Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?

Seed: Out of the Blue

With all the intensity and brilliance he is known for, Alan Kay gives TEDsters a lesson in lessons. Kay has spent years envisioning better techniques for teaching kids, and in this talk, after reminding us that "the world is not what it seems," he shows us how good programming can sharpen our picture. His unique software lets children learn by doing, but also learn by computing and by creating lessons themselves.

See also, from yesterday:

The STEPS project is setting out to create “Moore’s Law Software”: a high-risk high-reward exploratory research effort to create a large-scope-and-range software system in 3-4 orders of magnitude less code than current practice.

Alan Kay: An infectious idea for teaching ideas

The STEPS project is setting out to create “Moore’s Law Software”: a high-risk high-reward exploratory research effort to create a large-scope-and-range software system in 3-4 orders of magnitude less code than current practice.

This is new from Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research Institute.

From the archive:

"Thinking" is a higher category than "just" math, science, and the arts. It represents a synthesis of intuitive and analytical approaches to understanding the world and dealing with it.

STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming

Keep it real.

The rapid pace at which digital printing is advancing is posing a very serious challenge to the U.S. Department of the Treasury s Bureau of Printing (BEP). The BEP needs to stay ahead of the evolving counterfeiting threats to U.S. currency. To help meet that challenge, A Path to the Next Generation of U.S. Banknotes provides an assessment of technologies and methods to produce designs that enhance the security of U.S. Federal Reserve notes (FRNs). This book presents the results of a systematic investigation of the trends in digital imaging and printing and how they enable emerging counterfeiting threats. It also provides the identification and analysis of new features of FRNs that could provide effective countermeasures to these threats and an overview of a requirements-driven development process that could be adapted to develop an advanced-generation currency.

Have you seen Die Fälscher?

A Path to the Next Generation of U.S. Banknotes: Keeping Them Real

Clay Shirky's new book is on sale now. He recently spoke to Information Week about LOLcats in Bahrain. Fortune offers an excerpt.

Publishers Weekly says:

Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm, argues interactive telecommunications professor Clay Shirky. He contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the winners—Belarus's flash mobs, for example, blog their way to unprecedented anti-authoritarian demonstrations. Likewise, user/contributor-managed Wikipedia raises the bar for production efficiency by throwing traditional corporate hierarchy out the window. Print journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web. Shirky is at his best deconstructing Web failures like Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times's attempt to facilitate group op-ed writing. Readers will appreciate the Gladwellesque lucidity of his assessments on what makes or breaks group efforts online: Every story in this book relies on the successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The sum of Shirky's incisive exploration, like the Web itself, is greater than its parts.

The book jacket carries praise from Stewart Brand, Steven Johnson, Chris Anderson, Ray Ozzie, and Cory Doctorow. Shirky is collecting other mentions here.

Radar says:

Shirky efficiently straddles two worlds and satisfies the needs of two seemingly opposite groups: the seasoned sociologist and the easily distracted.

The Boston Globe pits Shirky against Lee Siegel's Against the Machine:

No short review can possibly convey the subtleties of these books. Siegel's is a brilliant indictment of what's wrong with today's Internet; Shirky's, an eye-opening paean to possibility.

Siegel is the more capacious thinker, evaluating the Internet in the light of broader cultural trends. Its great promise is the democratic, universal expansion of information. Yet information, however trustworthy, cannot be equated with knowledge born of reflection.

From the archive:

All we need to do is remember that reading, in order to allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context.

Many students have less orientation towards reflection and more orientation towards résumé-building than students a generation ago.

Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together like laundry in an industrial dryer -- without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection.

Although my grandmother has seen a lot of it, she never liked change much. "The things you see when you don't have a gun" was a favorite expression, delivered on encountering any novelty or irritant.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the interaction of emigration of highly skilled labor, an economy’s income gap to potential host economies of expatriates, and optimal public infrastructure investment. In a model with endogenous education and R&D investment decisions we show that international integration of the market for skilled labor aggravates between-country income inequality by harming those which are source economies to begin with while benefiting host economies. When brain drain increases in source economies, public infrastructure investment is optimally adjusted downward, whereas host economies increase it. Evidence from 77 countries well supports our theoretical hypotheses.

International Mobility of the Highly Skilled, Endogenous R&D, and Public Infrastructure Investment

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summary of proposed ECMAScript 4.0 features not already in ActionScript 3.0

What's New in ECMAScript 4.0?

TED is almost here ...

Chris Anderson came to TED as a participant. He liked it so much that he bought it. Now he wants to take it to the world.

About Anderson:

Anderson, 51, was born in Pakistan to British missionaries. After studying philosophy at Oxford, he pondered teaching as a career. Instead, he jumped into journalism and publishing, he says, because of their potential to influence many more people.

And:

This year's TED Prize winners are author Dave Eggers, cosmologist Neil Turok and religion historian Karen Armstrong.

See also, from the recent archive, A conversation with Chris Anderson, Curator of TED Conference, from the Charlie Rose show.

Thinking Big

TED is almost here ...

Richard Saul Wurman anticipated the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design, and decided to have fun with it.

He says:

"You get to indulge your interests and find out about things you don't know about."

Also:

In Wurman's world, there are absolutely no lecterns. Standing behind one, he says, "allows you to read your speech. It also protects your groin. If your groin wasn't protected, you'd be more vulnerable" -- and able connect with the audience on a deeper, more emotional level.

Although the name is technology, entertainment, and design, there is apparently also some room for a Little Freud.

The Original TEDster