Mark Bittman goes over the history of how we eat and explains what is wrong with the way we eat today. He advocates eating more plants and less animals — both for our own health as well as help prevent global warming. Oh, you didn’t know that raising cattle contribute to global warming? Mark Bittman says “livestock is the second highest contributing factor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gases is generated by livestock production — more than transportation.”

Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor gave this talk at TED where she showed us a real brain and how it consists of two separate halves. The right half thinks in parallel and knows the concept of “we”. The left half thinks in serial and knows that concept of “I”. One day she had a stroke on the left hemisphere and she is able to describe to us today what happened on that day as her brain functions started to shut down. She described how she lost the normal brain chatter that are always in our head, how she gained a perspective as an outsider looking at herself, and how she experienced nirvana.

Professor Dr. Marti Hearst lectures at University of California at Berkeley. This is the first lecture of the course “Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business” from School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS 141).

This video is about two hours. If you want to bypass the portion of the video that goes over the course logistic and skip directly to the part of the lecture on how the web works, skip to 30 minutes into the video. If you want to skip to how search engines work, skip to 76 minutes into the video.
read more »

Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, gives an enlightening lecture at Google about our inner state that affects our happiness. He is the author of the book, See Happiness: A Guide to Life’s Most Important Skill.

Seth Godin gives the following talk at Google titled “All Marketers are Liars” which is also the title of his book.

Here is an entertaining and enlightening talk by Hans Rosling, professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. Lots of good data and animated graphs to give you a more accurate look at the world.

In this one hour video, Professor Barry Schwartz explains why too much choice is not always good. This is a paradoxical concept since western belief is that more choice means more freedom and happiness.

At about 45 minutes into this video, Schwartz comments on the effect of money on happiness. He says that …”What is true is that once you cross subsistence, whatever subsistence is in your society, additional increases in wealth have virtually no effect on well-being. There is a hugh steep curve going from zero to subsistence. But once you cross that line of subsistence, the curve flattens out. It is worth knowing, in case you have a choice between choosing x and making more money, almost certainly choosing x is what you should do.”

read more »

Computer scientist Jeff Hawkins (who also pioneered PDA’s) tells us the theory of brains and how the brain work. The talk is not technical but covers the theory. There are a few chuckles here and there as well.

Very fascinating. Deborah Gordon, who studies ants, explains how ant colonies work. In particular, the idea of task allocation explains how each ant know what to despite having no central control from the queen..

Chris Anderson, editor of “Wired” and author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, explains the concept of “The Long Tail” (a term he coined and is now widely used).

He talks about the “power law” and “scarcity effect” and the “long tail” economy that is taking place in business today.

Eva Vertes poses some interesting questions about cancer. Could it be that cancer is the body own immune system go awry and unable to complete the process?

Daniel Gilbert, author of the book Stumbling on Happiness, claims that the “impact bais” causes people to over-estimate the amount that events will affect people’s happiness. Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard University. He suggests that “synthetic happiness” is just as good as “authentic happiness”.

Luis von Ahn, assistant Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, starts the talk explaining captcha. This is an example of an application where computer can not solve it very well but humans can. He then goes on to explain other problems where humans can solve things much better than computers can currently. The idea is to harness the “human cycles” and use them to solve computer applications by making a “game” out of it.

Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience at Google, did a talk in Paris on June 19, 2007. She explains the four components of searches: comprehesiveness, relevance, speed, and user experiences. You will see slides of the evolution of the Google home page. She talks about the future of searches, universal search, and personalized search. She then answers audience questions.

Watch the video at PodTech.net

Ely Greenfield, architect of Abode Flex, presents an overview of the Flash and Flex architecture on a whiteboard.