Carl Conrad » general

TED talks about India

Carl — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 03:14:00 +0000

I’ve discovered the TED conferences last summer and have to admit I’m quite fund of them. The variety of subjects and the quality of the lecturers make these talks mostly interesting.

I’ve recently stumbled across some highly interesting talks dealing with India and I wanted to shared them.

Here they are:

Devdutt Pattanaik: East vs. West – the myths that mystify – Devdutt Pattanaik takes an eye-opening look at the myths of India and of the West and shows how these two fundamentally different sets of beliefs about God, death and heaven help us consistently misunderstand one another.
Shashi Tharoor: Why nations should pursue “soft” power – India is fast becoming a superpower, says Shashi Tharoor, not just through trade and politics, but through “soft” power, its ability to share its culture with the world through food, music, technology, Bollywood. He argues that in the long run it’s not the size of the army that matters as much as a country’s ability to influence the world’s hearts and minds.
Hans Rosling: Asia’s rise – how and when – Hans Rosling was a young guest student in India when he first realized that Asia had all the capacities to reclaim its place as the world’s dominant economic force. At TEDIndia in November 2009, Hans, managing to coment statistics as a horse race, graphs global economic growth since 1858 and predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US with a nice comment about the health care system in the US.

Some eye-opening talks about the so called sub-continent (what a dreadful word)…Similar Posts:

Did you know?

Carl — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:19:16 +0000

Here is the 2008 version of “Did you know?” now in video mode.
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The War of the Worlds

Carl — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:50:23 +0000

Seventy years ago, Orson Welles aired The War of the Worlds. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the Mercury Theatre on the Air series on October 30, 1938 and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network.

Directed and narrated by Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds.

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual Martian invasion was in progress.

Link:

The War of the Worlds (wikipedia)

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Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

Carl — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:03:24 +0000

If you don’t think you can, you should definitely try.

The idea behind Shutdown Day is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate.

Links:

http://www.shutdownday.org/

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What makes sense in Microsoft taking shares in Facebook?

Carl — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:02:16 +0000

Everybody now heard and read about Microsoft’s decision to take 1.6 % of Facebook. A 240 M$ deal. Not so bad. But what does this mean?

The official answer is that Microsoft will be Facebook’s exclusive advertising company. Is that truly worth 240 M$?

There probably more behind this.

What will this mean for Microsoft’s Live Spaces? It would not be the first time that creativity comes from acquisitions. Look at Yahoo! recent decision to drop Yahoo! Photos for Flickr which they bought two years earlier.

More, on the operating systems topic, many people say that Microsoft’s Vista could probably be Microsoft’s last operating system and that the future will be to Web based operating systems. Could this step be seen as a way for Microsoft to acknowledge this and a move to a future answer to the Google’s Google Aps initiative?

Obviously there is far more behind this move, probably a first step for the necessary future move for Microsoft to go for more online business, but it is too early to say in an ever changing world. Many open questions but a good topic to follow up.Similar Posts: