http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/vi/videos.aspx Watch the latest visiting speakers' lectures from Microsoft Research © 2012 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. en-US Mon, 14 May 2012 18:13:27 GMT [Speaker: Peter Bregman] Strategic advisor, Peter Bregman, explains how busy people can create a plan for managing their day in just 18 minutes. Bregman works from the premise that the best way to combat constant and distracting interruptions is to create productive distractions of one's own. His approach shows how to navigate through the constant chatter of emails, text messages, phone calls, and meetings to better focus on the things that are truly important. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=164198 Peter Bregman Science and Technology Wed, 09 May 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Leonard Mlodinow] In Subliminal, Leonard Mlodinow presents an illuminating examination of the ways in which the unconscious mind shapes our lives. Over the past two decades researchers have developed new tools for probing the subliminal workings of the mind. This explosion of research has led to a sea change in our understanding of how the mind affects the way we live. Scientists are becoming increasingly convinced that how we experience the world is largely driven by the mind's subliminal processes and not by the conscious ones, as we have long believed. Mlodinow unravels the subliminal mind and reveals its influence on how we interact with the people around us. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=163950 Leonard Mlodinow Science and Technology Tue, 08 May 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Tony Wagner] In Creating Innovators, Tony Wagner addresses the question of how do we create the next generator of innovators? By profiling young creators and examining cutting-edge programs, Wagner identifies that the answer is to embrace the principles of play, passion, and purpose, and shows how we can remake our schools and workplaces to better cultivate the change-makers of tomorrow. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=163758 Tony Wagner Science and Technology Thu, 03 May 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Greg Bear] Halo: Primordium continues the story of the enigmatic creators and builders of the Halos that began in Halo: Cryptum. In the wake of the apparent self-destruction of the Forerunner empire, two humans—Chakas and Riser—end up on a strange inverted world where horizons rise into the sky. Their epic journey across this damaged Halo takes them into the domain of a powerful and monstrous intelligence who claims to be the Last Precursor. Called the Captive by Forerunners, and the Primordial by ancient humans, this intelligence has taken charge of, and perverted, the Master Builder’s already horrifying research into the Flood. Chakas and Riser unwittingly become trapped in an ancient game of vengeance between the powers who seeded the galaxy with life and the Forerunners, who have taken up the sacred Mantle of duty to protect all living things. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=163760 Greg Bear Science and Technology Tue, 01 May 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: David Weinberger] Knowledge isn’t what it used to be. For about 2,500 years, we have engaged in a multi-generational task of nailing knowledge down and building on what we knew. Ultimately heading toward a world of shared ideas and beliefs. Now, there are a billion opinions, a trillion facts, and they’re all yelling at one another. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Paper couldn’t hold everything we needed to know, so we created a strategy of knowing our world by reducing it. Now that knowledge’s medium is as big as knowledge itself, it’s also messy, connected, unsettled, and in constant argument with itself. The question is how are we going to put the pieces back together again… and how can this be an opportunity to become smarter than ever as businesses, as a society, and as people. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=163436 David Weinberger Science and Technology Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: John Long] Biologist and robotics expert John Long has found an ingenious way to study extinct species: he creates robots that look and behave similarly, applies evolutionary pressures, lets them compete for mates and resources, and mutates their ‘genes.’ In short, he lets robots play the game of life; in the process learning some startling things about the origins–and trajectory–of species. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=162656 John Long Science and Technology Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Charles Duhigg] What habit do you want to change? The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. If you can diagnose your habits, you can change them in any way you want. Habits aren’t destiny. By harnessing the new science of habit, we can transform our businesses, our communities and our lives. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=162312 Charles Duhigg Science and Technology Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Jon Gertner] Bell Labs holds an unparalleled role as an incubator of innovation and birthplace of the century's most influential technologies. Long before America's brightest scientific minds began migrating west to Silicon Valley, they flocked to this campus in the New Jersey suburbs built and funded by AT&T. Gertner unveils the unique magic of Bell Labs through the eyes and actions of its scientists. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=162143 Jon Gertner Science and Technology Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Howard Rheingold] Howard Rheingold is a digital community builder. In Net Smart, he shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. Rheingold asserts that there is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could put us on the path to produce a more thoughtful society. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=162087 Howard Rheingold Science and Technology Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: George Dyson] “It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. A small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=161792 George Dyson Science and Technology Thu, 22 Mar 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Lenore Skenazy] The media labeled Lenore Skenazy "America's Worst Mom" when she let her 9-year-old ride the subway alone. She wore the badge with pride and went on to found Free-Range Kids, the book, blog and movement dedicated to the idea that our kids are SAFER and SMARTER than our culture gives them credit for. Learn how today's parents became so afraid about everything and how we can regain the perspective that allows us to trust our kids, our community and our own good-enough parenting. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=161679 Lenore Skenazy Science and Technology Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Eric Klinenberg] In Going Solo, sociologist Eric Klinenberg presents a revelatory examination of the most significant demographic shift since the baby boom: the sharp increase in the number of people who live alone. With eye-opening statistics, original data, and vivid portraits of people who go solo, Klinenberg upends the conventional wisdom to deliver the definitive take on how the rise of living alone is transforming the American experience. