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Showing posts from May, 2011

TED: Tom Chatfield: ways games reward the brain

experience bars measuring progress - instead of small reward increments give lots of task - keep the tasks small and measurable, break things down into many tasks reward effort - don't punish failure feedback - must link consequences to action, feel a lesson, model lessons uncertainty - neurological goldmine, the reward that they weren't sure they were going to get, there was an unlikelihood, the real turnon is doing stuff with other people, collaboration

TED: Nalini Nadkarni: Life science in prison

She gave trees canvases and let them paint. Found that trees have signatures like a Monet or a Renoir. She did calculations and found that the way they painted had cycles. How can this be applied to a seemingly static institution like a prison. They gave lectures about science in prisons The prisoners chose the lectures over TV That is movement They had a project about frogs and wetlands The prisoners chose to the project over TV Solitary confinement prisoners were given images of nature in their exercise yards If prisoners can change, we can too

TED: Elif Shafak: The politics of fiction

fetsiboomsticks: Cultural ghettos are places where we congregate with people just like us. Where we otherise others by affirming ourselves and by actively ennumerating what differences the differences of others. frustration is very stimulating. Learning a language, being frustrated that you can't express in fine detail keeps you trying. a reader wants to see the manifestation of the identity of the author in the story fetsiboomsticks: you are not a creator, an actor takes roles that he 'agrees' with, that he is prepared to endorse, that's what we think. multicultural writers are expected to write their culture, English writers are allowed to be more imaginative she was prosecuted for words she had written and she objects because it is fiction writers are entitled to their opinions, but it is not politics its fiction, separate things fiction is a connector, politics is a divider Muslims read books by Palistinians and vice versa, they connect. Politicians stop you

TED: Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leaders

Women systematically underestimate their own ability Women don't negotiate for themselves in the workforce 7% of women negotiate their first salary, 57% of men do Women attribute their success to external factors, men attribute it to themselves No one gets to the promotion without believing they deserve it Success and likability are negatively correlated for women and positively correlated for men Solutions: Get women to sit at the table (make sure that you notice that men are reaching, but women are also there), Make your partner your partner (men do less housework/childwork), Don't leave before you leave (open yourself to men working in the home, women stop putting their hands up in their careers because they want to have children)

TED: Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

Information junk food, vegetables and desert.  We don't have a balanced information diet. Beware the filters.  You are living in a filter bubble - google and facebook tailoring what gets into your bubble. You don't know what DOESN'T get in. Algorithms are curating the world for us, online.  The editors were human gatekeepers, now the gatekeepers are algorithmic - created by coder-gatekeepers. We need control over the filters. Filters must be made more responsibly because we need to know things outside of our opinion set so that we can operate responsibly.