BUMP TOP!!

I love this idea. It is so artsy to me. At first I thought that is was a bit unorganized and cluttered looking. But as he went through all the different features and showed off how much you could play around with things it definately won me over. I like the flipping through photos, it looks a lot easy to flip through and manage things. Anand Agarawala only looks like he's 18. But he knows what he's talking about when it comes to computers. I am very interested in the idea of bump top and would choose that over the old school version of a desktop.

A lyrical view of life on earth

For this weeks TED talk Frans Lanting's "a lyrical view of life on earth," stuck out to me. I'm going to school for photography and in this presentation this photographer for National Geographic puts together a slide show of pictures that he has taken on one of his journeys. I read some of the comments that other viewers had posted and its easy for me to agree that photographic journey through time is much more enjoyable and I think it is much more comprehendable. The music in the background is rather distracting though.

HTML Experience

In the fifth grade my class was required to make their own web page. We learnt some basic HTML codes, color codes, nothing to fancy. Our pages just consisted of different lettering styles, colors, fonts, page breaks, and it was information on ourselves. I have pages of notes from back then but I'm not all to sure where they are now or what program it was that we used. I enjoyed making my own web page and am excited to become more familiarized with it again.

War and Peace

In all honesty I hate discussions like this one. I'm not all up to date on what is going on in the world. I'll read through the newspaper and pick out the articles that catch my eye, but talks of this nature have no interest to me. I know this is mostly due to what little I know, and I don't quite understand what the heck he is talking about. I need things to be dumbed down when it come to the government and their tactics because they just don't make much sense to me. I don't believe in war however. We all live on this earth and need to share it's resources with one another. I don't think that killing or violence is a way of lending a hand and helping out. The U.S is power hungry, we have the most out of anyone yet we keep wanting more.

Artificial Intelligence

I came across this site : (http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html)

The site outlines the case for believing that we will have superhuman artificial intelligence within the first third of the next century. It looks at different estimates of the processing power of the human brain; how long it will take until computer hardware achieve a similar performance; ways of creating the software through bottom-up approaches like the one used by biological brains; how difficult it will be for neuroscience figure out enough about how brains work to make this approach work; and how fast we can expect superintelligence to be developed once there is human-level artificial intelligence.

Our Priorities for Saving the World

I must say that this TED talk from Bjorn Lomberg was rather disappointing. The beginning was very interested and he got my attention with the statistics on some one the problems that we are facing. Such as the 800 million who are starving, 1 billion are lacking in clean drinking water, 2 billion lack sanitation, 2 million dies each year from aids, 175 million international migrants, 940 million illiterate adults, and the several billion who are affected by global warming. Bjorn and the Copenhagen Consensus rank the top four challenges that we face are malaria, free trade, malnutrition and HIV/Aids at number one. All of the others were to costly and would take longer to make an impact than the ones suggested. Climate change was at the bottom of the list due to the high cost of money and the littlest impact it would have. Kyoto is an amendment to the international treaty on climate control. Personally I don't quite understand why this isn't among the top four problems that should be addressed first. They say that it is to costly yet why would we have to pay for it. It would be something to benefit everyone here on earth, who would not want to contribute to that. We could all pull together to help out with the environment. Bjorn also talked about how if we work on the four that are suggested it will save lives and the people in third world countries would eventually be making the amount of money that we do now as we would be making more too. I think that if we take the time to knock out one big problem the smaller ones will come easier. If global warming keeps up we will lose more and more resources till things become scarce. Why don't we feed the hungry? Why don't we lend a hand to those over seas in other countries with diseases? If we have the resources why are so many people doing without? Perhaps I'm being ignorant and things aren't as easy as that. However, I do know that money doesn't buy everything. Yet it seems to be what everyone is depending on to save the world. We need to look to people and ourselves to make a difference and not pieces of paper that we put face value on.

SLOW DOWN!!

So far this is my favorite TED talk. I couldn't agree with Carl Honore more. We try and press more and more into less time. We have turned everything into something to do quickly. Speed dialing, speed reading, speed dating, and speed walking are all examples. The majority of people in the world are living the fast life instead of the good life. Everyone is becoming more and more burnout by trying to do things quickly. When people hear the word slow they think of a person as being lazy or a slacker or even stupid. This is a cultural taboo that we have placed on these words. We all need to slow down and smell the roses, use our creative mode of thought, and savor life. People like moving fast for the adrenaline and they keep themselves so busy so that they don't have to ask themselves real questions. One of Carl's examples were, "If you're raising your kid right?" Carl also said that most of the emails he receives are from the younger age groups asking him to write a letter to their parents about slowing down. It is not just adults who aren't able to slow down its people of all age groups. We are marinated in the culture of speed. Relationships are even being fast paced. No one is taking the time for patience, tranquility or time, they would much rather walk away and not invest anymore time into it. Again this has been my favorite TED talk so far. And I hope everyone will take the TIME to watch it!