TEDChris: The untweetable

When 140 characters just aren't enough... 



May 7, 2009

More #TWISIs

Spread wisdom! Cut and paste to retweet.  (background here and here)

RT @azratek Those who repeat history are doomed to forget it. #TWISI

RT @monedays In today's world, I believe being a leader makes for great management. Managers who do not lead are vulnerable. #TWISI

RT @jackiegerstein Good tweets like good quotes are soundbites of wisdom. #TWISI

RT @kmangalam There is no such thing as a free lunch or a free market. #TWISI

RT @kmangalam Economics is greed made mathematical. #TWISI

RT @TagClub Claw for your Humanity, then redefine it. Prove you're alive or you aren't. #TWISI

RT @thenightbird You are how you drive - what can we share if we can't share the road. #TWISI

RT @SimonEdhouse BE AUTHENTIC (ref: all def'ns of 'integrity') ...strong moral principles+ consistency/lack of corruption in electronic data. #TWISI

RT @Thehoofer Technology can breed isolation, but the most successful advances are those that augment live interaction. #TWISI

RT @rapunzels_tears Focusing on similarity may bring peace but it stagnates. Desirable societal change also needs people to understand&embrace difference. #TWISI

RT @eaboyeji There is nothing wrong with a child soldier who has the right weapons: education ! #TWISI

RT @bjsebeck A little stress is a good thing. It's what kept our ancestors from getting eaten by dinosaurs. #TWISI

RT @eaboyeji  Dere r 2 kinds of child soldiers. Dose hu fight w EPK's & AK 47's and dose hu fight with E=MC2 and HIST

RT @fedecasas Que pasaría si lo pierdes todo? Si tu respuesta no incluye la muerte, entonces arriesgalo todo. #TWISI

RT @javiaven If it’s being sold out of someone’s car trunk, walk away. #TWISI

RT @joeltalks Fuck platitudes. Do something. #TWISI

RT @behaviorgeek The answers are in front of us. The environment affects our behavior. Embrace it understand it and make a change. #TWISI

RT @brainpicker  The biggest roadblock to innovation is that we keep looking left and right for reassurance, rather than forward for leaping ground. #TWISI

RT @dalka Do people understand that search will always have more relevancy than social media?#TWISI

RT @TEDJohnMark Re-amalgamation and fusion of education and entertainment with technology using Telepresence. #TWISI

RT @eaboyeji A truly free market is impossible without a genuinely free people. #TWISI

RT @stemcat5 How we think about our origin is important: http://tinyurl.com/c3msdh #TWISI

RT @Thandelike Societal taboos meant to protect us from unspeakable or unimaginable acts only help hide what happens before our eyes.  #TWISI

RT @chrisarsenault When an entrepreneur looks confident enough... he can pull anything off! #TWISI

RT @Moodstep  It's good to live in a time where spirit is lifting from crisis and destruction. Let's be and enjoy the change. #TWISI

RT @ImageDistillery Few things are more unsettling than the lack of thought some give to words which they put forward as proof or reason. #TWISI

RT @doctorzen Knowledge is better than ignorance. #TWISI

RT @rpontremoli: If everybody had great sex, all wars would be over. #TWISI

RT @BGlad I am looking forward to reading my tweets in the future and thinking how naive I was. #TWISI

RT @darkshdwstlkr When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. #TWISI 

RT@kellbags As Neal Donald Walsh noted, in the history on mankind more people have died in the name of god than any other reason. Ironic , no? #TWISI

RT @Lisa Merlini: The victory of ideology will be the downfall of us all. Our survival depends on the pragmatists, the optimists and the visionaries. #TWISI

RT @TEDChris Our species’ survival depends on how fast we embrace the moral shift from “patriot” to “global citizen.” #TWISI

Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [1]

May 7, 2009

#TWISI Ideas worth retweeting? You decide.

TWISI = "The Way I See It."  

UPDATE May 18:  This amazes me. REMO, the cool T-shirt & design company has set up a page showing all new TWISIs in real time and making it easy to retweet or vote the ones you like. They are giving away 100 customized T-shirts every month displaying the top TWISIs.  

