TED Talks by Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson provides an insiders view to giving an excellent TED talk in his book: TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking.

Elements of a good talk. The speaker is prepared. The speaker has practiced the talk and knows it well. Depending on the speaker, they will have it memorized or have visual prompts that assist and they know the topic well. They have a story arc. The visuals and the speech work well together. Some speakers take appropriate risks to deviating from the standard format and interacting with the audience through music or performance art. The person has lived a life, done the research and shares their insights and discoveries based on experience.

A poor talk has an ill prepared speaker. The speaker is focused on being famous and self-promotion. The speaker is not comfortable in front of the audience. The speaker is trying to sell something provide a gift of knowledge to others.

TED secrets to great public speaking - 10 minutes

What makes a great TED talk - 24 minutes

Lessons worth spreading - 12 minutes

The Art of Critical Decision Making by Michael A. Roberto

The Art of Critical Decision Making by Michael A. Roberto covers many difficult decisions that often focus on man made disasters. This is a worthwhile course for managers or individuals responsible for safety culture. He dissects the Columbia Space Shuttle accident. Managers adopted the wrong frame of reference setting a high bar to proving it was not safe rather than proving it is safe. The leader of the group also did not actively seek out dissenting views.

There are two responses to a threat. Confirmatory response (actively discounting the problem) presuming that our knowledge is complete and there will be no change unless there is overwhelming evidence of a problem that needs a solution vs an exploratory response actively attempting to understand the threat. In the face of an ambiguous threat learn by doing, conduct experiments, and conducting experiments.

The Three Mile Island nuclear incident is an example of complex coupled system. These often have a series of adverse events lining up to cause a problem. It is like the holes of several slices of Swiss Cheese lining up.

He also reviews the Bay of Pigs failed invasion of Cuba and the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Bay of Pigs was an insular process where differing opinions were suppressed. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, a diversity of opinions was sought out including former President Dwight Eisenhower. The former president asked questions about on the process of decision making. The problem solving groups were deliberately set up in opposing groups who offered solutions. The other group would attempt to poke holes in the proposal and request more information. This sharpened the solutions and provided better options for President Kennedy to review.

There was a failure to connect the dots with respect to the 911 terrorists. Both the Arizona and the Minneapolis Field office had people taking pilots lessons with large commercial aircraft with little previous pilot experience. Obstacles to information sharing include differentiation without integrations when dealing with an uncertain environment. Power is derived by the control of intelligence information. Work on both formal and informal network sharing. They have adopted password protected Wikis that allow information sharing between multiple agencies.

High Reliabilty Organizations (HRO) - Design enterprises to deal with interactive complexity and tight coupling (processes that are highly dependent on each other).

1. Preoccupied with failure ( may be a symptom of a larger problem) Actively seek out what might go wrong. Do not be preoccupied with success. Failures are not confined to a small area but may be systemic. Revealing problems allow people to work on them. 
2. Reluctance to Simplify interpretations. Do not put problems in a small box.
3. Sensitivity to the front line:   Invest time understanding in front line staff - Medicine used to be (ABC) Accuse Blame and Criticize.  Develop a culture of blameless reporting. 
4. Commitment to resilience: People who are resilient don't just anticipate they focus on mitigating the risk to build resilience. 
5. Deference to localized specialized expertise: Need to actively seek out localized specialized knowledge to find problems. 

Focus on concrete processes to improve safety. How to be preoccupied with failure. Code blue vs Rapid Response teams to diagnose people who are exhibiting ambiguous symptoms that may predict a cardiac event.  High reliability is a preoccupation with failure and resilience.

How do you become a problem finder? Seek out problems like Winston Churchill. He saw the rise of Hitler, the rise of the Iron Curtain. How do you do this. Become a voracious learner and go out in the field and ask questions. Discard the notion that you have all of the answers. The process matters.

Being a devil's advocate by Michael Roberto - 13 min. 

How Winston Churchill Changed the World Great Courses

I found the Great Courses lecture How Winston Churchill Saved the World by Michael Shelden to be informative giving more insight into the personal life of Churchill than the other two biographies I've encountered. Churchill had a lady friend who he relied on as and intellectual sounding board for his ideas. She would have gladly been his wife but Churchill married another. The friendship lasted.

