• Rational Irrationality - The real reason that capitalism is so crash prone by John Cassidy - The New Yorker - October 6, 2009
• Steven Strogatz on sync - TED Talk - See also Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks.

The Sesame Street Presentation Rule

After being on both the giving and receiving end of plenty of presentations, I now realize there's one golden rule which applies to all of them:

Entertain your audience.

Every slide of your presentation should serve this fundamental vision statement. Is it entertaining? I don't mean each slide has to contain a wacky joke of some kind. Every slide should provoke a reaction from the audience -- be it controversial, unexpected, amusing, or a meditative Zen koan. Prod your audience. Do this not only to keep them awake, but to engage their brains. Deliver a series of short, sharp shocks that jolt your audience into a heightened state of engagement.

Once your audience has engaged with your presentation, that's when you trick them into learning. The very best presentations entertain and educate-- the common portmanteau is edutainment. The archetypal example of edutainment is Sesame Street.

    * Snap a picture of your screen.
    * Record video of onscreen action.
    * Share instantly over the web, IM, email.

Networks of coupled dynamical systems have been used to model ... and many other self-organizing systems. Ordinarily, the connection topology is assumed to be either completely regular or completely random. But many biological, technological and social networks lie somewhere between these two extremes. Here we explore simple models of networks that can be tuned through this middle ground: regular networks 'rewired' to introduce increasing amounts of disorder. We find that these systems can be highly clustered, like regular lattices, yet have small characteristic path lengths, like random graphs. We call them 'small-world' networks, by analogy with the small-world phenomenon (popularly 6 degrees of separation. The neural network of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the power grid of the western United States, and the collaboration graph of film actors are shown to be small-world networks.

• Brian Berry is the guy.
• At about minute 40 minutes in there's a worthwhile observation about running grass roots organizations. Brian says he's talked to other people running grass roots organizations and they all agree that the biggest problem is finding committed people to work on them. Lots of people want to come and talk to you but that's not what you need.
• Brian sees the future of learning activities as Javascript and HTML 5.
• He would like to see a JS/HTML 5 learning activity framework
• He had not heard of the Lively Kernel
• Nepal's education system, partly as a result of limited resources, is based on rote and passing exams
• As a result, the learning activities must be based on the curriculum.