Hans Rosling explained world economic trends back in 2006

I'm sure I originally posted this many many years ago, but I can't find that post now, and it's worth calling it to readers' attentions again.  Sadly, Rosling has died, and his lectures on this subject are unappreciated.

Here is a later version focused on the subject of world population:

These are two of the finest lectures I've ever heard.  And during 30 years in universities, I've heard thousands of lectures.

Empowering amputees

The photo above (titled "Lost to cancer two years ago and still fighting multiple relapses. But very proud of how far I've come!") caused me to stop to ponder how different life is for modern amputees compared to just a generation or two ago.

The most famous advocate for leg amputees is Aimee Mullins, a double amputee since age one who went on to compete in NCAA division I track and field.   She presented this TED talk:

As she notes in the talk, she an wear a "blade" for athletics or choose from a variety of stylish or exotic legs, and adjust her height to whatever level she wants to be for the occasion.

Stoicism explained

YouTube link.

More interesting than the title would imply.  Try the first minute (especially liberal-progressives trying to adjust to the current political climate).

Via Boing Boing.

Stella Young: "I am not your inspiration"

YouTube link.

Stella Young is a comedian and journalist who happens to go about her day in a wheelchair — a fact that doesn't, she'd like to make clear, automatically turn her into a noble inspiration to all humanity. In this very funny talk, Young breaks down society's habit of turning disabled people into "inspiration porn."

Stella Young had osteogenesis imperfecta.  Her biography is here.

The science of baking cookies

YouTube link.

From the producers of TED talks, via Neatorama.

An inspirational TED talk

YouTube link.

The content is hard to summarize; this more an "inspirational" talk rather than the "instructional" talk one usually expects at TED.  This from the "about":

Louie Schwartzberg is an award-winning cinematographer, director, and producer whose notable career spans more than three decades providing breathtaking imagery for feature films, television shows, documentaries and commercials.

This piece includes his short film on Gratitude and Happiness. Brother David Steindl-Rast's spoken words, Gary Malkin's musical compositions and Louie's cinematography make this a stunningly beautiful piece, reminding us of the precious gift of life, and the beauty all around us...

Louie is credited by many with pioneering the contemporary stock footage industry by founding Energy Film Library, a global company with a network of 12 foreign offices, which was acquired by Getty Images in 1997. Motion picture clients of his cinematic artistry include Sex in the City, The Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4, Syriana, Crash, Men in Black and classics such as American Beauty, Koyaanisqatsi and E.T. among others.

A hat tip to cousin Kirsten for finding this.

Close-up card tricks

YouTube link.

It doesn't matter how many card tricks you've seen or how jaded you are; these will knock your socks off.  I find close-up magic to be so much more enjoyable and satisfying than the big-stage elaborate-equipment showpieces usually seen at casinos and TV shows.

This performance is by Lennart Green, world champion magician, at a TED conference in 2005. The resolution is good enough to enjoy full-screen viewing.

Reposted from 2008. 

Addendum:  A hat tip to reader wickershaw for noting that the young lady who assists in the video is Zoe, a daughter of Chris Anderson, TED's curator.  She died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 2010; here is a tribute to her.

p.s. - probably no more blogging for a day or two; we have ~6 inches of snow arriving tonight.

Plankton

Youtube link. 

Plankton longer than a blue whale, and animals that use body parts of their victims to build a home. But mostly awesome micro- and macrovideography.

Using technology to explore the acquisition of language

First, if you haven't seen my "Talking Babies" post at Neatorama, you might want to pop over and look at it - twin baby boys carry on an animated conversation using seemingly nonsensical sounds.

Then consider this TED talk featuring Deb Roy, a researcher at MIT who wired his new home with cameras and microphones in every relevant room so that every word and action could be viewed, saved, and analyzed.  90,000 hours of video, 140,000 of audio, capturing the life of his young son and the three caregivers (parents, nanny) to examine the influence of the social environment on language acquisition.