Churchill was a man of intense curiosity. He was a cosmopolitan man of the world in contrast to Hitler and Stalin neither of whom ventured far from home. Churchill flew in planes to get a sense of the experience and also to obtain an overhead view of the British and European coastline. He advocated for aerospace research to develop airplanes capable of combating the German aircraft. The work on aircraft development was funded in part by a patriotic British heiress. 

Churchill's experience in the Boar War as a combat soldier and a prisoner also informed his experience. He deplored the idiocy of the British generals ill advised charges out of the trenches into direct machine gun fire. Churchill's support of research on tank development, although ridiculed at the time, proved to be a useful resource in breaking the stalemate of trench warfare. As Lord of the Admiralty, his ill advised venture in the Dardanelles lead him to be pushed out of important public office.  This was done with full endorsement of others but they disavowed the action once it failed.

This was similar to Harry Truman giving Churchill his backing for the Iron Curtain speech and then claiming he had no knowledge of it when there was a political uproar. One thing Churchill never lacked was the courage to stand up and eloquently defend his convictions.

His party's ouster from government after the war allowed him time to paint but resulted in disaster for the country. The post war socialist government under labor resulted in food and power shortages. Churchill referred to Socialism as "shared misery." The leaders were grossly in competent and lasted a few short years before Churchill's party returned to power and cleaned up the mess by keeping the things that worked and correcting the agriculture and energy sector.

At the end of the course leader Professor Shelden offered an alternate time line where Great Britain sues Nazi Germany for peace. That gives Hitler 10 years to develop advanced weaponry and tighten his  control over a large area of the world. If Churchill and Great Britain had not stood up alone against Hitler, our world may have been very different.

Darkest Hour Movie (2017) - Blood, Toil, Sweat, and Tears - 4 min. 

The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker takes an exhaustive look at the factors that contribute to the level of violence in human and closely related animal cultures.

He provides evidence that violence per capita has decreased from the paleolithic (hunter gatherer) culture to the present time. Many factors enter into this equation. Having a leviathan or large societal structural control will usually reduce the level of violence as a percentage of the population by pacification.

This is not a permanent state and society will devolve as in the Middle Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire or in countries where the central government no longer functions well (Libya, Syria, Afghanistan etc.)

The optimistic scenarios about the noble peaceful savage have largely been disproved. The tribal behavior by humans is similar to the behavior of chimpanzees and not does not track to the slightly less violent bonobos who are very peaceful when well fed in captivity but less so in the wild where there is competition for resources. Chimpanzees and tribal cultures kill when they have the advantage. They will kill lone non tribal members if the likelihood of success is great with a ratio of three attackers to one victim. Killing early in the morning when others at sleep is also a successful strategy.

The printing press proved to be a positive vehicle for building empathy in other people. This was associated with a reduction in acts of public cruelty for entertainment. Human life became more valuable and the painful acts of torture developed during the Spanish Inquisition became unacceptable.  Empathy is not enough to reduce violence.

It also needs compassion and self control and a willingness to not follow along with the crowd. People often are more candid in private written assessments than in public forums in front of groups. This has implications for obtaining honest feedback about self-assessment.

This is a very difficult, well researched, and important subject matter. Readers can take this information and help foster an environment where violence continues to be reduced.

Bill Gates and Steven Pinker - 7 minutes

Steven Pinker - The Better Angels - 76 minutes

Steven Pinker - The Better Angels - 23 minutes

Photographs of Minnesota Wildlife by N. G. Carlson

This past spring and summer, I took photographs of wildlife at Silverwood Park and Long Lake Regional Park north of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Other locations were outside the Bell Museum of Natural History, near my residence and at a woods north of the Twin Cities metro area. 

Spending time in nature during weekday mornings and on weekends made the spring, summer, and fall a wonderful experience. In the book you will meet Scruffy and Blue two Great Blue Herons who glided from one fishing spot to another stopping long enough for me to watch them groom themselves and patiently fish. 

A doe and the fawn on the cover of the book surprised me more than once on my morning walks. The wood duck and hooded merganser families spent time with each other raising their ducklings together. Turtles played tag under water and covered up the available logs on cool sunny days. 

