2013-07-29
Tito Beveridge: Hitting It Against All Odds
source: Big Think
2013-07-26 At first glance, Tito Beveridge, the charismatic founder of Tito's Handmade Vodka, appears to be an unlikely success story, possibly even a complete fluke.
Beveridge tells Big Think he didn't set out to build a big nationwide vodka company. He just set out "to meet some girls, write off my bar tab, and maybe make $1,200 a month." So what's the moral of this story? Beveridge did what he loved, followed his dream, and ended up beating the odds. Maybe his success is not such a fluke after all.
SUBSCRIBE to Big Think: http://goo.gl/cZlhxI
Transcript -- As I've kind of gone along in my careers, I was a geophysicist first, I worked for oil and gas companies, subsurface mapping, I was a well site geologist, I did seismic data processing. And then I became a mortgage broker. Which it seemed like it's not a likely path for a vodka maker, but actually, in the end, it ended up being like the perfect recipe in my mind for a vodka maker.
The turning point for me was when I saw this guy on TV and he said, "If you're trying to figure out what to do with your life, take a sheet a paper and you draw a line down the middle and on one side you put what you love to do, on the other side you put what you're good at." And it's usually good to have like a few glasses of Tito's before you do this just to kind of loosen yourself up, a little truth serum. And then you sit there and you look at it and you try to incorporate everything you wrote down, as many things as possible into what you're dream job is.
And the theory behind it is that if you're doing something that you love to do, that you're good at, then you'll work harder at it. And you'll probably be better at it and you won't feel like you're busting your ass, you'll feel like you're going out, you're having fun, and stuff that you would normally would want to do anyway whether you got paid for it or not. For me going out to this little shack that I built out in the country and cooking booze and sitting there like tasting these little test tubes just as it's coming off the still, I mean, to me that did not seem like work to me. And it still doesn't. I just still enjoy going out there, have a few test tubes in my back pocket. And so, you know, would I spend a lot of time doing work? Yeah, I mean, I had a cot out there, I lived there out of, you know, I mean, I lived next to the still with my dog.
And so yeah, I spent a lot of time doing it, but I enjoyed it. I think that's just kind of all part of it. I mean, as far as like hard work, it's like, I don't know, you know, I guess there's people that are workers and people that aren't. But I've always just looked at it like I enjoy working. You know, when I'm not working I just tend to like sleep later and later and next thing you know I'm waking up and it's like 3:30 in the afternoon. I don't do well. I'm one of these people that's like, I'm like an old bird dog, you got to keep me working all the time or I'll be out chasing rabbits or something. So hard work and tenacity, you know, following your dreams, you know, hitting it against the odds, it's like, you know, I mean I didn't set out to build a big nationwide vodka company. I really just set out to meet some girls, write off my bar tab, you know, maybe make like $1,200 a month, you know. That would just be awesome. You know, and it just, it just kind of kept going and going and going and going and, yeah. And it worked out.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd
2013-07-25
Would You Kill Baby Hitler? (And Other Psychopathic Musings, with Kevin ...
source: Big Think 2013-07-24
Psychologist and psychopath expert Kevin Dutton sets up thorny moral dilemmas and speculates on the psychopathic, utilitarian tendencies of politicians.
Original Trolley Problem video here: http://goo.gl/TXgn0C
Transcript-
When we talk about the trolley problem, actually research has been done on the kinds of people who are willing to shove the fat guy over the rails. And what that research has uncovered is that these people tend to be utilitarian's in our society, okay. They tend to be people who are able to get the job done, who are less morally squeamish.
Now I've actually presented a variation of this dilemma to various psychopaths. I'll give an example of what the variation of the dilemma is. Imagine that you are a transplant surgeon. And you have five patients all in need of a transplant, heart, lungs, whatever. Okay? And they're all gonna die if they don't get that transplant, but there are no matching donors available.
Just by chance, a young traveler happens to walk past your surgery one day for just a regular check-up. And it turns out, hypothetically, that he is a direct match for all five, okay.
Now imagine that you are the transplant surgeon. Imagine if there was no come back to you, if that traveler somehow disappeared, okay. Would it be right to kill that young traveler in order to take his five organs to transplant them into your five patients?
