Barry is a mentalist at work. Some elementary extraction of concepts but mostly good brain stopping fun.
Category: Notes
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Sherry Turkle: Alone Together
Addressing new issues of information proliferation. Turkle comments that we used to have gatherings, say a fifteen year old birthday party, which we often did not want to go to, but we went to anyway and we would grow and expand because “we did this hard thing.” Today, we see people mentally checking out by pursuing their virtual world; this makes it hard to emotionally progress because we no longer do “this hard thing.” In essence, if we are not careful, we will be alone even when we are together.
Professor Sherry Turkle – Alone Together (RSA)
Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone? (TED) -
Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover
Meyer advocates a makeover of way we teach math. He identifies several areas in which we can improve our teaching methods, including some simple realignment of the curriculum. Meyer suggests that instead of training people to extract data from a problem (that only has the relevant information) and plugging them into a formula; we should train students to sift through information to find the relevant information, figure out what the answer they want and discuss through how they can get that answer from the available information.
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Jack Horner: Shape-shifting dinosaurs
I love Jack Horner. He and I go way back. Well, not really. I read an article once that was an interview with him in which he discussed his Halloween preparation (which, apparently, are quite elaborate) and his work on the recently producer Jurassic Park movie in which he was consulted regarding the look and appearance of the dinosaurs.
In this lecture: he discusses a realization (“Where are the little, as in juvenile, dinosaurs?”), a theory (that dinosaurs change over time much like their avian posterity) and a discovery (many of the ‘different’ dinosaurs are actually the same dinosaurs while they are growing up).
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Dave Birch: The Future of Money
The technology of money has been evolving for several centuries and is now facing its midlife crisis. After recapping a brief history of money through time (a really fascinating dissertation) and then suggests that we should disband the “cash economy” in order to progress money to its next phase of life.