TED - James Flynn: Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents' (2013)

TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) organizes talks posted on their website and available free of charge. There is a wide variety of conferences but they are frequently based on counterintuitive ideas or at least going beyond the established knowledge. Simply put, their motto is Ideas worth spreading. I have found amazing lectures there. I hope you enjoy them all.

This one, in particular, is given by Prof. James Flynn and is about the effect of the environment (and the tasks one has to perform to cope with real problems arising within it) in our intelligence quotient. By the way, it has been called the "Flynn effect" the fact that each generation increases their IQ levels.

Enjoy!

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RSA Animate - Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us - Daniel Pink

RSA Animate is a collection of 10 min cartoon-like animations on a whiteboard that partners with a synthesis of a conference given by renown academics in RSA Events . This series is put forward by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), who aim at a 21st century enlightenment . I first saw some of the short-film series while being in Cuba. I remember I was astonished by the amount of information they could compress in a 10 min talk. Then, I noticed that there was a great deal of post-processing after the 'natural' 30 min or so talk. Nonetheless, it is still amazing how they can manage to do it so smoothly. The animations deserve special attention. They are not only accompanying the talk but they actually supply complementary information, in terms of irony, cultural references, etc., while marking a step-by-step evolution of the speech in a better way than any slide show could do. Here is an RSA Animate example on "Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us", ...

Slow science/publishing and educational system

Guys, I don't know if you already know about the ''Slow science movement'' or not, well this is a wiki definition for it: Slow science is part of the broader slow movement . It is based on the belief that science should be a slow, steady, methodical process, and that scientists should not be expected to provide "quick fixes" to society's problems. Slow science supports curiosity -driven scientific research and opposes performance targets . I'm personally interested in it if you remember Gabriel once we had a discussion on the waste of energy and resources to produce junk science and the fact that scientists are losing balance on looking into science. Sometimes people do not know why they publish and for the sake of what?! it's become a tradition or kinda religion. I'm most agreed with the directed scientific activities, slowly going ahead and touching the problem, whenever you can swallow the problem with...

Firing Line - Thomas Sowell with William F. Buckley, Jr. (1981)

Firing Line is a TV show from the US I discovered just a few days ago. It is always conducted by William F. Buckley, Jr. of whom it has been said to be "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half-century…". The program is a talk show based upon the interview of top level intellectual figures from the US and abroad on different topics. It has the nice quality of being intellectually challenging while often dealing with highly polemic issues. See Hoover institution archives on Firing Line broadcasts for more features and details. In particular, the interview with Prof. Thomas Sowell in 1981 (entitled "The economic lot of minorities") contains a profound debate supported with lots of data on race and gender discrimination, and how unemployment and low income rates relate to education in ethnic minorities and women. I hope you reflect on these difficult points, which are still unresolved 36 years after this interview. ...

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