The authors of the top 10 TWISIs get 5 each, and the remaining 50 go to people who retweeted them or voted for them.   Or you can order a T-shirt showing the TWISI of your choice. Check it out!  The shirts look terrific, with several different designs and REMO's famed quality and attention to detail.   

[Earlier] A semi-serious post last night seems to have lit a small fire and dozens of Twitterers have been tweeting short quotes with the #TWISI tag. Here's a collection of some of them in random order, laid out so that they're super-easy to retweet. Find any that you like and then just copy and paste the entire line. If there's space maybe add the (shortened) url to this page as background. http://ow.ly/5CEU You'll be helping spread a little wisdom!

We'll track which TWISIs get retweeted most and figure out something cool to do with them. 

And if you want to write your own #TWISI just post it on Twitter with the #TWISI tag at the end and maybe also include it in a comment below. We'll see it and either update this list or add another list soon. 

Thanks everyone below for taking part. If nothing else, it's a fun social media experiment.

RT @jackiegerstein From a teacher: please give your child the gift of gratitude rather than the expectation of entitlement. #TWISI

RT @fedecasas Fear paralyzes you. Act as if you had nothing to lose and you'll defeat it every single time. #TWISI

RT @prexiousbl You fail when you quit trying. #TWISI

RT @rpontremoli The truly important decision in life is who you want to spend it with. Then the rest is easier. #TWISI

RT @eaboyeji A truly free market is impossible without a genuinely free people. #TWISI

RT @cmermel The only wasted day is the one in which you have learned nothing (or learnt nothing, if you are British). #TWISI

RT @bjsebeck There is no such thing as failure. You either succeed, or you learn. #TWISI

RT@brainpicker Our species' survival depends on how fast we embrace each other. #TWISI

RT @techdom When humans learn to love the earth, animals, and others and only take what we really need, we will prosper and survive. #TWISI

RT @Rodien  A better world is everyone's business. #TWISI

RT @Self discovery leads to world improvement. #TWISI

RT @Pundelina If you try hard enough, you can achieve whatever you want ... usually. #TWISI

RT @scarrey Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change! #TWISI

RT @brainpicker The biggest roadblock to innovation is that we keep looking left and right for reassurance, rather than forward for leaping ground. #TWISI

RT @BGlad It seems that the more people you meet and understand their real life story, the more you realize that we are all not that different. #TWISI

RT @haikalsiregar Success shouldn't be about anything but what impact you've made on someone's life. #TWISI

RT @tmtek I think it is important to set aside a little time on a regular basis to consider whether or not you are the bad guy. #TWISI

RT @tmtek Dedicating time to convincing yourself you are the good guy does not count. #TWISI

RT @tlthorntjr The next great leap in societal evolution will occur when we learn to focus on our similarities not our differences. #TWISI

RT @andresb When you give more than you have, others will always step up to cover for you. Give freely, live freely. #TWISI

RT@e_s Make an effort to listen better: difference is more on the points we make than the sides we take. #TWISI

RT @ashdonaldson Learning a skill: If you understand the how and why, when faced with new circumstances, you'll be able to adapt. #TWISI

RT @primesoftnz  Systematise the symptoms of Love; if you can't make it, fake it. #TWISI

RT @michaeljanzen Shouldn't the value of a home be measured by the happiness and security it brings instead of its size and cost? #TWISI

RT @jaiforster When I open my eyes, I understand little about the world. It's how I look at it, that will affect the world I live in. #TWISI

RT @jasonwpratt The keys to happiness: build lifelong relationships, and to give away 10% of everything you earn to whatever you think is worthwhile. #TWISI

RT @dojau The best way to active a future is to co-create it. #TWISI

RT @MarketingVirgo Optimism, a teapot still singing even though up to its neck in hot water. #TWISI

RT @jaiforster The only things I truly own are my thoughts, the words I say and the actions I take. #TWISI

 RT @fedecasas Fear paralyzes you. Act as if you had nothing to lose and you'll defeat it every single time. #TWISI

RT @eaboyeji Ideas may rule the world...but if they fails the test of sound logic and reasoned debate....the may very well ruin it. #TWISI

