Gladwell's World

Occasionally I like to tap into some innovative thinkers here in the WWW blog. A while back I featured some lectures by Jarod Diamond, and this week we're going to hear from Malcolm Gladwell. Author of The Tipping Point and Blink, Gladwell is a writer for the New Yorker and has some interesting insights about American (and often, more broadly, Western) society. In this first video, he appears with Mark Kingwell on at CBC radio broadcast to discuss social change.


Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Kingwell on QTV (CBC Radio)



In this second video, Gladwell talks about a man whose studies around the marketing of food lead to an eventual democratization of taste in American culture.


Malcolm Gladwell: What We Can Learn from Spaghetti Sauce

War with Iran

Extending our poly-sci coverage from last week, I've found a couple of interesting pieces about Iran. Our foreign policy approach to that country is an issue that will almost certainly need to be addressed by whoever wins the election on November 4, and I've selected these pieces to try and give a little context. These pieces offer very different perspectives on the country. The first is a citizen journalist piece that briefly looks at life inside Iran and the fear that the US may launch a war against the county.

A View from Iran


The second piece is more formal telejournalism and investigates whether or not the US has already started a proxy war with Iran through resistance groups on the Iraq-Iran border.


America's Secret War

A Couple of Looks at 'Fortress America'

With the American elections just three weeks away I went out looking for some different points of view on Election 2008, and I ran across this surprisingly good piece of citizen journalism from Current.com that explored attitudes toward Americans by citizens of other countries. Check it out...

The View from Over There



Of course, most of the folks featured in those videos can't vote in American elections so for a slightly more domestic point-of-view check out this videographic presentation from The Economist magazine on Anglo-Saxon attitudes to many common issues. It's an interesting comparison of American and British cultures.


Divided We Stand

Some Like It Hot...

Figured I'd stick with the arts for another week, but this week the artistic motif is fire. Check out these films from a couple different years of the Burning Man festival (remember how it was before the money flowed in). There's not much else to mention about these, they sort of speak for themselves. Oh, but I will add the first one has a little pixelated nudity...but should be SFW.

The Shiva Vista Project


Flaming Lotus Girls: Mutopia


Then, to cool things down a bit, check out this performance from Pilobolus. (If you're body conscious, don't watch this one after eating.)

Pilobolus: A Performance Merging Dance and Biology


-C-

Minds Wide Open

Ever since I read Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open I've been fascinated with the human brain...how little we understand about it, but how much it governs (whether we like it or not) every...single...thing we do. So I present to you this week, a pair of videos on our brains. It's a topic I'm sure we'll come back to in the future, so if you have any you'd like to see featured here send me a link.

For today, the first is a captivating lecture from Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuro-anatomist who recognized she was having a stroke and what she learned from that experience.

Jill Bolte Taylor - My Stroke of Insight



The second is lecture by Jeff Hawkins, most famous for inventing the Palm Pilot, but also very passionate about brains and artificial intelligence. I'm embedding a 5-part playlist from YouTube of a lecture he gave at the 2008 RSA conference.

Jeff Hawkins: On Artificial Intelligence