Carrot-and-stick approach not only often does not work, it often does harm when it comes to 21st-century tasks. This has been known – and been ignored – for many years.
21st-century tasks require creative thinking. Cognitive skills. The carrot-and-stick approach is more suitable for mechanical skills.
Mastery, autonomy and purpose. THAT is the real secret of the gaming approach. It is NOT in the “rewards” themselves, it is in the mastery they stand for.
Gaming can make a better world
I’m with her on this.
Also watch this one, by Seth Priebatsch, and other talks.
The talk by Jane McGonigal (PhD from Berkeley) made me pose some questions about the UK, such as “Does the UK have a big gaming culture?” I did a search and found a survey by PopCap, of the US and the UK. Two differences struck me:
“Only 17% of UK-based social gamers chose “connect with others” as a reason for playing, compared to 28% of their U.S. counterparts.”
“U.S.-based social gamers are far more likely to play with strangers than their UK counterparts (41% vs. 29%).”
Sound science for cool jokers (and librarians):
For more, go to Holosonics.
Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg. It’s a presentation by Professor Philip Zimbardo.
And this one – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc – on motivation, by Dan Pink.
I first heard about it six to ten years ago. 3D-printing.
It just so happens that in the past few weeks, I had wondered what had become of that idea, for consumers. And it just so happens that Jaap Meijers wrote about it in Dutch daily Trouw in April.
Estimates are that the Netherlands has currently about 30 3D printers. You can build them, and partly print them, at home.
For more, see for example www.RepRap.org and this YouTube channel.
REMARKABLE: TED talk by Pattie Maes (WOW!)
Related to above, from MIT, at switched.com
TED talk by Jeff Han, also related
The future is NOW.
“Don’t leave. It’ll be worth the wait.” That’s what Craig Venter said when he briefly popped out of the Sheldonian Lecture Theatre in Oxford on October 25, 2007. It turned out he was right.
Rodrigo Mujica is clearly proud of the work he and his colleagues do at VMB in Chile, and rightly so. VMB is an engineering company with a staff of 40 to 50 and it specializes in building for earthquakes. Quake-proof construction. Yesterday, Rodrigo gave a presentation at the University of Portsmouth. Foster and Partners had invited Rodrigo to give a presentation at its headquarters in London, and that is how Rodrigo happened to be in the neighborhood.
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You can either continue to read this blog post or go to the edited and updated version on the SmarterScience web site: http://www.smarterscience.com/vmb-seismic-engineering.html
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One of the first things Rodrigo Mujica showed us was a video taken by a surveillance camera on the 12th floor of a building that was at quite some distance from the epicenter. It was impressive.
I first heard that electricity that can be generated from the chemical difference between saltwater and freshwater in September 2007, when I read about it in an article in a Dutch science magazine (C2W).
A Dutch test installation was about to start producing several tens of kiloWatts. I did a web search and learned about a pilot plant in Norway and a few other things. Reuters reported on these new developments in March 2008. NewScientist did too, about a year later.
After I’d read the article in C2W, I posted about the topic on Ecademy. Nobody there had heard of it yet and the idea was met with skepticism. It’s funny how anchored in the old ways of energy generation many people are, how attached to oil. Devising all sorts of methods of manufacturing all kinds of oil clearly is not going to solve the world’s energy problems.
We need to start from the basics. Electricity means that electrical charges move. Why add extra, usually energy-consuming steps to that if you do not really have to? Why not simply let electrical charges move? The same applies to heat: Wherever you can harvest heat directly, do it.
Shortly after I read that article in C2W, I received a message from a new client who’s involved in the research associated with what is often called blue energy. Confusingly, the phrase blue energy is also used for other types of water-related energy, such as tidal energy or wave energy. A little bit later, people immersed in this type of blue energy at another university started knocking on my virtual door. Needless to say, I was tickled pink.
When I recently discovered that still relatively few people know about these new developments, I decided to write about them. In one, salt comes in very handy and the other one only works because of salt.
Yep, another article from SmarterScience and it won’t cost you more than a mouse click. 
I have a second energy-related article up my sleeve. That one’s been sitting there for about two years. It’s starting to itch badly and now that it has a good context, it will see the light soon. I’ll post about that one on this blog too, of course. It will have babies in it. It will also have J. Craig Venter in it.