We Are Singing Stardust: Carl Sagan on the Story of Humanity’s Greatest Message and How the Golden Record Was Born by Maria Popova “We [are] a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.” In 1939, just before his fifth birthday, Carl Sagan visited the New York World’s Fair, where he marveled at the Time Capsule evincing the fair’s confidence in the future — a hermetically sealed chamber, filled with newspapers, books and artifacts from that year, buried in Flushing Meadows to be revisited in some far-off future era by a future culture very different from and curious about the present. Sagan, in his characteristic eloquence, writes of the motivation, offering a poetic, humbling, and timelier than ever reminder of just how misplaced our existential arrogance is: The coming of the space age has brought with it an interest in communication over time intervals far longer than any [of our predecessors] could have imagined, as well as the means to send messages to the distant future. The Golden Record
The Science of Our Optimism Bias and the Life-Cycle of Happiness by Maria Popova “To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities, and not just any old reality but a better one.” “If I expect as little as possible, I won’t be hurt,” Susan Sontag famously wrote in her diary. And yet we’re wired to expect a lot — and to expect great things. So argues neuroscientist Tali Sharot in The Science of Optimism: Why We’re Hard-Wired for Hope — a short, absorbing TED Book summarizing Sharot’s own research, as well as that of others in the field, using a combination of neuroimaging and behavioral science to explore why we’re “more optimistic than realistic,” what this might mean for our everyday well-being, and whether it’s due to the specific architecture of our brains. The root of optimism, Sharot suggests, isn’t far from what Montaigne argued five centuries ago. Optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel. She traces the intersection of memory and optimism to a neural framework:
Sleep and the Teenage Brain by Maria Popova How a seemingly simple change can have a profound effect on everything from academic performance to bullying. “Sleep is the greatest creative aphrodisiac,” Debbie Millman asserted in her advice on breaking through your creative block. In Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (public library) — the fascinating exploration of what happens while you sleep and how it affects your every waking moment, and also among the best science books of 2012 — David K. Biology’s cruel joke goes something like this: As a teenage body goes through puberty, its circadian rhythm essentially shifts three hours backward. Randall points out that those early school start times originated in an era when youths either had a job after school or had to complete chores on the farm, so the schedule was designed to fit everything in; thus, the teenage circadian rhythm has only become problematic in the past century or so. The school, however, stuck with the plan for the academic year.
Interpreting the Data: 10 Ways to Teach Math and More Using Infographics From stock prices and unemployment rates to trends in tuition and quality of life, the ability to understand and interpret quantitative data is more important than ever in understanding the world. Over the years we’ve written many posts about teaching with Times infographics, including a 2010 series about using them across the curriculum, and a 2011 lesson called “Data Visualized: More on Teaching With Infographics.” If you like, you can scroll through our entire collection of posts that highlight Times interactives and graphics here. Below, we offer a math-focused list of 10 ways students can learn from and tell stories with the numbers in some recent charts, tables and interactives found in The Times. 1. Pick a graph from The Times that plots some quantity over time and use it to tell a story. For example, the first graph in “The War on Poverty Turns 50″ shows several different poverty rates in the United States over the past 50 years. 2. 3. Browse The Times with a critical eye. 4. 5.
189, Stephen King Stephen King began this interview in the summer of 2001, two years after he was struck by a minivan while walking near his home in Center Lovell, Maine. He was lucky to have survived the accident, in which he suffered scalp lacerations, a collapsed right lung, and multiple fractures of his right hip and leg. Six pounds of metal that had been implanted in King’s body during the initial surgery were removed shortly before the author spoke to The Paris Review, and he was still in constant pain. “The orthopedist found all this infected tissue and outraged flesh,” said King. A second interview session with King was conducted early this year at his winter home in Florida, which happens to be within easy driving distance of the Red Sox’s spring training compound in Fort Myers. King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. In person, King has a gracious, funny, sincere manner and speaks with great enthusiasm and candor. How old were you when you started writing? It might.
Salman Khan doubles down on building the school of the future When Salman Khan shared his vision for “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere” at TED2011, he turned the education world on its head. As he introduced Khan Academy — a virtual classroom that uses video lessons to create an individualized, self-paced learning experience — his alternative model fueled the nascent dialogue about online education. The conversation only exploded from there. In the three years since his talk, Khan has doubled down on his efforts to cultivate Khan Academy into the education model of the future. Khan himself has been busy reimagining the education experience. Khan recently spoke with the TED Blog about Khan Academy’s incredible growth, and what’s on the horizon for classrooms both physical and virtual. Khan Academy has seen incredible growth since you spoke in 2011. Content coverage is a big thing. The other big thing that’s happening is internationalization. How have you seen the thinking about education shift since you gave your TED Talk?
