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Video: What Will Replace Religion
Imagine, if you will, a humanist church that met at night under the open sky, discussing the true nature of the planets and stars, and the incomprehensible vastness and majesty of the cosmos of which we are but a very small part. Imagine a humanist church that spent its Sundays not shut up in a…
Read MoreWhy Every Tech Worker Needs a Humanities Education
“Many of the builders of technology today haven’t spent enough time thinking about the implications for the world.”
Read MoreWhy Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers
Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014 The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent…
Read MoreVisualizations of Data about Maine
Through advanced data analytics and visualization, DataUSA tells stories about: places in America—towns, cities and states; occupations, from teachers to welders to web developers; industries — where they are thriving, where they are declining and their interconnectedness to each other; and education and skills, from where is the best place to live if you’re a…
Read MoreThe Minecraft Generation
Mastering [Minecraft] requires rigorously logical thinking, as well as a great deal of debugging: When your device isn’t working, you have to carefully go over its circuitry to figure out what’s wrong. One fifth grader I visited, Natalie, was assembling a redstone door on her iPad while I watched. But nothing happened when she flicked…
Read MoreVideo: Kate Bush – Cloudbusting
Based on a true story set in Maine. Wilhelm Reich 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, along with being a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. It was shortly after he arrived in New York in 1939 that Reich first said he had discovered a biological…
Read MoreVideo: We’ll grow up to blow you away
From TED on YouTube The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging considering your guys credentials. But the way progress happens is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the…
Read MoreVideo: Africa From The Sky
Even if you’ve been fortunate enough to visit Cameroon, you’ve probably never seen it like this before. William Thielicke, a Ph.D. student in biomimetics, built an MM6 Hexacopter (yes, that has six rotors) and attached a video camera to it, and the results are absolutely stunning. Fly down Cameroon’s coast and up its rivers, above…
Read MoreVideo: Sparks – How Youth Thrive – Peter Benson
No one has ever said, oh this child of mine, my fondest wish is they will ace statewide benchmark math and science tests when they’re 16… When you actually listen to people’s statements about their dreams for our kids, you hear a very different language. Kids who experience joy. Kids who are connected and engaged.…
Read MoreVideo: The Koh Panyee Football Club: A True Story
In 1986, in a floating village in the middle of the sea that has not an inch of soil, the kids loved to watch football but had nowhere to play or practice. But they didn’t let that stop them. This film is based on a true story about a little island in the south of…
Read MoreVideo: How Eric Whitacre conducted his virtual choir of 2,000 voices
With an emergent technology, something happens that you’d never imagined. Here, YouTube and Hulu, via WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter — and built upon the Internet — bring something new and wonderful to life. In a moving, madly viral video last year, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the…
Read MoreVideo: An Idea is a Curious Thing…
An idea is a curious thing. It can be hard to find, and then suddenly appear. It can be simple or complex, big or small. An idea can come from anywhere, and go anywhere. And once you have an idea, the real fun begins. By 90˚W. Video and Bad Dog Pictures. Original composition by Mark…
Read MoreVideo: “See, I change the world. Make the change.”
Beautifully inspirational viral video for Li Ning/China. Analysis from Rand Han of Little Red Book: I’ve been seeing this trend recently, first introduced in Olympics advertising, then obvious in Vancl’s latest campaign, and now in Li Ning: protagonists that focus not on conformity, but on discovery; a beautifully refreshing attitude of going against the grain of…
Read MoreVideo: Thought of You
“Thought of You” video from YouTube From Open Culture Ryan Woodward has worked on the art direction of many big name Hollywood films – Ironman 2, Spiderman 2 & 3, The Iron Giant, the list goes on. But he had an idea for a short animated film, a love story expressed through dance, and it…
Read MoreVideo: The Banker – Robin Hood Tax
Excerpts from YouTube Campaign video by Richard Curtis and Bill Nighy, about the Robin Hood Tax, a tiny tax on bank transactions that could raise hundreds of billions for public services and to tackle poverty and climate change at home and around the world. Add your own voice to the campaign
Read MoreBroken Land – The Adventures (1988)
Show me the love to keep us together / Open up your hearts don’t turn me away / Comfort me through this stormy weather / From where I stand, I see a broken land…
Read MoreThe Dreamer by Tom Rush
The moon she rides the tattered storm on a ragged gypsy journey The snow lies on the mountain like a cloak upon a king My dreams go tumbling with the dust out across the valley Low above the river low above the sea Life’s a sparrow lost at sea in dark of night with far…
Read MoreVideo: Derek Sivers – How to Start a Movement
With help from some surprising footage, Derek Sivers explains how movements really get started. (Hint: it takes two.) “Leadership is overglorified…. It was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader. So, as we’re all told that we should be leaders, that would be really ineffective. If you really care about…
Read MoreIn Small Towns, We Get to Know People in a Fuller Way
Dr. Collier represented for me what living in a small town is all about: we don’t just make quick, specialized appearances in each other’s lives.
Read MoreDIY: From Whole Earth Review to This Old House
“In the 1970s, DIY spread through the North American population of college- and recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes. But it also related to various projects expressing the social and environmental vision of the 1960s and early 1970s. The young visionary Stewart Brand, working with friends…
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