Monday, December 25, 2006
Lecture Prank
Thursday, December 21, 2006
MIT Students Making Millions the Easy Way (Horizon 2005)
| In the mid-1990s, a team of American science students took on the might of the Las Vegas casinos, and came home with millions of dollars. Hardworking engineering students during the week, they became high-rolling gamblers by the weekend and proved that, in one game at least, the house doesn't always win. The game was blackjack, and the students were from the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their audacious winnings marked the climax of an arms race between casino and player that began 40 years earlier with maths professor Edward Thorp. He realised that the one feature of blackjack that made it different from other casino games also made it possible to beat. | |
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Tony Robbins on top form (watch for the hilarious Al Gore moment) (TEDTalks)
| Tony Robbins explains how to unlock your true potential, and asks the audience (including former Vice President Al Gore) for a bit of high-level interaction. Robbins is a leading expert in leadership psychology, and one of America's most popular public speakers. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 22:30) - More TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com | |
TED 2006 Conference Presentation: Aubrey de Grey
| Presentation by Aubrey de Grey at the Technology Entertainment Design (TED) Conference 2006. http://www.ted.com/conference/flashpage.cfm?conferenceKey=2006 Related websites: http://www.Mprize.org http://www.ImmInst.org http://www.Sens.org Related topics include: Cryonics (cryogenics), anti-aging, caloric restriction, transhumanism, nanotechnology, technology, nanobots, immortality, Methuselah Mouse Prize, scientific conquest of death, longevity, fitness, health, population control, birth rate, death rate, rejuvination therapies, aging reversal, Aubrey de Grey, live forever, cancer research, technology, nanobots, research, gene therapies, disease, transplants, physics, chemistry, computers, computing, bioscience, nutrition, exercise, philosophy, sociology, politics, history, elixir, drugs, singularity, Ray Kurzweil, matrix, supplements, suspended animation, cryo sleep, scientific debate, MIT, Technology Review, Cambridge conference sponsored by Larry Ellison, overpopulation, 1000 year lifespan, thousand year lifespan, infant mortality, science breakthroughs, futurist, future, war on aging, medical, youthful, retirement, computer engineer, genetics, research. | |
Ideas Worth Spreading: Hans Rosling from TED 2006
| "See" how the world is changing. Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden shows us multi-dimensional animated statistical graphics that capture global trends and profound human change over decades that would otherwise be invisible in two dimensional representation. This is a beautiful lesson in visual communication at once both simple and complex. A must view for any serious presenter. | |
Professor Malcolm Clarke - discusses the anatomy of sperm whales
| Prof. Malcolm Clarke, a world expert on Sperm Whales and Giant Squid, speaks from his Whale Museum on Pico in the Azores about the anatomy of sperm whales. Includes a discussion of water and air holes, sound generation, the size of the brain and heart and the digestive system which includes 4 stomachs and is responsible for the creation of ambergris, an excretory product made from the beaks of giant squids. A sample of ambergris is shown. Ambergris has extraordinary properties of smell retention and has consequently been used in the world's finest perfumes. Attempts to synthesis similar compounds have failed. This is one of a series of films featuring Malcolm Clake and the Whale Museum on pico. For other films in the series, check out the "other films by same user link" or the "More Videos - related" link or visit the URL at the top of the column. All the films in the series can be found via: http://www.notreallyrelevant.com/Malcolm_Clarke_Whale_Museum_Pico_Azores.html Malcolm's Museum web site is at: http://www.bienal-baleias.org/malcolm/index.php | |
Social Impact Investing - Maria Ortero
| Maria Otero is president and CEO of ACCION International, a leading global microfinance institution that seeks to open the financial systems in developing countries to reach the poor. ACCION provides technical assistance, equity investment and financial services to 27 of the most advanced microfinance institutions in the world, which ACCION helped start and/or grow. Most of these microfinance institutions are regulated, are members of the ACCION Network, and together reached 1.9 million borrowers at the end of 2005, with an active loan portfolio that exceeded $1 billion. Ms. Otero first joined ACCION in 1986 as director of its lending program in Honduras, where she lived for three years. She became president of the organization in 2000. Ms. Otero is a leading voice on sustainable microfinance, and has published extensively on the subject, including as co-editor of The New World of Microfinance, published by Kumarian Press. Ms. Otero chairs the board of ACCION Investments, a US$20 million investment company for microfinance. She also serves on the boards of directors of three regulated microfinance institutions in Latin America: Mibanco in Peru, BancoSol in Bolivia and Compartamos in Mexico. Ms. Otero also serves as the coordinator of the Council of Microfinance Equity Funds, which convenes 18 equity investment funds dedicated to microfinance. | |
"Verbatim" - Erin McKean speaks at Google
