For your viewing pleasure, I have culled a few more TED Talks that I found fascinating and relevant. From new ideas on teaching science in high school to a monkey controlling a robot directly from its brain, here are some thoughts to expand your mind.

Want to name a blog?

As many of you know, I have left full time work with Automation World. Just felt like it was time to move on and try new ideas. One of the ideas is to develop this Web site with its “blog-style” journalism into a business. I’m looking for a name for the site. Must have “manufacturing” in the title. Short and catchy. Thought I’d ask the few thousand loyal readers of this blog what they thought. Any good ideas out there? Thanks.

TED Talks

High school science teacher Tyler DeWitt was ecstatic about a lesson plan on bacteria (how cool!) — and devastated when his students hated it. The problem was the textbook: it was impossible to understand. He delivers a rousing call for science teachers to ditch the jargon and extreme precision, and instead make science sing through stories and demonstrations.

What can economists learn from linguists? Behavioral economist Keith Chen introduces a fascinating pattern from his research: that languages without a concept for the future — “It rain tomorrow,” instead of “It will rain tomorrow” — correlate strongly with high savings rates.

Can we use our brains to directly control machines — without requiring a body as the middleman? Miguel Nicolelis talks through an astonishing experiment, in which a clever monkey in the US learns to control a monkey avatar, and then a robot arm in Japan, purely with its thoughts. The research has big implications for quadraplegic people — and maybe for all of us.

Who Controls the World? James Glattfelder studies complexity: how an interconnected system — say, a swarm of birds — is more than the sum of its parts. And complexity theory, it turns out, can reveal a lot about how the economy works. Glattfelder shares a groundbreaking study of how control flows through the global economy, and how concentration of power in the hands of a shockingly small number leaves us all vulnerable.

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