
Top TED Talks of 2011 To Inspire Tech Startups - marksoper
http://blog.marksoper.net/Top-10-TED-Talks-of-2011-to-Inspire-Tech-Startups.html
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richardburton
_CAPTCHA creator Luis von Ahn goes from a annoying text entry box to
motivating a 100 million people to translate the web for free._

    
    
      http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html
    

This guy has a great sense of humour: "How many of you have filled out a
CAPTCHA? How many of you find them really, really annoying? Yeh, I invented
that"

~~~
singh
He is also an amazing professor / educator. His class at Carnegie Mellon
(15-251: Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science) is one of the hardest
yet most entertaining CS courses at CMU. One of the first assignments involves
a scavenger hunt with a randomly assigned team, across campus, based on
challenging algorithmic puzzles inspired from many different areas of computer
science.

In one semester, he found people who were copying on their homeworks by
creating a website with solutions to a problem on an early assignment. Many
people fell into the trap, even after he had given a very clear disclaimer to
not use search engines to solve homework problems.

~~~
richardburton
What a privilege to learn from him. Sounds like a hilarious and engaging man.

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hsshah
In addition to these: Check this out as well. Interesting talk about how
computing from one of the Wolfram brothers.
[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/stephen_wolfram_computing_a...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_of_everything.html)

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nicklovescode
Fair warning: this page loads ten flash videos that made my browser crawl for
about 15 seconds(latest Chrome on Lion)

~~~
beilabs
wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/SalmanKhan_2011.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/TimHarford_2011G.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/HaraldHaas_2011G.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/RichardWilkinson_2011G.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/SkylarTibbits_2011U.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/MorganSpurlock_2011.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/LuisVonAhn_2011X.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/StefonHarris_2011S.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/BunkerRoy_2011G.mp4>

wget <http://download.ted.com/talks/JR_2011.mp4>

~~~
khalidmbajwa
Smooth as silk on OSX 10.6.8 and FireFox 8.0.1 for me !

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carlsednaoui
Given all of the distractions we have today, procrastinating is easier than
ever. This is why I personally enjoyed this talk about "the battle between
your present and future self" -
[http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_goldstein_the_battle_between...](http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_goldstein_the_battle_between_your_present_and_future_self.html)

~~~
sek
Very interesting until the middle, then he talks just about aging simulation
and not about a solution.

~~~
marquis
The solution is provided by the simulation: to consider your future self and
how happy you will be. I found it insightful and gave me pause for thought.

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jgeerts
Can't agree on number 4 that invented captcha's. I saw that talk and he talks
how annoying captcha was and how re-captcha would be so much better because it
is actually used for a purpose. There is one word they know the meaning of and
they use your translation of the word that they don't know the meaning of.

It's just horrible that in a time of great motivation that they still try to
push a security issue to the end user. And for me they made it even worse with
re-captcha because now you have to type 2 words.

A solution would be to know which is a computer and which is a real user, it's
not impossible to do so.

~~~
skore
"A solution would be to know which is a computer and which is a real user,
it's not impossible to do so."

It seems like you have revolutionary knowledge that could change the course of
human history. Or you're just trolling. Since you are not pointing to any
actual approaches and hundreds of thousands of engineers have not yet come up
with what to you is just "a solution" that doesn't even require further
specification, I will go with trolling.

Figuring out remotely whether you are dealing with "a human" without any
interaction (or, particularly, interaction less than a captcha, or even
-gasp!- a two word captcha) is very definitely impossible. Think about it -
how do you know whether it's a human? Well, you say, the black box device that
he is sitting at has made sure that he is! And how does that machine transmit
data to you? Over that data line that this supposed human is sitting right
next... I guess you will see where I'm going with this.

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igorgue
One more suggestion.

Both Damon Horowitz's talks are great:

<http://www.ted.com/speakers/damon_horowitz.html>

Specially the "moral operating system". Everyone doing something with data
should listen to that.

~~~
marksoper
Yep, I really liked the moral operating system talk as well - really powerful
stuff. There's more on it here: [http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/14/damon-
horowitz-moral-opera...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/14/damon-horowitz-
moral-operating-system/)

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smickie
I recommend watching "Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex" from this
list.

Makes one think of self-assured designers vs. AB testing, how trial and error
is much better approach to the design of a site than God complex approach.

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vijayr
#1 and #2 are both very very impressive. And Roy is funny too.

