Eleanor Longden: The voices in my head. #SugataMitra is trending: Twitter reacts to the 2013 TED Prize reveal. 7 TED Talks on the wonder of 3D printing. From ordering movie tickets to booking a dentist appointment, mobile and web apps have made the tasks of daily life easier. But there are some things that an app can’t do. Standing in line at the pharmacy is one of them. Lee Cronin: Print your own medicineIn today’s talk, Lee Cronin asks: “Could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? In essence, could we app chemistry?” With his team of researchers at the University of Glasgow, Cronin has created a 3D printing application that allows scientists to print out laboratory equipment specific to the experiment they wish to run — something they’ve called “reactionware.”
Someday, Cronin says, the same software that runs reactionware could open up the doors of possibility. At TED, we love sharing stories of 3D printing and its rapidly developing power to make new things possible. Lisa Harouni: A primer on 3D printing So what exactly is 3D printing? David F. Michael Anti: Behind the Great Firewall of China. National Grid | Fully Charged. Re-thinking Progress: The Circular Economy. The circular economy is a generic term for an industrial economy that is, by design or intention, restorative and in which materials flows are of two types, biological nutrients, designed to reenter the biosphere safely, and technical nutrients, which are designed to circulate at high quality without entering the biosphere.
The term encompasses more than the production and consumption of goods and services, including a shift from fossil fuels to the use of renewable energy, and the role of diversity as a characteristic of resilient and productive systems. It includes discussion of the role of money and finance as part of the wider debate, and some of its pioneers have called for a revamp of economic performance measurement tools The circular economy is grounded in the study of feedback rich (non-linear) systems, particularly living systems.
A major outcome of this is the notion of optimising systems rather than components, or the notion of ‘design for fit’. Ed | Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen. Rosling is a passionate advocate for “liberating” publicly-funded data on the Internet. Select one topic area for which country-specific data might be compared (e.g., education, health, food production, the environment, etc.), and identify what you think are the best sources of data in this area on the Internet. Create a guide that lists these sources, and provides a brief review of each. If the administrators of these data repositories are thinking about how users might engage with the data via mobile devices or social media, note this in the review.
If the administrators currently aren’t doing anything in these areas, how could mobile devices and social media enhance the user’s experience? Here are a few resources to make learning statistics an interesting experience. Martin Seligman on positive psychology. Seligman believes that there are three different types of happy lives: the pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life. Create an infographic explaining the three lives. The infographic should include a spokesperson who seems to represent each type of life; this could be someone you know, celebrity, a historical figure, or a character from TV, movies, or literature. Try what Seligman calls the “Gratitude Visit” [16:53]. Keep a written journal or a video diary to record your feelings before and after the exercise. Want to be happy? Be grateful: Brother David Steindl-Rast at TEDGlobal 2013 We all want to be happy. David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization.
To create his infographic about nutritional supplements, it took McCandless a month to review about 1,000 medical studies and design the visual. Is that level of effort surprising, and do you think it’s worth it? Try out the interactive version that’s available on McCandless’s website. What engaged or surprised you? What, if anything, would you change to improve the user experience? Write a brief review and post it to the site. McCandless says that “absolute figures” aren’t as meaningful as “relative figures” and he uses data about military spending and troop size to make his point [10:26]. Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world.
Slavin worries about our reliance on algorithms: “We’re writing these things that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible, and we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made.” What’s more, Slavin believes we may not even realize it, as the algorithms “acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again, and they ossify and calcify, and they become real.” Imagine Slavin’s examples taken two or three steps further, and create a short story set in a world that is completely dominated by computer algorithms. MoveOn’s former executive director and online activist Eli Pariser took the TED stage in 2011 to warn about the unintended consequences of algorithms that personalize people’s online experiences. Ed | Clay Shirky: How Social Media can Make History. Shirky says that before the Internet and social media, over the past 500 years, there were only four periods where media changed enough to warrant the label “revolution.”
Research these revolutions and create a visual way to represent their key features. Do you have a guess about what the next revolution might bring? If so, add it in! As social media enables citizen reporting and greater interaction between news organizations and their audiences, the boundaries of journalism and ideas about what constitutes news are changing. TED: Paul Lewis: Crowdsourcing the news Online Journalism Review: “The pros and cons of newspapers partnering with ‘citizen journalism’ networks” and its reply, “The pros and pros of ‘citizen journalism’” Foreign Affairs, From Innovation to revolution: Does social media make protests possible?
Kevin Alloca: Why videos go viral. Allocca asks, “Who could have predicted any of this?” It’s amazing to “rewind” from the way we currently experience moving images (video) to consider the first motion pictures, produced a little over a hundred years ago. Research the history of moving images. What advances in technology have changed the way people engage with film and video? What do you think will happen over the next hundred years? Share your findings and predictions in an exhibit—or, better yet, a video. Allocca describes a significant change in media over the past few decades: “unlike the one-way media of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become part of the phenomenon...we all now feel some ownership of our own pop culture.” Do you think that growing up in this kind of culture, with this kind of media, changes people’s expectations about other aspects of their lives, like school and work?
Gary Wolf: The quantified self.