Now, most people -- again it's the five and one life score. It's exactly like the trolley problem. But most people would say absolutely not. No, that's just not right. It's ethically not right to kill that person. But I've given this to psychopathic killers and they've said, well actually, you know what? Imagine if you were the families of those five guys. One life lost, is it really that bad when you're saving five others? What if that guy was an evil terrorist? And the five guys who needed to transplants were peace workers or aid workers, for instance. Would that make it any different?
Now, these are kinds of -- not exactly that -- but these are kinds of scenarios, these are kinds of decisions that world leaders and politicians have to grapple with. Here's another little one to conjure with. Imagine that you were, hypothetically, left in a room with a newborn baby, okay.
And you were left in that room for ten minutes with that newborn baby. And I told you -- and you have to believe this is true -- that that newborn baby will grow one day into Adolph Hitler, okay. And I told you that there would be no moral comeback, no legal comebacks on you were you to kill that baby with a pillow and walk out of that room.
Now, what would you do? Would you kill that baby and save millions of lives further on down the line in history? Or would you not be able to do it? These are moral conundrums, which are kind of played out in everyday life. I'm obviously reducing these to absurdities. But these are the kinds of decisions on a lesser level that you have to make if you're a politician or if you're a world leader.
Sending anyone out in to battle knowing that there's a chance that they might not come back, committing thousands of troops to a war is something that not many people can carry lightly on their conscience.
And if you look at psychopathic traits, actually, you know, psychopathic traits are pretty well represented in politicians and world leaders. You think about it. You know, politicians and leaders have to deal with all sorts of nasty kinds of crisis during their administrations, anything from the threats from rouge states to natural disasters like hurricanes or floods.
Also, though, they have to be pretty confident to run for office at all. They have to be very good at presenting themselves in a certain light. And they have to be very persuasive and manipulative. I mean, one senior UK politician, who should for obvious reasons remain nameless, had a great quote. And he said to me, "You know, in politics the only way to know who's stabbing you in the back is to see their reflection in the eyes of the person stabbing you from the front."
That's a great kind of quote, which, for me, sums up that kind of snakes and ladders game. Every man for himself, cut throat, kind of existence that characterizes politics I would say probably across the board in most nations of the world.
Directed and Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd
2013-07-24
2013-07-23
【幸福大師－雷諾瓦與二十世紀繪畫】特展：蔣勳講座 (完)
source: ishow2010 2013-07-23
「幸福大師－雷諾瓦與二十世紀繪畫」特展
日期：2013/5/25(六) 至 9/8(日)
地點：故宮圖書文獻大樓一樓
官網：http://renoir.ishow.udn.com/
2013-07-21
2013-07-20
Neil deGrasse Tyson: The 3 Fears That Drive Us to Accomplish Extraordina...
source: Big Think·2013-07-19
Nobody wants to die. And not only that, people especially don't want to die poor. But if you have to die, and God forbid, die penniless, it's good to have lavished sufficient praise on a deity so you might be in his good favor in the afterlife.
According to the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, these fears account for "the most expensive, ambitious projects humans have ever undertaken."
Take the Pyramids, which are "basically expensive tombstones," Tyson says. The praise of deity or royalty also got us the great cathedrals of Europe. We're not investing the same portion of our wealth and energy in churches nowadays, but Tyson says the other two fears are still quite powerful.
War, or the fear of death led to the construction of The Great Wall of China. It also led to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project. But would the threat of war get us to Mars today? It's conceivable, but not likely. So if "kings and gods are not sufficient in modern times to undergo heavy projects," Tyson asks, what's left?
The promise of economic return. That's what is responsible for hugely expensive enterprises such as the voyages of Columbus, Magellan voyages, and Lewis and Clark.
In the video below, Tyson wholeheartedly endorses this driver, as the impact would be as follows:
"You can go into space, transform society, change the zeitgeist of your culture, turn everyone into people who embrace and value science, technology, engineering and math, the STEM field."