DON’T PANIC — The Facts About Population The world might not be as bad as you might believe! Don’t Panic – is a one-hour long documentary produced by Wingspan Productions and broadcasted on BBC on the 7th of November 2013. The visualizations are based on original graphics and stories by Gapminder and the underlaying data-sources are listed here. Hans’s — “All time favorite graph”, is an animating bubble chart which you can interact with online here and download offline here. Hans presents some results from our UK Ignorance Survey described here. Director & Producer; Dan Hillman, Executive Producer: Archie Baron. More videos Hans Rosling explains a very common misunderstanding about the world: That saving the poor children leads to overpopulation. The world might not be as bad as you might believe! Hans Rosling is debunking the River of Myths about the developing world. Instead of studying history one year at the university, you can watch this video for less than five minutes. TED-talk at the US State Department.
The Woman Who Could Write, But Couldn't Read One morning, a kindergarten teacher was about to take attendance for her class when she realized she couldn't read the paper in her hands. She tried looking over her lesson plans, but like the attendance sheet, they seemed to be covered in incomprehensible symbols. She didn't know it yet, but the teacher, identified only as M.P. in a recent case study her doctors published about her in the journal Neurology, had had a stroke. The stroke afflicted a very specific part of her brain, leaving the 40-year-old woman with some unusual, but not unprecedented, symptoms—and plenty of functioning outside of that. Her case study is a fascinating look at what the brain, and human ingenuity, are capable of. It turns out M.P.' For instance, when shown the word 'dessert' in writing, M.P. exclaimed, 'Oooh, I like that!' M.P. had her stroke in October 2012, her doctors report. Given a word, M.P. will direct her attention to the first letter, which she is unable to recognize.
5 Awesome Innovations in 2014 Image credit: iStockphoto Is it just me, or does it seem like things are going a little coocoo? I know we humans are no strangers to brutality and savage conflict, or scary meteorological anomolies or rampant political corruption. Yet it does seem like we're spinning a little too uncontrollably towards Crazytown. But despite all of this -- or perhaps because of it -- I'm really excited about the innovations listed below. Each gives us an opportunity to think differently about ourselves, our communities, and our institutions. 1. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone lament "I would do ____ in my class if I only had the money," I would be rich enough to fund every one of these requests. 2. While we're on the fundraising tip, who doesn't love a little extra pocket cash? In an interview with the Washington Everett Herald, Lynette shared that she earned around $3,300 in October 2013 via the site. 3. 4. There was also a focus on the psychological underpinnings of heroism. 5. 6.
NSA files decoded: Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations explained | World news Two factors opened the way for the rapid expansion of surveillance over the past decade: the fear of terrorism created by the 9/11 attacks and the digital revolution that led to an explosion in cell phone and internet use. But along with these technologies came an extension in the NSA’s reach few in the early 1990s could have imagined. Details that in the past might have remained private were suddenly there for the taking. Chris Soghoian Principal technologist, ACLU NSA is helped by the fact that much of the world’s communications traffic passes through the US or its close ally the UK – what the agencies refer to as “home-field advantage”. The Snowden documents show that the NSA runs these surveillance programs through “partnerships” with major US telecom and internet companies. The division inside the NSA that deals with collection programs that focus on private companies is Special Source Operations, described by Snowden as the “crown jewels” of the NSA. Jeremy Scahill Fiber-optic cable
Internet access is a basic human right: A Q&A with Keren Elazari Keren Elazari speaks at TED2014. The day she gave her talk, we spoke to her about the shutdown of Twitter in Turkey. Photo: James Duncan Davidson Two weeks ago, hours after Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to “wipe out” Twitter, his government blocked access to the platform across the country. It was just weeks before a hotly contended election, and Erdoğan was upset about tweets accusing him of corruption. A judicial ruling in Turkey called for Twitter to take down the offending links, but when Twitter did not comply, the Turkish government opted to block the site. Other governments have also tried to block access to parts or all of the Internet in the past, including Egypt’s Internet shutdown in January 2011 and Syria’s in May 2013. In her talk, Elazari said that hackers play an essential role in giving power, or free access to information, back to the people when governments try to take it away. So what’s really going on in Turkey? But they’re still trying.