Freedom of Speech

It’s not politics or religion separating humans from each other; it’s shame

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IDEAS.TED.com Feb 26, 2019 / Douglas Rushkoff   Excerpted from the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff. Copyright © 2019 by Douglas Rushkoff. Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. Watch his TED Salon: Samsung talk here: https://embed.ted.com/talks/douglas_rushkoff_how_to_be_team_human_in_the_digital_future ABOUT THE AUTHOR Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the popular Team Human podcast. He has written 20 books, including the bestsellers “Present Shock” and “Program or Be Programmed,” as well as regular columns for Medium, CNN, Daily Beast and the Guardian. Rushkoff also made the PBS Frontline documentaries “Generation Like” and “Merchants of Cool.” He coined such concepts as “viral media” and “social currency,” and he’s been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics.

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Media

Love the news but hate clickbait and fluff? Here’s how to get more quality and less quantity

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Ideas.Ted.com Feb 5, 2019 / Cal Newport Digital minimalist Cal Newport shows how you can turn off the information firehose and follow current events on your own terms. Are you ready to join the attention resistance? In 2010, a trio of Germans with backgrounds in sociology, technology and market research posted a document titled “Das Slow Media Manifest” (the English translation is “The Slow Media Manifesto”). Following the Slow Foodmovement — which promotes local food and cuisine as an alternative to fast food — the Slow Media Manifesto notes that the first decade of the 21st century “brought profound changes to the technological foundations of the media landscape.” The second decade, it proposes, should be dedicated to figuring out the “appropriate reaction.” Their suggestion: We can embrace the concept of “slow.” In an age in which the digital attention economy is shoveling more and more clickbait toward us and fragmenting our focus into emotionally charged shards, the right response is to become more mindful in our media consumption. The Slow Media movement is still mostly European; in the US, the response has proved more puritanical. Whereas the Europeans suggest transforming media consumption into a high‑quality experience, Americans have tended to embrace the “low information diet”: a concept popularized by author Tim Ferriss, in which you aggressively eliminate sources of news and information to reclaim time for other pursuits. Much like the American approach to healthy eating, it focuses on eliminating […]

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Ted Talks

How to make your small wins work for you

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IDEAS.TED.Com Jan 29, 2019 / Rob Smith The internet has inflated people’s expectations about what success looks like — any achievement that doesn’t go viral can seem skimpy. By changing our perspective and appreciating human-size, human-scale achievements, we can move towards our goals, says educator Mehrnaz Bassiri. Every weekday for the month of January, TED Ideas is publishing a new post in a series called “How to Be a Better Human,” containing a helpful piece of advice from a speaker in the TED community. To see all the posts, click here. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” We’ve heard this chestnut — or seen it in Instagram posts with handwritten fonts — over and over again. But is there truth in this stale nut? And if so, how can we translate it into real life? Well, it may be time to give this aphorism a refresh and change it to: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single win.” That’s because success can be found when we start to mark and celebrate our small wins, according to Vancouver-based educator Mehrnaz Bassiri. Drawing on the work of organizational theorist and psychologist Karl Weick, Bassiri says, “Small wins have a transformational power. Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion to favor another small win and another small win until the combination of these small wins lead to larger and greater […]

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Media

Want to save your mental energy for the stuff that really matters? Set a decision budget

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Ideas.Ted.com Jan 9, 2019 / Dave Asprey Watch his TEDxConstitutionDrive talk here: ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dave Asprey is a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur. He has spent over two decades and $1 million to hack his own biology and be a better husband, father and entrepreneur. Asprey is the creator of Bulletproof Coffee, founder of the Bulletproof Executive blog, host of the […]

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Caregiver

3 ways that your memory stays sharp even as you get older

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Ideas.TED.com Oct 4, 2018 / Alan D. Castel While overall memory declines as we age, that’s far from the end of the story. In fact, there are certain things older people continue to remember quite well, says researcher Alan D. Castel. Our memories are our identities, and at my lab at UCLA, I’ve worked to understand how we remember what matters to us, especially as we age. Memory decline is one of the first things that concern people about growing older — it can start after the age of 20, so being more forgetful when you are 60 or 70 is often normal. And while a vast amount of research has shown the deficits that accompany aging, it’s far too simplistic to say that the elderly have impaired memories. In fact, there are many things older adults remember quite well. Here’s a look at a few of them: 1. Older people tend to remember the essentials. A great deal of memory research focuses on what might be considered by some of us to be mundane — word lists, face-name pairs, studying and being tested on pictures — and it’s unclear why this might be important to remember. But how about things that are of real concern or interest? Imagine you’re packing for a trip. You want to make sure you’ve put in the most important items, the ones that would be extremely costly and/or inconvenient if you forgot them (e.g., your passport, your credit cards). While […]

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Caregiver

Once unwanted, these dogs are now on the front lines of wildlife conservation

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Ideas TED Talks Nov 6, 2018 / Rebekah Barnett These incredible pups catch poachers, sniff out invasive plants and diseases, and more, thanks to the work of wildlife biologist and conservation-dog expert Megan Parker. What happens to those dogs that are just too much dog for people to handle? “You know them — you go to your friend’s barbecue, their dog is so happy to see you that she pees on your feet, and she drops a slobbery ball in your lap,” says Megan Parker (TEDxJacksonHole talk: Dogs for Conservation), a wildlife biologist and dog expert based in Bozeman, Montana. “You throw it to get as much distance between you and the dog as possible, but she keeps coming back with the ball. By the 950th throw, you’re thinking, Why don’t they get rid of this dog?” All too often, their owners reach the same conclusion and leave their pet at a shelter. Thanks to Parker and the team at Working Dogs for Conservation (WD4C), some of these dogs have found a new leash lease on life. They’re using their olfactory abilities and unstoppable drive in a wide variety of earth-friendly ways, working with human handlers to sniff out illegal poachers and smugglers, track endangered species, and spot destructive invasive plants and animals. Chai is shown here with a trainer. After a dog learns to recognize a particular scent, the education isn’t over — their handler works with them regularly so they maintain their skills. These days, you can find this […]

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