Transcript -- So about a decade ago I realized that if we were going to go to Mars with people it would be really expensive, and so I thought to myself: what activities have human cultures engaged in, in the past that were as expensive as what it might be to go to Mars and what motivated them to spend that money? I was going to fill a whole book, "Motivations to do Great Things, Great Expensive Things," and then I'd find the task, I'd find the activity that most closely resembled what it would be to go to Mars in the 21st century and I'd say, oh, is that what that culture did with their population, is that how they raised the money, is that how they convinced the people? I was going to fill a whole book of this. It would be a nice little reference catalog about how to get something done in modern times.
In conducting that exercise what I found is that there are only three drivers, not more, not less, three drivers that account for the most expensive, ambitious projects humans have ever undertaken. One of them is the praise of deity or royalty. That's what got you the pyramids. They're basically expensive tombstones. That's what got the cathedral and church building of Europe. That was a period where huge fractions of societal investment went into those activities. There is less of that today, so that's not really a useful driver to think about how we might transform the 21st century. Another driver is war. Nobody wants to die. That gets you the Great Wall of China. That gets you the Manhattan Project where we built the bomb. That gets you the Apollo Project. Another driver, the search for economic return—nobody wants to die, nobody wants to die poor. The search for economic return, that's what is responsible for the Columbus voyages, the Magellan voyages, Lewis and Clark figuring out what is beyond that frontier in hugely expensive enterprises, conducted by governments.
So if we're going to go to Mars, and if war is not the driver—because it could easily become the driver if you get another space race with someone we view as a military adversary; I wonder who that might be—but if peaceful heads prevail, then war is not the driver available to you. Let's check our list. Well, kings and gods are not sufficient in modern times to undergo heavy projects such as that. What's left? The promise of economic return.
You can go into space, transform society, change the zeitgeist of your culture, turn everyone into people who embrace and value science, technology, engineering and math, the STEM field. Whether or not people go into space or serve the space industry they will have the sensitivity to those fields necessary to stimulate unending innovation in the technological fields, and it's that innovation in the 21st century that will drive tomorrow's economies.
Any frontier in space now involves biologists—we're looking for life—, chemists, geologists, physicists, mechanical engineering, electrical engineers, aerospace engineers, astrophysicists, all the traditional sciences and engineering frontiers are captured in any ambitious goal to explore space. We can recapture those times and reinvent America. We've already invented America once before. It's ripe. It's ready and it's willing, I think, to be invented again.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd
2013-07-18
The Seven Essential Life Skills, With Ellen Galinsky | Big Think Mentor
source: Big Think 2013-07-17
In The Seven Essential Life Skills, her workshop for Big Think Mentor (http://goo.gl/06gYu), author and educational leader Ellen Galinsky teaches thinking and interpersonal skills grounded in decades of psychological research and essential to thriving in a rapidly changing world. In this introductory session, she introduces the seven skills and their relevance to life in the 21st century.
2013-07-17
2013-07-16
2013-07-13
Crazy Wisdom: Daniel Dennett on Reductio ad Absurdum
source: Big Think· 2013-07-12
With his new book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking," (http://goo.gl/FtKWl) philosopher Daniel Dennett offers a kind of self-help book for deep thinkers -- a series of thought experiments designed as a workout for the deliberative mind. Here he discusses reductio ad absurdum, "the workhorse of philosophical argumentation", wherewith thinkers test the validity of an opponent's argument by taking it to its most illogical extreme.
Transcript -- One of the reasons I wrote this book is because oddly enough, philosophers who are famous -- notorious for being naval gazers, for being reflective. I think, in fact, philosophers are often remarkably unreflective about their own methodology. I wanted to draw attention to how philosophers actually go about their business and get them thinking more self-consciously about the tools they use and how they use them.
A tool that everybody should be familiar with and, in fact, people use it all the time is reductio ad absurdum arguments. It's the sort of general purpose crowbar of rational argument where you take your opponents premises and deduce something absurd from them. That is, you deduce a contradiction officially. We use it all the time without paying much attention to it. If you say something like -- if he gets here in time for supper, he'll have to fly like Superman. Which is absurd -- nobody can fly that fast. You don't bother spelling it out, you just say -- you point out that something that somebody imagined or proposed has a ridiculous consequence.
