Sharing Essential Knowledge & Big Ideas
“In this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our ‘divided brain’ has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA’s free public events programme.”
Yesterday the human population reached seven billion.
“Population is a complicated topic. But we wanted to do it in a way that gives readers room to think. We spread out our coverage over a year, with articles that take deep dives into specific issues—demographics, food security, climate change, fertility trends, managing biodiversity—that relate to global population. Our reporting is collected here. Feel free to explore and share your thoughts on twitter at #7billion.” – National Geographic Special Series: 7 Billion
The Beautiful Brain is an online magazine on the art and science of the human brain:
“The Beautiful Brain explores the latest findings from the ever-growing field of neuroscience through monthly long-form essays, reviews, galleries, short-form blog posts and more, with particular attention to the dialogue between the arts and sciences. The site illuminates important new questions about creativity, the mind of the artist, and the mind of the observer that modern neuroscience is helping us to answer, or at least to provide part of an answer. Instances where art seeks to answer questions of a traditionally scientific nature are also of great interest, and for that reason you will hear from artists as well as scientists on The Beautiful Brain.” <link>
A movie inspired on numbers, geometry and nature, by Cristóbal Vila.
Go to www.etereaestudios.com for more info: theory behind, stills, screenshots, tutorials…
This video reminds me of the award winning animations XVIVO created for the website BioVisions at Harvard.
“Documentary which takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride through the wonderful world of statistics to explore the remarkable power thay have to change our understanding of the world, presented by superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend.
Rosling is a man who revels in the glorious nerdiness of statistics, and here he entertainingly explores their history, how they work mathematically and how they can be used in today’s computer age to see the world as it really is, not just as we imagine it to be.
Rosling’s lectures use huge quantities of public data to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers – in just four minutes.
The film also explores cutting-edge examples of statistics in action today. In San Francisco, a new app mashes up police department data with the city’s street map to show what crime is being reported street by street, house by house, in near real-time. Every citizen can use it and the hidden patterns of their city are starkly revealed. Meanwhile, at Google HQ the machine translation project tries to translate between 57 languages, using lots of statistics and no linguists.
Despite its light and witty touch, the film nonetheless has a serious message – without statistics we are cast adrift on an ocean of confusion, but armed with stats we can take control of our lives, hold our rulers to account and see the world as it really is. What’s more, Hans concludes, we can now collect and analyse such huge quantities of data and at such speeds that scientific method itself seems to be changing.” <BBC>
“Publicity was once the exclusive property of men of rank. They alone, by virtue of their stations, could make things public. During the 18th century it became meaningful to talk about “public opinion” as something formed outside the state. Today anyone with a Twitter account can make a public. In this series IDEAS producer David Cayley examines how publics were formed in Europe, between 1500 and 1700, and how these early publics grew into the concept of “the public” that we hold today.”
“All of us today participate in imaginary communities that we call publics – our Ideas broadcast assembles a virtual community of listeners – a listening public. But there was a time when making things public was the exclusive property of men of rank. Matters of state, Queen Elizabeth I proclaimed to her subjects in 1559, were fit to be treated only by “men of authority” and conveyed only to audiences of “grave and discreet persons.” By the 18th century it had become meaningful to talk about public opinion as a sovereign power formed outside the state. What happened in the intervening years to make this revolution possible is
the subject of this Ideas series.”
You can find these episodes here.
“During the past year, the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (RSA) has burst onto the scene, offering a steady diet of videos created with a TED-like formula. They’re short. They’re animated and visually snappy. And they’re substantive too. But while TED is all about bringing the inspiration, RSA videos tend toward critique. Take the four videos below. Though varied in focus, they all circle around a common theme — the flaws running through our contemporary capitalist system.”
“CCEPA promotes the public good through the cultivation and dissemination of knowledge of ethical issues, which helps generate new insights, provide greater awareness, and heal misunderstandings.” (about)
I first came across this organization through Situating Science‘s series called Trust in Science. This five-part series presents some really great speakers on fascinating science policy topics. It is seriously on par with the How to Think about Science series that CBC produced a few years back (which is unfortunately no longer available online). You can then imagine my excitement to discover a whole collection of video series with talks by top scholars in ethics, science and policy studies, management, philosophy, etc… These hosted events (which are only available through the website’s flash player) can be found here.
Earlier this year, at the end of my first year of graduate school and in the middle of paper-writing season, my laptop died. It had been lying innocently in my bag when they both toppled over and crashed onto the ground. The impact affected the monitor; it wouldn’t turn on. I don’t think there could have been a worse time. Deadlines were approaching and tensions were mounting. Thankfully I had been using Dropbox and, commandeering a nearby desktop computer, I was able to continue working without missing a beat.
The reason my working documents (including a powerpoint presentation and relevant images) were saved is because Dropbox, like Google Apps (explained previously), use cloud computing to save (or “sync”) your files online. For me, what’s special about Dropbox is threefold: For one, the service functions seamlessly with how you use your computer already. Dropbox is represented on your computer simply as a folder like any other. You drop files and organize subfolders as you would anything else. The difference is that this folder’s contents are backed up online. Which brings me to the second aspect I enjoy about this service: it is passive. That means that you don’t need to do anything for it to be doing its job. When my computer suddenly became inaccessible due to a broken screen I could be confident that the most recent version of the files I was working on would be available online, from any computer. This brings me to the third feature. Again like Google Apps, I can access my own Dropbox folder from any computer (through a login at the Dropbox website) and can even have files publicly accessible for others should I choose.
Go ahead, get Dropbox here.
“In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.
Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure.
Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be.
Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy’s power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.” <link>
Watch it here.