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=160596 Eric Klinenberg Science and Technology Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Sharon McGrayne] From Microsoft spam filters to DNA decoding and the drones over bin Laden’s compound, Bayes’ rule pervades modern life. It has been used to help crack the Enigma code, hunt down Russian submarines, and solve a host of other modern day problems. Yet for most of the 20th century, opponents viewed it as subjectivity run amok. In this talk, I will recount some of the triumphs and stories behind Bayes, as it ignited one of science’s great controversies. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=159395 Sharon McGrayne Science and Technology Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Sebastian Seung] Science has long struggled to pinpoint where, precisely, our uniqueness resides. A connectome is a map of connections between a brain’s neurons, and connectomics is the use of brain imaging and technology to increase the speed and efficiency of those maps. Your brain contains a million times more connections than your genome has letters. Finding the complete neuronal connectome of a human brain is one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of all time. Seung’s goal is to compare connectomes between normal brains and disordered brains, which would reveal what’s behind brain disorders. If he and his team succeed, it could reveal the basis of personality, intelligence, memory, and mental disorders. Many scientists speculate that people with anorexia, autism, and schizophrenia are “wired differently.” This research has the potential to completely rock our understanding of the brain. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=159015 Sebastian Seung Science and Technology Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Adam Lashinsky] It has been said about Apple that its business practices are like a bumble bee: It shouldn’t fly, but it does. And how well it does. Apple is the first or second most valuable company in the world, and it got that way by doing business differently from how it is taught at Harvard Business School. The whole world loves Apple products, but even sophisticated business people don’t understand how Apple does what it does. Apple’s approach to leadership, personnel, secrecy, design, product development, marketing, public relations is extraordinarily unique approaches to business. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=158955 Adam Lashinsky Science and Technology Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:00:00 GMT [Speaker: Rebecca MacKinnon] In an age where technology companies censor and turn over users’ personal information at the behest of government, internet policy expert Rebecca MacKinnon argues a different approach to protecting our personal liberties and freedoms. In Consent of the Networked, MacKinnon proposes focusing policy upstream—at the point of conception and innovation—to ensure accountability is built into the fabric of cyberspace. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=158668 Rebecca MacKinnon Science and Technology Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Susan Cain] At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking, reading to partying; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working independently over brainstorming in teams. Although they are often labeled "quiet," it is to introverts that we owe many of the great contributions to society--from van Gogh’s sunflowers to the invention of the personal computer. The dominant values of American business culture, where forced collaboration can stand in the way of innovation, and where the leadership potential of introverts is often overlooked. Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=158430 Susan Cain Science and Technology Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:30:00 GMT [Speaker: William Gibson] William Gibson is known primarily as a novelist, with his work ranging from his groundbreaking first novel, Neuromancer, to his more recent contemporary bestsellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. During those nearly thirty years, though, Gibson has been sought out by widely varying publications for his insights into contemporary culture. Wired magazine sent him to Singapore to report on one of the world's most buttoned-up states. The New York Times Magazine asked him to describe what was wrong with the Internet. Rolling Stone published his essay on the ways our lives are all "soundtracked" by the music and the culture around us. And in a speech at the 2010 Book Expo, he memorably described the interactive relationship between writer and reader. These essays and articles have never been collected-until now. Some have never appeared in print at all. In addition, Distrust That Particular Flavor includes journalism from small publishers, online sources, and magazines no longer in existence. Distrust That Particular Flavor offers readers a privileged view into the mind of a writer whose thinking has shaped not only a generation of writers but our entire culture. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=158107 William Gibson Science and Technology Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Winifred Gallagher] All of us are attuned to things that are new or unfamiliar because they convey vital information about potential threats and resources. The "love of the new," or neophilia, is hardwired into our brains at the deepest levels. In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the mind-boggling number of new things that bombard us daily. The amount of new information that we handle has quadrupled in the last thirty years and shows no sign of slowing—we must look beyond such secondary issues as voracious consumerism, attention problems, and electronics addiction to refocus on neophilia's true purpose: to learn about and create the new things that actually matter. Whether we love change, avoid change, or take the middle path, neophilia plays a crucial role in all of our lives. We can embrace our changing world AND live a fuller, saner life. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=157776 Winifred Gallagher Science and Technology Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:30:00 GMT [Speaker: Beth Coleman] There has been a cultural shift from analog to digital: creating an “x-reality” that crosses between the virtual and the real. Encompassing a multiplicity of network combinations, it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency--our new power to customize our networked life. The gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities--in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. What has come out of this shift is real-time collaboration and co-presence. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject--all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=157343 Beth Coleman Science and Technology Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:30:00 GMT