As a sample of what  immense computing power can do, he shows how the child's word for "water" morphs from "gaga" to "water."  And there is a "map" of every word (503) that the child learned by age 2.  For me, the "holy shit" moment begins at 8:00 when the 2D view is transformed to a 3D one, and the cameras allow a virtual walkthrough of the house.  I was also startled by the "wordscape" at 10:30.

The resolution of the video isn't great for fullscreen viewing, but the content, as is typical for TED talks, is awesome.  I think what's important is not how Dr. Roy's son learned to say "water," but rather how technology can be used to study the world.

And I suspect this also gives a hint of how the NSA analyzes every phone call and email sent in this country...

A "lightning calculator"

Mental calculators were in great demand in research centers such as CERN before the advent of modern electronic calculators and computers... The world's best mental calculators are invited every two years to compete for the Mental Calculation World Cup... These math prodigies achieve blood flow to parts of the brain responsible for mathematical operations at six to seven times the typical flow... In Frank Herbert's novel Dune, specially trained mental calculators known as Mentats have replaced mechanical computers completely...

More at Wikipedia, including a list of famous human calculators.

The "globe skimmer" dragonfly crosses oceans

This dragonfly has the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world (twice the distance covered by the runnerup Monarch butterfly).  Like all the TED talks, this one is quite interesting (though it could have been delivered in half the time).

TED talk about Mars

"Planetary scientist Joel Levine shows some intriguing -- and puzzling -- new discoveries about Mars: craters full of ice, traces of ancient oceans, and compelling hints at the presence, sometime in the past, of life. He makes the case for going back to Mars to find out more."

A lecture by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran discusses the Capgras Delusion, phantom limbs, and synesthesia (including the bouba/kiki effect).  This is a very technical TED talk, but excellent if you are interested in human biology.

The astrolabe - a 13th century computer

An explanation in nine minutes of how the astrolabe worked. The earliest devices date from about 200 BC, but by medieval times they became sophisticated mechanical computers.

The convergence of tissue engineering and robotics

TED talks are invariable thought-provoking. This 18-minute presentation by Juan Enriquez begins with commentary on the state of the economy, but then shifts to the true topic, which is how the dovetailing of cellular engineering, tissue engineering, and robotics presages a remarkable future for mankind (if we can get past the economics hurdle).

Some of the topics covered: the use of skin cells as a virtually unlimited source for stem cells, the use of the stem cells to produce artificial teeth and bladders, then hearts and tracheas and bladders, and finally artificial eyes and ears, the enhancement of those organs to "better than human" performance, and ultimately the combination with robotics such as the "big dog" pictured below for the creation of humans (or cyborgs) with much greater capabilities than we have (hearing ultrasound, viewing ultraviolet.

Perhaps "homo sapiens" is not the ultimate goal for God and evolutionary processes. If homo erectus thought he/she was God's ultimate goal and the perfect hominid, then he/she was wrong, because erectus was supplanted by Neanderthals. And if the Neanderthals thought they were the best that humans could be, then they were wrong too. Why should we have the hubris to think that we are the best possible creation of God and evolutionary processes?

Very thought-provoking.

I've now created a separate label for TED talks. And I would add that the TED talk I blogged long ago about crows learning to put money in vending machines to get peanut rewards has now been called into question.

TED talk - How bacteria communicate - Bonnie Bassler

Are there any bad TED talks? I haven't encountered any so far. In this one Bonnie Bassler, professor of molecular biology at Princeton, explains how bacteria communicate with one another.

She begins with bioluminescence, and why it only occurs after bacteria have multiplied to a critical mass/concentration. She then extends the concept to virulence in human infections; the bacteria actually control their pathogenicity. Fascinating.

Equally fascinating is the closing concept that multicellular creatures (humans, etc) evolved [or were created, depending on your cosmic view] using an extension of the same principle of quorum sensing that bacteria use to distinguish "self" from "other."