Well, let's look at one of the great granddaddy reductio ad absurdum arguments of all times. And that's Galileo's proof that heavy things don't fall faster than light things leaving friction aside. He argued as follows. Okay, suppose you take the premise that you're gonna show is false. Suppose heavier things do fall faster than light things. Now, take a stone A which is heavier than another stone B. That means if we tied B to A with a string, B should act as a drag on A when we drop it because A will fall faster, B will fall slower and so A tied to B should fall slower than A by itself.
But A-B tied together is heavier than A by itself so it should fall faster. It should fall both faster and slower than A by itself. That's a manifest contradiction. So we know that our premise with which we began has to be false. That's a classic reductio ad absurdum. That's been known and named for several millennia I guess. And, as I say, it's the workhorse of philosophical argumentation.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd
2013-07-12
The interspecies Internet? An idea in progress...
source: TEDtalksDirector
Apes, dolphins and elephants are animals with remarkable communication skills. Could the Internet be expanded to include sentient species like them? A new and developing idea from a panel of four great thinkers -- dolphin researcher Diana Reiss, musician Peter Gabriel, internet of things visionary Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet.
2013-07-11
Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager
source: TEDtalksDirector 2013-07-11
Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than two percent chance of survival. How could this be? Jack Andraka talks about how he developed a promising early detection test for pancreatic cancer that's super cheap, effective and non-invasive -- all before his 16th birthday.
2013-07-10
2013-07-09
Ramez Naam on Idea Sex and the Evolutionary Logic of Knowledge Transfer
source: Big Think 2013-07-08
Why do certain ideas succeed? Ideas have to pass a kind of Darwinian fitness test, argues the computer scientist Ramez Naam, who is the author of "More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement." (http://goo.gl/7lBWl) It turns out the most useful ideas are the ones that spread, like the wheel that was invented in Egypt and was improved upon in Sumaria by going from a solid disk to spokes.
Passing the usefulness test crucially involves the ability of ideas to propagate themselves, just as biologically successful humans are able to pass on their genes. In the case of the wheel, two ideas met, and reproduced. In other words, the wheel was carried by humans to another place where it was then improved upon by other people.
So everything we're doing in society today, such as expanding access to education and research tools, Naam says, "is accelerating this process of the Darwinian evolution of ideas."
Transcript - Ideas spread for lots of reasons. It might be a catchy tune or a funny joke that you've heard that sticks in the brain and makes you want to propagate it, to tell others. But one reason that we know that ideas stick and spread is because they're useful. The useful ones propagate. So an example is the wheel. The wheel was invented in Egypt but it was improved upon hundreds of years later in Sumaria by going from a solid disk to spokes. How did it get to Sumaria? Well, merchants used it to travel and spread their goods from point A to point B. So that utility to them, the fact that it was a useful invention helped the invention itself spread from place to place. It was carried by humans to other places where then it was improved upon by other people.
A very important factor is that there's an evolution happening of ideas. Lots of ideas are tried. Lots of ideas are proposed. Many of them don't work out for whatever reason. They're not true or they're not a good innovation. But then ideas pop up that do pass sort of the Darwinian fitness test, if you will. And they go on to thrive and they spread. And then they meet other ideas. And those ideas combine. Matt Ridley talks about that as idea sex -- when two ideas meet. And then they can give birth to new ideas.
Any technique that develops new diversity of ideas helps that Darwinian evolution. So Thomas Edison, for example, experimented with thousands of different filaments for the light bulb before he got to one that worked. So it's another way the Darwinian evolution can happen. Lots of creational diversity and then a filter that picks just the ones that people want to pass on for whatever reason.
So this process of innovation of spreading ideas from person to person, one of the things we've been doing, some of the ideas we've been creating, are accelerators of that process. When we invented writing maybe five to seven thousand years ago, that accelerated the spread of ideas. When we went from writing on scrolls to the printing press that could print things thousands of times faster than monks could transcribe them by hand, that accelerated the spread of ideas and helped launch the scientific revolution and helped accelerate the Renaissance. And now with the Internet ideas can spread very, very rapidly. Funny cat pictures, of course, utilize that but so do scientific papers. So do dialogue between researchers or scholars in all sorts of fields.
