The Story of Stuff
Posted: February 2, 2012 Filed under: Nature, Technology, Videos Leave a comment »
Video: monkey fairness
Posted: September 15, 2011 Filed under: Animals, Research, Videos Leave a comment »A pair of capuchin monkeys show very compelling signs of cooperation and a sense of fairness, by working together to solve a problem using tools, and then sharing the reward.
They also show signs of understanding fairness: when unequal rewards are given to one monkey and not another, the monkey receiving the lesser treat would rather go hungry than accept anything less than an equal reward.
From the BBC documentary “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, narrated by the ever brilliant Sir David Attenborough.
For the full 29 minute documentary, “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle,” click here.
>Video: Monkey Tool Usage Hammer and Anvil
Posted: September 9, 2010 Filed under: Animals, Early Man, Videos Leave a comment »>
From the BBC documentary “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, narrated by the ever brilliant Sir David Attenborough.
For the full 29 minute documentary, “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, click here.
>Video: The Rise of the Numerati
Posted: April 23, 2010 Filed under: Psychology, Technology, Videos Leave a comment »By Stephen Baker
With the explosion of data from the Internet, cell phones, and credit cards, the people who can make sense of it all are changing our world
An excerpt from the introduction of the book The Numerati.
Imagine you’re in a café, perhaps the noisy one I’m sitting in at this moment. A young woman at a table to your right is typing on her laptop. You turn your head and look at her screen. She surfs the Internet. You watch.
Hours pass. She reads an online newspaper. You notice that she reads three articles about China. She scouts movies for Friday night and watches the trailer for Kung Fu Panda. She clicks on an ad that promises to connect her to old high school classmates. You sit there taking notes. With each passing minute, you’re learning more about her. Now imagine that you could watch 150 million people surfing at the same time. That’s more or less what Dave Morgan does.
“What is it about romantic-movie lovers?” Morgan asks, as we sit in his New York office on a darkening summer afternoon. The advertising entrepreneur is flush with details about our ramblings online. He can trace the patterns of our migrations, as if we were swallows or humpback whales, while we move from site to site. Recently he’s become intrigued by the people who click most often on an ad for car rentals. Among them, the largest group had paid a visit to online obituary listings. That makes sense, he says, over the patter of rain against the windows. “Someone dies, so you fly to the funeral and rent a car.” But it’s the second-largest group that has Morgan scratching his head. Romantic-movie lovers. For some reason Morgan can’t fathom, loads of them seem drawn to a banner ad for Alamo Rent A Car.
>Video: Building Made From Plastic Bottles
Posted: April 15, 2010 Filed under: Technology, Videos Leave a comment »>
A building made from recycled plastic PET bottles has been built in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei.
The country is famous for having a large number of convenience stores, but the population’s love of fast-food has resulted in residents consuming a vast amount of bottled beverages – up to 4.6 billion a year.
The inspiration for the building came from the amount of them found in rubbish bins, according to developer Arthur Huang, of the Miniwiz Sustainable Energy Development Company.
>Video: Brian Johnson – "How I’m Setting My Intention & Goals for 2010"
Posted: April 14, 2010 Filed under: Inspiring, Videos Leave a comment »>
Consistency vs Intensity
Brian Johnson, who writes the terrific Philosophers Notes, has put up this very useful video on his planning process for 2010. The distinction that leapt out for me was what became the title of this post – the power of consistency vs intensity. His point, and it’s a fine one, is that many of us burn ourselves out in the first 5 days of the new year trying to exercise more, write more, love more, play more, meditate more all while eating less, wasting time less, watching TV less, doing busywork less…
This intensity exhausts us and is not sustainable. What works, what makes the difference, is focus and consistent application.
Easier said then done of course.
Einstein – who clearly had a gift for snappy quotes as well as being able to unpick the deeper mysteries of the universe – once said “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.”* That’s a relief, because even though I know I should be following Leo and Brian’s advice, focusing on one thing and being consistent… I find on my list for 2010 such things as: exercising more, meditating more, writing more, creating more, networking more, playing more, relaxing more. And that’s just for January. It feels a little like everything has to happen Right Now to be a success.
Thanks Patricia, for sharing!
>Video: Selective Attention Test
Posted: April 9, 2010 Filed under: Psychology, Research, Videos Leave a comment »>
First watch the video and then read below to learn about this experiment…
Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?
Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.
This experiment reveals two things: that we are missing a lot of what goes on around us, and that we have no idea that we are missing so much. To our surprise, it has become one of the best-known experiments in psychology. It is described in most introductory textbooks and is featured in more than a dozen science museums. It has been used by everyone from preachers and teachers to corporate trainers and terrorist hunters, not to mention characters on the TV show C.S.I., to help explain what we see and what we don’t see. And it got us thinking that many other intuitive beliefs that we have about our own minds might be just as wrong. We wrote The Invisible Gorilla to explore the limits of human intuition and what they mean for ourselves and our world. We hope you read it, and if you do, we would love to hear what you think.
By Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Thanks to Melanie for sharing!
>Video: 19 Minutes – Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity
Posted: April 7, 2010 Filed under: Education, Psychology, Videos Leave a comment »>http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
About this talk:
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
About Ken Robsinson:
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
>Video: Monkey Tool Usage
Posted: April 1, 2010 Filed under: Animals, Research, Videos Leave a comment »>
(4:30) – Capuchin monkeys in an experiment in South Carolina demonstrate wonderful tool usage and remarkable problem solving abilities, to acquire honey using multiple tools.
Illustrates planning behaviour, the understanding that tools having different properties are useful for different applications, and even rudimentary bartering ability!
The token exchange is interesting in and of itself; I’m sure it took a lot of training. There is another example of its usage by the same experimenter here.
From the BBC documentary “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, narrated by the ever brilliant Sir David Attenborough.
For the full 29 minute documentary, “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, click here.
Source:
Westergaard, G.C., Evans, T.A., Howell, S. 2007. Token mediated tool exchange between tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella). Animal Cognition 10(4):407-414. (doi:10.1007/s10071-007-0072-9)
https://commerce.metapress.com/content/c8…
>Video: New Glasses Allow Blind Soldier to ‘See’ With his Tongue
Posted: March 19, 2010 Filed under: Science, Technology, Videos Leave a comment »>http://ilovepwnage.com/player.swf?autoplay=0&Addr=NjkzOA==
A soldier blinded in battle has become the first member of the armed forces to test a special pair of glasses which allow him to ‘see’ using his tongue.
Lance Corporal Craig Lundberg, who was blinded in a grenade attack in Basra, is trying the glasses which turn pictures into electrical impulses that are felt on the tongue.
The different sensations mean he can distinguish between light and dark and negotiate his way around objects.
Jonathan Beale reports. Thanks to Patricia for sharing.