RT @eaboyeji There is nothing wrong about a child soldier with the right weapons. Education fights poverty. #TWISI

RT @fedecasas What would happen if you lose it all? If your answer doesn't involve death, then risk it all. #TWISI

RT @sarahracha Happiness is that place between too much and too little. #TWISI

RT @moodstep  We will become global citizens by apreciating diversity and distancing ourselves from our opinions. #TWISI

RT @Leynete It's not fun unless you're wearing bunny slippers. #TWISI

RT @doingitwrong Starbucks isn't such a bad company. #TWISI

RT @neoptolomus A little bit of decadence never hurt anyone. #TWISI

RT @klowey22 have faith, love, and hope. share appreciation, respect and trust. #TWISI

RT @Thandelike Societal taboos meant to protect us from unspeakable or unimaginable acts only help hide what happens before our eyes. #TWISI

RT @eaboyeji listen to us jaw, that there may be no need for war. #TWISI

RT sunnykins A truly liberatory social justice movement cannot afford to leave anyone at the margins. explanation here http://is.gd/xkJ4 #TWISI

RT @nassefi  Truth without compassion is violence. #TWISI

RT @baconner Skepticism is a virtue not a vice. A true skeptic is open to the hardest kind of change, a change in their own beleifs. #TWISI

RT @baconner We can no longer consider information free if its not on the internet, searchable. #TWISI

RT @baconner Learn the difference between casuality and causality or waste a lifetime of decisions on false assumptions. #TWISI

spanspanspanspan

Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [2]

May 6, 2009

#TWISI: The Way I See It...


This was my Starbucks moment. Allegedly 5m of these were manufactured  -- but I guess it takes more than coffee cup slogans to change the world.   It occurs to me that quotes like these could work quite well on Twitter. For one thing they're short enough, for another #TWISI (short for The Way I See It) is a natural Twitter tag.  

Anyone have one to offer? (Does not have to be as earnest as the above! Funny, insightful, punchy... all good.)  If we can get five decent ones, we'll unleash them on Twitter...  ...and maybe @Starbucks will join the fun.  It's a little Twitter version of "ideas worth spreading".  Limit suggestions to about 100 characters to allow for tag and retweeting.  You could also link to a longer post elsewhere, but the core quote needs to be strong!



Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [47]

May 6, 2009

Pendulum paintings of Tom Shannon

I'm a huge fan of sculptor & painter Tom Shannon, a gentle genius who turns science into art and art into science.  We just posted today his 2003 TED talk showing his gorgeous science-inspired sculptures and his vision for the Air Genie video airship.  In the last few months he has returned to a form of painting he invented more than 20 years ago.  He created a mechanized paint dispenser that is suspended on a giant pendulum over a canvas on the floor.   Tom sets the pendulum in motion, typically on an oval pathway, and then uses a remote control device to select with careful precision which paints are streamed onto the canvas and in what quantity.  

At his Manhattan studio the other evening, I watched him in action.  The results are spectacular. He's given me permission to share some of these images, none of which are up on his site yet.  They are to be the subject of an exhibition in New York later this year. (Watch this space).

             

Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [3]

May 4, 2009

Sara Watson and her amazing vanishing car...

...are all over the web, but it helps to see the pics in the right order.

Take this bizarre paint treatment of an old Skoda...

...then view it in its proper parking spot and, hey presto:

One smart kid...

Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [2]

May 4, 2009

The future of newspapers

Prompted by the following conversation on Twitter this morning...

2020science: Rumours of a Large-screen Kindle - a lifeline for print media? http://bit.ly/XzRGb Mixed feelings on this!
Me: Newspaper publishers clinging on to the wrong vision of their future. Display size is not the issue. 
2020science:  Agree, but would love your take on what the issues are Re: the future of "print" media

(OK, deep breath...)

Me: The key issues: 

- Broken business model.
- Glacial pace of adoption of web opportunities. 
- Denial.

When the news depended on having to cut down trees, stamp ink on them and truck them around the country, only a few could play. The lucky few thrived on monopoly pricing.