So everything we're doing in society both increasing the number of people who are educated, giving them access to more tools to do their research and giving them more ways to communicate more quickly is all accelerating this process of Darwinian evolution of ideas.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd
2013-07-08
The Path to Discovering Your Talents and Passions, with Sir Ken Robinson...
source: Big Think 2013-06-30
In How to Find Your Element, his 7-session workshop for Big Think Mentor (http://goo.gl/06gYu), creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson tackles the epidemic of dissatisfaction with work and life. In this introduction, he outlines the path to "finding your element" -- the environment and set of activities that will activate your unique abilities, sustain your happiness, and enable you to live your best possible life.
Joel Selanikio: The surprising seeds of a big-data revolution in healthcare
source: TEDtalksDirector 2013-07-02
Collecting global health data was an imperfect science: Workers tramped through villages to knock on doors and ask questions, wrote the answers on paper forms, then input the data -- and from this gappy information, countries would make huge decisions. Data geek Joel Selanikio talks through the sea change in collecting health data in the past decade -- starting with the Palm Pilot and Hotmail, and now moving into the cloud. (Filmed at TEDxAustin.)
Hector Ruiz: The Evolution of Cognitive Computing
source: bigthink 2013-07-02
At some point a child might touch a hot plate and his mother will say the word "hot." That word is then programmed in the child's brain. When someone says, "hot," the child knows to be careful. Eventually, when the child has accumulated enough knowledge he will start to ask the question "why?"
Can computers learn the same way a children learns?
We are getting to that point, explains Hector Ruiz, the former chariman and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices and the author of "Slingshot: AMD's Fight to Free an Industry from the Ruthless Grip of Intel." (http://goo.gl/s8cCR) Ruiz tells Big Think that we are starting to see evidence today that computers can "get to a point where actually they begin to query back and say 'I need more information. Give me more information. Tell me about this.'"
Ruiz points to experiments going on right now in health care, oil exploration and financial transactions that are beginning "to tap the power of cognitive computing."
Transcript -- You know in the history of our industry there have been some real major events that transformed the industry and had a huge impact in our lives. The invention of the integrated circuit really opened up a huge number of opportunities to do things that were unimaginable back then. Then the creation of the personal computer, the PC, that was a huge impact on our lives. Not only in our own personal lives but in the way industry conducted itself in how to use computers to do the things that were important to them. Then the third thing was the introduction, of course, of the Internet. I mean that Internet with PCs and the integrated circuit you can see how all that is building and changing the world.
I believe that the next step is gonna be what's called cognitive computing. Because technology has changed so much that we have now so much power in our computing capability and so much memory that we can store that we're able, for the first time, to actually create products that begin to mimic how a brain works.
And what that means is that the product can actually -- on a very narrow, particularly expertise, could be as narrow as, let's say, weather forecasting for example -- something very narrow. That the product begins to learn as it is used and in a way that means it has some cognitive capability. So the more you use it, the better it becomes at a particular function. To the point where it actually gets to a point where it begins to actually ask questions of you. Think of it as a child. You know, when a child is born their brain is empty. It begins to get filled with stuff, hopefully mostly good. And there comes a point in time when the child touches a hot plate and the mother says, "Hot." Then the child knows from then on every time somebody says "hot" he better be careful because now it's programmed in his brain and he's learning. He continues to learn.
But there comes that time in the child's life that all of us that have been parents either dread or look forward to is when the child starts asking why. When you do something, you say "why, why, why." And what the child's doing is learning. He now has enough cognitive capability to understand enough of what's going on but not enough so he'll ask why. Well, in the same way these circuits get to a point where actually they begin to query back and say I need more information. Give me more information. Tell me about this. And there are some experiments going on today in health care, in oil exploration, in financial transactions where they actually begin to tap the power of cognitive computing. And I believe that when that happens we're gonna enter an era that's unimaginable today.
And in some ways it's kind of exciting to think of the fact that we get surrounded by intelligence that helps us make our lives better. But it's also somewhat frightening in the fact that you're now surrounded by intelligence that begins to think they know more than you do. But we're moving in that direction. I see it happening. I think we're about ten years away from that being a real commercial reality.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd
2013-07-03
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)