I enjoyed listening to the sounds of songbirds and the hammering of the woodpeckers. I watched bluebirds diving on the grass to pick up insects and the osprey fishing for sunfish. Butterflies, bees, and dragonflies enjoyed the flowers and time on the lake.   

Photographing the wildlife was a walking meditation and an opportunity to capture the beauty in nature. It was a chance to observe and enjoy the dance of life. The book, Photographs of Minnesota Wildlife is available from Amazon in a paperback and kindle version. 

I appreciate the support from the Silverwood Camera Club and my editors Betsy Salvatore and Tammy K. Smith. 

Cardinal Song - 1 min. 15 sec.

Catbird song - 36 sec.

Evolutionary Psychology part 1: The Science of Human Nature by Allen D. MacNeill

In this first section of a two part series Allen D. MacNeill covers the individual aspects of evolutionary psychology, The Modern Scholar: Evolutionary Psychology I: The Science of Human Nature. In the next set of lectures Evolutionary Psychology Part Two focuses on group interactions.

Professor MacNeill's theatrical background makes listening to his lectures entertaining. He often pauses struggling for appropriate euphemisms to describe topics that are not appropriate for dinner time conversation.

He pokes holes in the standard social science model that we are all blank slates that can be molded by the environment into the person you become. He favors the proposition that we are shaped by our genetic background and the environment that we occupy.

He compares the behavior of other animals and finds similarities. Some findings are disturbing. Infanticide or abuse is much higher with stepfathers with no genetic relation to the child. This is true with humans and in many other primate species. With apes if a new male displaces the top male the  non related infants are killed so that the DNA of the new male can be passed along.

Professor MacNeill differentiates between lust, limerence (romantic love) and attachment. These different forms of love are also regulated by different hormones. Please see Science behind lust attraction companionship - Harvard U blog. Attachment (oxytocin and vasopressin) is achieved if you are calmed in the presence of the person you love. Limerence (dopamine and others) is the yearning to couple and is characterized by anxiousness and big mood swings. These feelings are reduced in direct proportion to the frequency of intimacy.

Evolutionary Psychology - 14 minutes

Factfulness by Has Rosling

In the book, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling we get not an optimistic but a realistic view of the world through data. The world may be bad but in general it is getting better. Hans wrote this book with his daughter and son-in-law as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. It summarizes the life lessons he has learned as a public health professional using facts to evaluate the world. It may be bad, but we are making it better and we can measure our progress.

He makes a strong case for dumping the dichotomy of the developed world and the undeveloped or third world. He instead divides nations into 4 categories, 1- Extreme poverty, 2- low income, 3- moderate income and 4- high income. He also recognizes that within countries there is overlap. In general, as income levels rise birthrates drop. This is why the global population will peak and remain stable at approximately 10 - 12 billion in the year 2100. The population curve is S shaped not J shaped.  He points out that up until 200 years ago most of the world was on level one with families having 6 babies and loosing 4 before they children reach adulthood. He recalls his grandmother in Sweden watching the first load of laundry going in his parents' washing machine. She then told her grandson Hans, the machine is doing the work and now we have time to go to the library.

He polls audiences about the current state of the world offering them three choices. In all but one case the audience does worse than random selections by chimpanzees. The only question audiences do better than the chimps is on the consensus of scientists regarding the trend upwards in global temperature. Hans was pressured by Al Gore to provide graphs of the worse case scenario for climate change but Hans refused to extrapolate beyond the data. Activist are often temped to exaggerate to increase urgency and this may work in the short term but backfires when credibility is lost when the predictions do not come true. 

Why is this? We are fed a steady diet of news that is generally factual and dramatic but provides a distorted view of the world. We are treated to the unusual and atypical. We also have data that is correct for 20 or 30 years ago but has not been updated.

He also cautions about orphan numbers. These are facts that stand alone but have no comparison. He uses the example that 2 million babies in the world died before reaching age 1 at some year in the 21st Century. This is bad but in the 1950's that number was around 16 million. Considering the world's population is much greater now, the death rate per 1,000 people is much lower than it was in the 50's. There is work to be done but we are making progress.

The mindset of factfulness  Hans Rosling- 17 minutes

How to not be ignorant about the world - 19 min. 

This is why the world is getting better Anna Rosling - 24 min.