#tedxcmu

[monriatitans]

2,960,323 views  Apr 10, 2013 Stephen is a Senior Directing major at Carnegie Mellon. He is also the current President of Carnegie Mellon's Film Club. He recently completed his Thesis Project within the School of Drama: a production of Mac Wellman's "A Murder of Crows." He is currently working on creating a collective of Film Enthusiasts across Carnegie's Campus as well as other colleges and universities around Pittsburgh. You can find out more about Stephen and his talk on his website: www.stephentonti.com or follow his blog "Caffeine, Nicotine, and ADHD: a guide to maintaining sanity."

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

[monarchofsnark]

[estavezespersonal]

Luis von Ahn: Colaboración masiva en línea

          Después de redefinir el proyecto CAPTCHA para que los esfuerzos de identificar respuestas humanas ayuden en la digitalización de libros, Luis von Ahn se preguntó de qué otra manera se podrían usar esas pequeñas contribuciones de muchos en la Web para el bien común. En TEDxCMU (Carnegie Mellon University), explica cómo su nuevo y ambicioso proyecto, Duolingo, ayudará a millones a aprender un nuevo idioma mientras se traduce la Web de forma rápida y precisa… y todo gratis.

Translated into Spanish by Sebastian Betti Reviewed by Lidia Cámara de la Fuente

[stevemoraco]

The New Way To Work

This post best viewed here on my blog!

TEDxCMU - Charlie Hoehn - The New Way to Work

This one is simple and clear. The speaker is a bit nervous, but he's got a good sense of humor and an awesome message.

Summary

Essentially, his talk boils down to "if you can't get a job out of college, stop trying to do stuff you don't like and instead learn how to freelance." He presents this in a nonstandard way by suggesting that you start freelancing for free, before moving into paid work. Especially if you have no experience. He presents a way that even the most reletively inexperienced individuals can begin working on projects they love and eventually get paid to do it.

Personal response

This is something that I enjoyed being reminded about, and it's essentially the way I've gotten any gig outside of my comfort zone - first work free. I think it'd be a good refresher course for a few of my just-out-of-college peers that I see blasting resumes and taking the first job that says yes.

I liked how simple and straightforward the talk was. He's not the best public speaker, but he got his point across and you can tell he cares about what he's preaching. It'd be nice if more of my generation had this mindset, and I'm excited that we live in so much of a connected time that we can have mindsets like this.

[allysontachiki]

HAPPY FACE FOR THE DAY!

Check out one of my best friends, Chinmayi Bhavanishankar performing some amazing classical Indian dance routines and explaining why dance is the passion that brings her peace. 

courtesy of TEDxCMU

[johnef-blog]

luis von ahn: brilliant

[schubertmalbas-blog]

yo puedo leer español un poco

I switched the channel to BBC and chanced upon Click, their nifty tech show. By some happy circumstance, they were talking about Duolingo, a new language-learning service with two exciting things written all over it: online, and free. You probably have guessed from this post's title that I don't know Español that well - I only took one very basic Spanish course at the university during my entire undergraduate life - but BBC Click made me get up from bed to search the internet for "duolingo". The Duolingo website says it's in private beta, which means it sifts through tons of e-mail addresses they get via the front-end page, probably on the look out for bogus addresses to screen them out, and then give out official invites to a few lucky ones.

Duolingo introduction

Aside from being a language tutorial website, Duolingo doubles as a translation service. The developers are doing non-commercial content first, it seems. One of Duolingo's developers is Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University, who is known for bringing CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA to the web. This gating system are common tools in many websites to deter bots and automated spammers. In fact, reCAPTCHA is so revolutionary for the Web that Google bought the system in 2009 for an undeclared amount; must be a pretty large sum.

Luis von Ahn at TEDxCMU

In the end, the more ambitious aim of Duolingo is to translate hundreds of thousands of sentences, commercial or otherwise, whilst providing free language tutorials precisely through the massive crowdsourcing capacity of online language learners all over the world. Who knows, I might be able to finally write a decent Spanish text after this module, or help out with the Spanish page of the TED Open Translation Project, of which I am a volunteer. Evidently my knack for understanding español has dried up. It is quite impossible to cough up a few hundred dollars to learn the language with other online services like Rosetta; it's a good thing Google Translate remains a free, though lackluster, viable option. I know how to get to the local Instituto Cervantes here in Manila, but sadly they charge several thousand pesos per module. I totally understand where they are coming from, having to earn their keep as a thriving language center, but I am hardly a rich man who can barely pay the rent. I'm pretty eager to improve my syntax and expand my vocabulary with the virtuosity of a real Español. It'd pretty cool if other users from the Philippines would sign up for Duolingo, so that it'd be easier to ask for help. I think I'd be the luckiest person if I ever get their official invite. I'm feeling a bit giddy right now with all the excitement.

[victimeyes-blog]

TEDxCMU: Micky McManus of Maya Design explains information liquidity.

"The explosion of technology has created vast complexities that we do not know how to deal with. However, biology and millions of years of evolution inherently has the tools to deal with these complexities. How can we use the tools we have in our bodies to shape the next stage in technological evolution?"