Google’s 8-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve. Photo Editing Online That’s Easy as Pie. Secrets of a Mind-Gamer. Good Experience: customer experience, user experience. About TED. TED is a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world. On TED.com, we're building a clearinghouse of free knowledge from the world's most inspired thinkers — and a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other, both online and at TED and TEDx events around the world, all year long. In fact, everything we do — from our TED Talks videos to the projects sparked by the TED Prize, from the global TEDx community to the TED-Ed lesson series — is driven by this goal: How can we best spread great ideas?
TED is owned by a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation. Our agenda is to make great ideas accessible and spark conversation. We want to hear from you: Contact us. TED: Ideas worth spreading. At Ethics Bowl, L.I. Teenagers Debate Slippery Issues. Whatever Happened to Sex in Movies? - Critics Notebook. Does Loneliness Reduce the Benefits of Exercise? Does Loneliness Reduce the Benefits of Exercise? Luke White With Valentine’s Day around the corner, this seems the proper moment to ask whether being in a relationship changes how you exercise and, perhaps even more intriguing, whether relationships affect how exercise changes you. That latter possibility was memorably raised in an elegant series of experiments conducted not long ago at Princeton University.
The researchers were trying to replicate earlier work in which the brains of mice given free access to running wheels subsequently fizzed with new brain cells, a process known as neurogenesis, and the mice performed better on rodent intelligence tests than those without access to wheels. To the Princeton researchers’ surprise, when they performed the same study with rats, “which are a little closer, physiologically, to humans,” said Alexis Stranahan, the lead author of the Princeton study, running did not lead to neurogenesis. The rats’ brains remained resolutely unaffected by exercise. Does this happen in lonely human exercisers?
Wii Shall Overcome. Illustration: Marcos ChinIn February 2010, Jane McGonigal completed another level in her quest to become America's new guru of gaming. She delivered a talk at TED, the annual California conference that's an obligatory stop for anyone peddling a Big Idea, from Al Gore to Bill Gates to David Byrne. McGonigal's was that video games can fix the planet's toughest problems. It's a bold, appealing proposition: Game-addled kids, who spend an average of more than 10,000 hours fiddling with consoles and controllers before they turn 21, could wind up stopping climate change with their PlayStations! It should come as no surprise that gamers, techies, and Silicon Valley types have been thrilled to have a much-maligned pastime elevated to an altruistic pursuit—and by an exuberant, un-geeky blonde, no less. McGonigal's new book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, is sure to amplify the buzz.
Full-Service Gyms Feel a Bit Flabby - Skin Deep. Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times Matthew Knowles on a treadmill in Dallas. Solo exercisers pose a challenge to many gyms. It used to feel worthwhile to commit to an annual membership at an everything-and-the-kitchen sink gym featuring high-spirited classes, top-of-the-line cardio machines, weights — and perhaps a shot at striking up a conversation with Ms. Lithe sipping a post-workout smoothie. But these days, the idea of a full-service gym is as stale as yesterday’s sweat-soaked towel. For all their ads promising to stir motivation, gyms have failed to do so. Blame the gym’s now-ubiquitous flat-screen TVs and the fact that iPods are de rigueur, said Jonathan Fields, a marketing consultant in Manhattan who has helped found personal-training gyms and studios. Today’s consumers wonder why they should pay more for a so-called big-box gym when they can get the laissez-faire approach for less.
Mr. “They acknowledge that you are a consumer, and are friendly at the same time,” Ms. Wine critic Mike Steinberger tries a '47 Petrus in awkward company. - By Mike Steinberger. I published a lengthy investigative piece last June about the fraud scandal roiling the fine-wine world. At the center of the story was a New York-based retailer called Royal Wine Merchants, which appeared to have served as a conduit for Hardy Rodenstock, a German pop-music-promoter-turned-wine dealer who is suspected of flooding the market with counterfeit old Bordeaux. Focusing on one wine in particular, the 1921 Château Pétrus, the piece documented the links between Rodenstock and Royal and also showed how the allegations against Royal dragged the critic Robert Parker into the controversy.
(For an update on the major players mentioned in the June article, click .) After the article ran, I exchanged e-mails with a friend of mine named Wilfred Jaeger, a Bay Area wine collector (he co-owns a restaurant in San Francisco called RN74, one of the city's premier wine hangouts, and also owns parts of two vineyards in Burgundy). Wilf had issues with my story. So what to make of all this? Schott?s Vocab - Schott's Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com. The Best Films of 2010 - Movies - News. Our picks for the top ten releases of the year. If 2010 has been the year of the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, it’s also been the year in which the truth became subjective and, often, incidental.
These past 12 months saw the arrival of the avowed documentary many suspect is staged “Catfish,” and the admitted staged film that pretended to be a documentary “I’m Still Here,” but as the dust has cleared, what remains is the question of their bona fides as stand alone films. Does Banksy’s puckish “Exit Through the Gift Shop” lose some of the bite of its bitterly funny art world commentary if it turns out to be more engineered than it claims? Is it important that “The Social Network” elides and ignores details about Mark Zuckerberg and the website he founded? Would “Alamar” be less of a movie if it were populated by unrelated actors instead of a father and son?
Your answers may differ, but personally, I’m not that concerned. 10. 9. 45365Directed by Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross 8. 7. 6. Blue Valentine, with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, reviewed. - By Dana Stevens. Within the first 15 minutes of Derek Cianfrance's wrenching romantic drama Blue Valentine (the Weinstein Co.), you know more about the intimate, day-to-day details of its characters' lives than you do by the end of most movies. Cindy and Dean (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling) are a married couple in their late 20s or early 30s.
They live in rural Pennsylvania with a daughter of about 5 (Faith Wladyka). Cindy, an obstetrics nurse, loves her job and is good at it, but at home she's snappish, discontented, and perpetually overworked. Dean is a house painter, ambitionless but reasonably content in his work, a volatile husband and a goofy but besotted father. Cindy and Dean's marriage is in trouble—not because of an affair or abuse or addiction (though both drink more than they probably should), but just because of the passage of time and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic. Follow. Watch Free Documentaries Online - Modern Marvels - S10E33 Building A Skyscraper: The Human Environment by History Channel. John Singer Sargent’s Impressionist Stage - Slide Show. ‘Brain:The Inside Story’ - Slide Show.