| Erin McKean, editor and lexicographer for the New Oxford American Dictionary, tells Google the ten things she wishes people knew about dictionaries, how people go about making new words, and how lexicographers use Google. Erin McKean has wanted to be a lexicographer since she was eight years old. She has a BA and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, where she wrote her master's thesis on the treatment of phrasal verbs in children's dictionaries. While at the University of Chicago, she worked as a volunteer at the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. Before OUP, Erin spent eight years at Scott Foresman, where she worked on the Thorndike Barnhart children's dictionaries. Erin is a member of the American Dialect Society, the American Names Society, and Euralex and is a member of the board of the Dictionary Society of North America. Her publications include two papers in Dictionaries, the journal of the DSNA. She is a computer enthusiast and has given several presentations on SGML and XML to Chicago Webgrrls. When not writing dictionaries or editing VERBATIM, she likes to sew completely impractical clothes from vintage patterns and haunt used bookstores for copies of Kathleen Norris and E. Phillips Oppenheim novels. This video is part of the Authors@Google series. | |
Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance
| Former independent White House counsel Kenneth Starr joins constitutional scholars Bruce Ackerman and Doug Kmiec for the National Constitution Center's Inaugural John M. Templeton, Jr. Lecture on Economic Liberties and the Constitution. Bruce Ackerman will present the lecture. Starr makes remarks following the lecture. Douglas Kmiec moderates the event, which will include a question and answer session with the audience. Ackerman says that his proposal for campaign finance reform uses the "virtues of the market system" to promote the economic liberty of all, permitting people to contribute to political campaigns without intrusive regulation. Dr. John M. Templeton, Jr. has established the John M. Templeton, Jr. Lecture on Economic Liberties and the Constitution at the National Constitution Center to create a public forum to explore in detail the economic liberties provided by the Constitution. Located on Philadelphia's historic Independence Mall, the National Constitution Center is an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing public understanding of the U.S. Constitution and its relevance to Americans' daily lives. For more information, call 215.409.6600 or visit www.constitutioncenter.org. | |
Sparse and large-scale learning with heterogeneous data
| Google Tech Talks September 5, 2006 Gert Lanckriet is assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. He conducts research on machine learning, applied statistics and convex optimization with applications in computational biology, finance, music and vision. ABSTRACT An important challenge for the field of machine learning is to deal with the increasing amount of data that is available for learning and to leverage the (also increasing) diversity of information sources, describing these data. Beyond classical vectorial data formats, data in the format of graphs, trees, strings and beyond have become widely available for data mining, e.g., the linked structure of the world wide web, text, images and sounds on web pages, protein interaction networks, phylogenetic trees, etc. Moreover, for interpretability and economical reasons, decision rules that rely on a small subset of the information sources and/or a small subset of the features describing the data are highly desired: sparse learning algorithms are a must. This talk will outline two recent approaches that address sparse, large-scale learning with heterogeneous data, and show some applications. | |
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Google predicts future video trends
| Aug. 30 - Google's Vice-President of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer shared her vision for the role the technology company will play in the new era of video distribution. For more technology stories and reports, go to http://TV.reuters.com | |
Physics 10 - Lecture 02: Atoms and Heat II
| Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents. Spring 2006. Professor Richard A. Muller. The most interesting and important topics in physics, stressing conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events. Topics covered may vary and may include energy and conservation, radioactivity, nuclear physics, the Theory of Relativity, lasers, explosions, earthquakes, superconductors, and quantum physics. [courses] [physics10] [spring2006] | |
Decision Making and Chance
| Google Tech Talks September 17, 2006 Dr. Mike Orkin is a Managing Scientist at Exponent, a publicly traded scientific consulting company headquartered in Menlo Park. Mike has numerous research publications in game theory and probability theory and has written data mining and simulation software. He is a nationally known authority on odds and gambling games and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows to discuss gambling and odds, including CNN, NBC's Dateline and ABC's World News Tonight. ABSTRACT Certain gambling games, such as roulette and craps, are games of pure chance: In repeated play, luck disappears, and the persistent gambler will go broke. Other gambling activities, such as betting on sports or the stock market, may involve an element of skill. One way to measure this is to compare the results of a gambling strategy with chance: A skillful strategy should produce long-run results that are better than would be achieved by someone who is just guessing. One can also compare a gambler’s losses with chance to see if the gambler is doing worse than chance would allow. I will discuss two recent projects that illustrate these concepts: • Automated data mining software discovers that the Baltimore Ravens are 17-3 versus the point spread when they lost their previous game and their opponents played their previous game on the road. Do situations like this give clever gamblers an edge or are such strong win-loss records merely random flukes? • A gambler loses $30 million betting at an online casino. Is it possible to lose this much just by chance or is the gambler being cheated? Or maybe the gambler is part of a money laundering scheme. | |