This video is 19 minutes long - very long in the short-attention-span world of websurfing, but worthwhile if you want to be impressed by how the world works, and by how the principles elucidated in this talk might be used to overcome antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

If you watch and enjoy this talk, try one of these that I blogged earlier:

• The face of Leonardo DaVinci
• Fertility, longevity, and income (see sublink near the end)
• Training crows to help mankind
• Close-up card tricks
  

I hope you weren't planning on getting any work done today...

Training crows... to help mankind?

When I posted an item two days ago about starlings removing quarters from car wash machines, I was reminded of something I had seen long ago, but I couldn't locate it. Finally located it this morning.

The ten-minute video above is a presentation at the remarkable TED conference about how crows can be trained to perform tasks. The initial success was training the crows to find money lost by people (estimated at $200 million per year) and turn it in to a vending machine, which in turn dispenses peanuts to them.

This is the link for the website documenting the project.

The extrapolation is that crows might be trained to pick up litter and trash, or to perform other useful tasks.

The video has a number of interesting and sometimes humorous anecdotes and observations. This is an interesting tidbit: crows are distributed worldwide on all continents, but do not live "in the wild." They almost never nest more than a few km from humans...

This video (like most of the TED talks, incidentally) is worth watching...

Update April 2009: Mr. Klein's project was also written up in the New York Times in December of 2008, but after further investigation, the paper has published a "correction" indicating that the experiments he describes with crows may not have been conducted in a properly scientific fashion.

The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo. Asked to explain these discrepancies, Klein now says he and the reporter had a misunderstanding about the zoo.

So, the above talk, while thought-provoking, should be taken with a (large) grain of salt.

Fertility and longevity correlate with income

There is a tendency on TYWKIWDBI (and most other blogs) to lean toward "lightweight" topics - funny pictures, brief stories, and other interesting ephemera that can be enjoyed and then forgotten. One reason is that such items require little work on the part of the blogger - just copying and pasting for the most part. They also require little "work" on the part of the visitor.

There is a lot of material that requires more work for both of us. War, economics, ethics, history, hard science, and many other subjects are best served with thoughtful entries that consider multiple viewpoints, and are best appreciated by visitors with time to devote to the subject and an open, informed mind.

The graphs above are in this category. Each of them shows average personal income (on the hnorizontal axis) versus another variable (children per women in the top graph, life expectancy in the bottom graph). The images shown would be predictable by many or most of the more widely-read and well-educated readers of TYWKIWDBI.

But there's more than that. Those graphs come from a website called Gapminder. They were created by Hans Rosling, a Swede who used publicly available statistics, and then "crunched" the data using a computer algorithm called "Trendalyzer" (since acquired by Google).

The images above are static screencaps, but the original data MOVES. Each colored dot represents a different country (color corresponds to continents as per map at right), and the size of the dot reflects the number of people in the country. You can hover your mouse over a dot to see which country it is, or find your country from the list at right. The complete database includes all the data from 1950 to 2005. I took a screencap of the image from 2005, but at the Gapminder website you can take the slider at the bottom of the screen, move it to the left to 1950, and then start it moving. The countries move on the graph - the dots get bigger as the population grows, and the dots move up and down, right and left as birth rates and longevity and personal income change. There's a MASSIVE amount of data compressed here into an incredibly viewer-friendly format.

Try it. Go to THIS LINK for the fertility vs. income graph, move the slider left, click PLAY, and see what has happened in the world in the last 50 years.

HERE is the graph for longevity vs. income.

If you find this at all interesting, go to THIS LINK for a "TED talk" (more on TED talks later) by Hans Rosling. I spent my professional career in education and have heard probably thousands of lectures in 40 years. This is one of the best talks I have seen, partly for the topic and partly for the Trendalyzer method of presenting data. Just try 5 minutes (trust me); once he starts the data "moving" you'll probably continue watching to the end.

The face of Leonardo DaVinci

This is one of the TED talks - a remarkable collection of educational lectures. This one is just four minutes long and worth viewing.