the same guy whose TED talk was banned because it supported the consumption of DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) and made several rather unscientific claims: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/19/the-debate-about-graham-hancocks-talk/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N,N-Dimethyltryptamine#Conjecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYDgmpiE-U0 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsdOz0AHRqI8otCpT6_Oewg

Infant mortality is definitely one. There's a team from Stanford who developed a baby warmer for areas where electricity is an issue http://blog.ted.com/2010/07/09/fellows_friday_4/ http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_chen_a_warm_embrace_that_saves_lives/tra… Even if you go for a different problem, it's an interesting case to look into method-wise - I read somewhere else about how they iterated based on feedback from local community but I can't find it...