James Randi Lecture at Princeton 2001
| The Search for the Chimera - Lecture given by James Randi at Princeton University in 2001. | |
Toward the First Revolution in the Mind Sciences
| Google TechTalks August 8, 2006 B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D. has been a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970. He is currently seeking ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices and Western science to advance the study of the mind. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies ( http://sbinstitute.com ). ABSTRACT Galileo took a seminal role in launching the first revolution in the physical sciences, and a key element in this revolution was the rigorous, sophisticated observation of physical phenomena. Darwin likewise launched a revolution in the life sciences on the basis of decades of meticulous observation of biological phenomena. Although scientists have been studying the mind for more than a century, no comparable revolution has taken place in the mind sciences, and the missing element that may account for this delayed revolution is the absence of rigorous, precise observations of mental phenomena. By integrating the third-person methodologies of the cognitive sciences with the first-person methods for examining the mind that have been developed in Buddhism and other contemplative traditions, our present generation may bring about the first revolution in the mind sciences. | |
Chemistry 3B - Lecture 03: Electronic Spectroscopy
| Chemistry 3B: Chemical Structure and Reactivity. Spring 2006. Professor Peter Vollhardt. Chemistry 3B represents the second semester of the standard organic chemistry series at UC Berkeley. It covers conjugation, aromatic chemistry, carbonyl compounds, carbohydrates, amines, carboxylic acids, amino acids, peptides, proteins, and nucleic acid chemistry. Ultraviolet spectroscopy and mass spectrometry will be introduced. Organic chemistry is a specific discipline within the subject of chemistry. It is the scientific study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of chemical compounds of carbon and hydrogen, which may contain any number of other elements, such as nitrogen, oxygen, halogens, and more rarely phosphorus or sulfur. Multi-carbon compounds form the basis of all life processes. Professor Vollhardt has had over 250 scientific coworkers and supervises a group of 10-15 students and postdoctorals. He has published and/or submitted for publication over 290 scientific papers or books, including the textbook for this course. Six patents have been issued to him. Since 1975 he has presented lectures at over 100 international and national meetings and more than 320 invited research seminars at various academic and industrial institutions. [courses] [chem3b] [spring2006] | |
SIMS 141 - Search, Google, and Life: Sergey Brin - Google
| Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. The World Wide Web brings much of the world's knowledge into the reach of nearly everyone with a computer and an internet connection. The availability of huge quantities of information at our fingertips is transforming government, business, and many other aspects of society. Topics include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities. The Instructor, Dr. Marti Hearst, is an associate professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, with an affiliate appointment in the Computer Science Division.[courses] [is141] [fall2005] | |
Integrative Biology 131 - Lecture 01: Organization of Body
| Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy. Fall 2005. Professor Marian Diamond. [courses][fall2005] [ib131] | |
9/11 - 2/1/2006 BYU Professor Steven E Jones WTC Lecture UVSC
| BYU Physics professor and founder of SCHOLARS FOR 9/11 TRUTH Steven E Jones presents his presentation on the collapse of WTC Buildings 1,2, and 7 on 9/11. A very informative and scientific presentation that raises serious questions about the official account of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and Building 7. | |
Integrative Biology 131 - Lecture 09: Muscular System
| Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy. Fall 2005. Professor Marian Diamond. [courses][fall2005] [ib131] | |
Integrative Biology 131 - Lecture 15: Cardiology, Posted at the suggestion of Charles Phillip Larkin
| Integrative Biology 131: General Human Anatomy. Fall 2005. Professor Marian Diamond. Lecture 15 on Cardiology. [courses][fall2005] [ib131] | |
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
New Responsibilities of the Department of Defense CIO-Prototype for Other CIOs?
A May 2, 2005 DoD Directive has far reaching implications in assigning to the DoD CIO with new responsibilities. Mr. Strassmann's lecture interprets the significance of the new roles.
The Strassmann Lecture Series is free and open to the public. This is the first of four 2005-2006 lectures.
Paul Strassmann is Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences in the School of Information Technology and Engineering at George Mason University. Previously, he was acting chief information officer (CIO) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, former director of defense information, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and retired vice president of the Xerox Corporation. He is the author of several books, including Amazon.com's number one best-selling book on information management, The Squandered Computer. Strassman has served on numerous boards and was named to the CIO Hall of Fame by CIO Magazine as one of the 12 most influential CIOs of the decade. His research and writing focuses on the growing scope and complexity of information-intensive organizations and the establishment of empowered CIOs.
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