Sam Richards with a new interpretation of Empathy

Take Aways

Sam Richards pointed out that sociology is basically the study of empathy or as he also puts it, the study of something really hard to see. He says that empathy is the ability to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and feel how they would in any given situation. I also took away that an extrinsic motivator plays it’s part in how people feel empathy. For example in the Middle East the need for oil eclipses the fact that what Americans are doing there is quite difficult for the native people. Repeating some of Dan Pink’s ideas Richards demonstrates that the need for oil creates almost a cop-out or an excuse. He also mentioned that depending on people perspective different pieces of information is taken into account or not. Like if you were an Iraqi citizen then you would notice that Americans live in big houses, drive big cars while you are living in poverty. But if you were American then you would just say “Well we all don’t drive big cars” and brush it off and not think much of it.

Speaking/Presenting Techniques

One of the best aspects of Richard’s speech was his effective story telling techniques. To start his speech he asked the audience to step into the shoes of an Iraqi citizen and then for the rest of his speech asked them to imagine certain situations. He also told a fictional story about china taking over the US for coal to show that people empathize better with themselves. To augment the realism of empathy Richards constantly displayed images of war-torn villages and fear stricken people to help people visualize. His speaking throughout the whole speech was urgent and distressed towards the audience. Which I thought was very fitting for the serious topic he was speaking on.

Application to Education

I think that this speech would be most useful as a resource to teachers. Because it teaches them the basics of empathy and also compares different types of empathy and which really hits home with people. It also sets a great example of good story telling because he told a seemingly realistic story at the beginning of his speech that in truth was totally fictional.

Connections

There were a ton of connections to what we are talking about in class and what comes up in our fishbowls for AWNM. First of all he is talking about empathy which is a quite obvious connection to what Daniel Pink is saying. Many of the things that Richards brings up about empathy match what Daniel Pink says. But then you can also see clear connections being drawn to design and some of the other themes in AWNM. He even specifically mentions design, when he is talking about someone else coming into a country for resources. He said that they have a design for those resources and that is a hard thing to combat. Connecting to Story, his whole presentation was practically a story, building on itself so that the audience can concentrate on the raw feelings coming from stepping in someone else’s shoes. He also mentions that citizens in the Middle East see military every day and they become accustomed to it, kind of like it is becoming part of their story. Symphony had some not as obvious connections but it is like seeing an event/situation from a country/personal view as opposed to a world view since symphony is seeing the specific picture and the whole picture.

Carlo Ratti redesigning pixels and architecture

Take Aways

I took away from Carlo Ratti’s TED Talk that our world is very reliant on sensing what is around us and will eventually help us gain a better understanding of it. This is already being achieved in networks monitoring city’s call density and concentration. I also learned that cities occupy only 2% of the earth’s crust but consume 75% of it’s energy, emit 80% of it’s CO2 emmisions, and house 50% of the worlds population. I learned that tasks can be categorized into sensing and actuating.

Speaking/presenting techniques
Carlo had some very effective techniques including showing alot of visual aids on the screen. He talked very clearly and made sure to connect everything back to his original point and his main focus. On the screen he was displaying video representations of his ideas and innovations because they were very hard to understand without actually seeing the implementation. He also talked in sync with the video, while the video was playing he was bringing up descriptions and stories that directly dealed with what was playing on the screen at that moment. He also talked with pace, he didn’t speed up or slow down drastically at all the whole duration of the speech. The only thing distracting from the quality of the speech could perhaps be overuse of the slides on the screen. The non-video slides were for the most part extraneous but otherwise his speech conveyed it’s point with zero error.
Application to education/me
His idea not as much as the creativity it took to get there is what could shape education in the future. He looked at digital pixels on a screen and saw so much more potential. He then had the forethought to innovate and design his own never before thought of 3-D pixels. He thought that the pixels themselves could move and thought of new mediums(like water). This kind of repurposing is what will really become necessary in a world of changing needs as it transitions into the conceptual age.
This was very interesting because most people want pixels to become smaller and smaller and restricted the term to small crystals in a computer screen. He had the mind to challenge what other people had established as the way it had to work and came up with architecture that changed the way many people thought about art and architecture. This needs to be a important part of the conceptual age because it will be implemented in everyones lives where they can see it everyday. I think that this could expediate the shift for some reluctant people. The only way that some people will accept that times are changing is to surround them with it in their lives and make it seem normal.