Now that cost of distribution is zero, everyone can play, and the world's attention will increasingly be divided into millions of much smaller slices.  There is zero chance that the massive work-forces of journalists, editors and photographers paid for to date by commercial organizations can be maintained.  Online audiences of the big brands can certainly be large... larger than they ever were in print, and larger than much of their online competition... but nonetheless not nearly as dominant as they were in the old world.  Therefore they cannot be monetized to anything like the same degree.  A bigger screen with fancy layouts won't help. The size of newspapers was driven by economics of printing, not by inherent reader desire for giant pages. 

To have a chance at surviving the big newspapers (and TV news channels) will have to:
a) slash costs, including editorial numbers.
b) do a far better job of using the amazing tools available online, such as crowd-sourcing and curation (vs creation).  This means recognizing the incredible asset that their reader-bases represent and taking them seriously.  Hello? It's the participation age. 

Honestly, the biggest problem for a lot of media companies is that their DNA is still "We're the experts at this. Why would we accept content from our, shudder, readers?!"  Instead they should be using whatever remains of their brand value to start making heroes of their more talented readers, who will be all too willing to work for nothing but the glory of publication/visibility.  They'll be amazed at what this could bring them. 

So instead of, a national newspaper with, say, 600 journalists + 3m readers, you may end up with maybe 100 super-insightful news curators, columnists and analysts, aided by 10,000 citizen journalists/contributors/posters/commenters (and the new package will quite possibly reach 50m+ readers).  It's a painful prospect for many... but I suspect the only hope for survival.  (And the resultant editorial package might just end up being richer, more detailed, more varied, more inclusive, and... dare one say it? ...better!)

"But who will pay for foreign news bureaus, quality news gathering, etc.?" 

Well:
1) Today there's massive duplication
2) Some of the role can be taken up and possibly improved by carefully filtered citizen journalism... though the models for that not yet proven.
3) More importantly, in the long run I suspect basic news reporting will be regarded as a fundamental infrastructure of a democratic society and treated the same way as roads, water and electricity.  It'll be publicly funded and/or subsidized by visionary non-profit foundations. The dear old BBC is not a bad model. 

Indeed stripping away the commercial overload may end up being a fantastic public good.  You can make a powerful case that the commercial media we have are inadvertently guilty of fundamentally misrepresenting the world.  (I argued this here.) We could lose a lot in the coming years of inevitable media job-losses and restructurings... but we could also figure out a much better way.

P.S. Steven Johnson's views on this topic are pretty compelling. 

Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [15]

May 3, 2009

5 interesting alternatives to text captchas

Captchas, the bot-blocking verification devices that make you copy  a set of fuzzy letters for security before registering on a site, are getting more and more annoying. Thanks to the increasing intelligence of  character recognition technology, we're being expected to strain our eyes to make out whether something is a Q or an O, a J or an I, upper or lower case, and so forth. What, for example, is this?  Words? I don't think so.

There's been a lot of talk in the past few months of alternative ideas involving object recognition... the idea being that humans do this much better than computers.  Here are five promising approaches.

(...but as described this idea vulnerable to straight guesses.  Spammers will take 1 in 9 attempts as success.)

(...addresses problem in the above, but - as executed here - some rotations hard to match even for humans.)

(Need to see wider variety of pics to judge.)

(Strikes me as both fun and exceptionally hard for a spam-bot to break... except by guessing right 1 time in 40,000.)

(This predates the others and to a layman seems ingenious. Michael tells me his patent application for his method is not yet through, and he has another even better idea about to be unveiled.)

Some more links:
- Captchas in wkiipedia 
- a Technobabble article claiming that all captchas are doomed to be broken... 
- and a typically funny and fascinating discussion on Slashdot about the Technobabble artice here. 

P.S That often infuriating ReCapatcha technology illustrated at the top at least has a silver lining. You are 
helping to digitize books
 that scanning computers can't read.

Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [5]

April 30, 2009

Feeling the heat in Delhi

I received this email today from TED speaker Kamal Meattle (who has a fine short TED talk on using plants to improve air quality.... http://tr.im/k7vV )  Of course you can't pin a single heat spell on anything... weather is too variable for that. But his plea is eloquent nonetheless. 