Dave Eggers Recreating Education

Take Aways
I take away from this video that there is a gap between teachers and students. Teachers have hundreds of students and would have to almost double their work hours and double the teachers to have just one hour of one-on-one time with each students. Even when Dave created his place for students to connect with one-on-one tutors they had trouble having enough kids coming. I also noticed that students were much more interested in school when they went to the tutoring and got the human contact. The environment around them made them keep coming back and kept everything new.
Speaking/presenting techniques
Dave Eggers was a very effective and natural speaker. He didn’t go out of his way to make his speech humorous which I think was the downfall of some of the other speakers I have seen. He told a story about his program for the majority of the speech and let humor naturally fall into it’s place. As far as presenting went *** used a lot of slides of pictures of students from his tutoring and the tutoring environment. For almost all of his speech he was telling his story or similar stories and for the final segment challenged the video audience. His challenge was brief and straight to the point so that it was clear how the whole speech applied to you.
Application to education/me
I think that this TED Talk is a quite obvious applier to education since that was the base of the speech. But I think that another application is having one on one time with students be on a smaller scale. Instead of having teachers of classrooms with the one on one time there could be parents, or even students teaching each other. This way more and more kids could be receiving one on one teaching and they would be at the same level so they could help each other at the same time.
Connection
I think that Dave Eggers’ speech connects to the overall design of education similar to the design chapter in AWNM. Eggers challenged the appearance of education by creating an outside source for editing and helping students. He used a story (the design of the actual tutoring area) to attract kids and enthrall them with their learning.

Bruce Schneier On the Mirage of Security

Take Aways

There were some interesting things that I found were very untouched on. He illustrated that every day we make tradeoffs with our own security in mind. We quickly balance the price/ risks and make a snap decision on how that will affect our actions. According to Schneier these decisions are mostly based off our sense of security as opposed to the real level of security. Also these decisions are subconscious for the most part and a large part of being a human so very few people think about these decisions as they are doing them. But there is one thing that mediates between our feelings and reality and that is a model. This made me see how much people look to the people and things around them when making decisions for their own safety and how scary this could be if the model is far from the reality of security. But Schneier says that the model will typically follow the real level of security closer than people’s feelings so if people take the model into account then their feeling of security will be closer to the reality of security. Because people will always be able to see their perceived security and never be able to see the real security but if they can look at the model of security then they will be much closer to how truly secure they are.

Speaking/Presenting Techniques

In my opinion Schneier had some of the blandest speaking techniques of all of the TED Talks yet far. He stood on the stage and kind of walked in a disorienting circle while speaking in monotone his speech with his eyes on the floor and occasionally looking past the audience into the back of the room. He did not put any slides up on the screen to help illustrate his speech so I constantly had to pause and rewind the video to understand what he was saying. He also didn’t come back to what he had stated earlier so it was hard to connect all of his ideas together.

Application to Education/Me

This applies to almost every student in the United States because the false sense of security is within each student but the teacher is like the model because they know what the world is like. Students don’t know if they really are secure because school is like a little world but the world changes constantly around it.

Connection

This is very similar to Little Brother and 1984 because the citizens felt secure in the grasp of the government and were too naïve to see that the real threat was the government themselves. In Schneier’s video he also mentioned that people fear the rare threat and this can cause them to overlook the common threats that are more serious in their everyday lives. For example lots of people are afraid of flying but aren’t afraid of driving. Driving is statistically more dangerous than flying but it isn’t common to people so they fear it. This can be seen in 1984 because the people are scared of whoever is attacking Oceania but in doing so overlook the oppression of their government for the most part.