From: "Kamal Meattle"
Date: April 30, 2009 7:15:35 AM EDT
To: "'Chris Anderson'" 
Subject: Global Warming

Dear Chris,

Yesterday was the hottest day in Delhi in 51 years – 43.5 degrees centigrade on April 29, 2009.

There is more of this to come ...

The Executive Secretary of UNFCC has said that the Himalayan Glaciers will dry up by 2035.

This will mean that the Holy Ganges River will also dry up as a year round river and will depend on the monsoon rains only

The question is in Hindi, "Jab Ganga sookh jaigi tub kia?" – In English it translates to “What happens after the Ganges River dries up?”

What does this mean to us as farmers in Punjab, Haryana, U.P, Jharkhand, Uttranchal, Bihar, West Bengal etc?

What does it mean to the residents of Delhi?

We know that the Ganga does not flow through Delhi but it certainly flows through our hearts and through the taps of Delhi!

If this river dries up, can you imagine what this will mean for many of us who have a preference for our ashes being immersed in the Ganga River?

The sad part of it is that we politically battle over caste and forget about the issues that threaten our very existence or developmental issues?

Are we informing the people that this is a disaster waiting to happen? 

Is it not right for the people to know of this threat?

2035 is only 26 years away and the Glaciers are not going to suddenly dry up on New Years Day 2035!

It will happen much before then and we need to wake up and inform the people and create an awareness and start doing something about it.

The solution is not entirely in our hands as this is going to happen due to Global Warming which in turn is a result of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere.

We have still not learnt to build walls in the sky and hence are dependent on what people in China, USA or Europe or elsewhere do.

We must do something ourselves and take this threat with the seriousness it deserves.

The first step is for us to recognize this threat and be aware of it.

Best wishes and regards,

Kamal

www.greenspaces.in

Kamal Meattle
Chief Executive Officer
Paharpur Business Centre & Software Technology Incubator Park
Nehru Place Greens, New Delhi 110019, India

 

 


Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [0]

April 25, 2009

Resources to better understand the swine flu epidemic (updated 5/8)

The new H1N1 virus is spreading fast, but homo sapiens in 2009 has the ability to spread life-saving knowledge even faster. Here are some valuable online resources:

•  [Update 5/8] Headline summary from authoritative news sources http://swine-flu.alltop.com/

•  [Update 5/4] Regularly updated summary of cases worldwide http://flucount.org

• "Ground Zero" identified?  
The Guardian
on an outbreak in a Mexican village in February 

• Veratect credited with first reporting of the epidemic and are one of the more reliable reporters of breaking health news. They can be followed on twitter @veratect, though I don't necessarily recommend it. Lots of short updates create an unsettling,  possibly distorting drumbeat. A daily check-in better?!

• The relevant pages on the
official websites
are:
   World Health Organization (WHO)
here
   Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
here

• CDC's Dr Martin Cedron 
in the 
NYT
 
on the key mystery of apparently different levels of virulence inside and outside Mexico.

• Spectacular one page display of how media are reporting global health events (you can adjust for different locations, languages, and remember, just because it's a headline doesn't mean it's true) (via @vasantk)

• Important context. Click 'Illness' in LH bar. The counter for Respiratory Infections is showing the number of new influenza-like cases that are happening all the time, swine flu or no swine flu. 

• Excellent, but worrying, article by former influenza researcher.

• Three key personal safety tips on HuffPost.

• A fine public health blog Effect Measure

 of cases maintained by biomedical researcher 'Niman'   (alas, you now have to zoom out because the virus has spread.) There are some duplications, and the info not necessarily up to date. Looking for better map.

• Timeline of the outbreak.

• Useful call for skepticism in this warning about Twitter misinformation

• ...google.org flu trends page that plots local-level reports of flu outbreaks in US compared with prior years.  So far nothing out of the ordinary.  (This page is one small outcome from Larry Brilliant's 2006 TED Prize wish.)

If you know of an additional great resource, or a problem with one of these, please post a comment. 

Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [13]

April 24, 2009

In an economic crisis, you read strange things...

(From today's WSJ.com)  "U.S. stock futures turned higher as the market warmly greeted a $1.4 billion loss at Ford and a 32% profit drop at Microsoft... "

Posted by Chris Anderson 

Comments [4]