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 * TED Talks **

media type="custom" key="7016925" =**Steven Hawking talks **=

I believe this man is correct on many things. I believe that life on planets in our galaxy is very possible, I also believe that they may have destroyed themselves which holds a very real lesson for us to think about.

I have heard many time over news channels that Hawking said that God did not exist. This seems to be more additional excrement that the lame stream media is shoveling. Hawking was simply using his head to try and figure how the world may have been created and did not exclude God from the process. Please take time to view a couple of sites, one that discusses Hawking incorrectly and the other obscure site gets it from Hawking's peer. Hawking did not say there is no God But co-author Mlodinow explains that their theory did not cast out God. I enjoyed Hawking talking about what happened before the big bang. I know I have always pondered the beginning (which I believe was God).

media type="custom" key="7012701" =Rodney Brooks talks about our future with Robots = I enjoyed watching how humans interact with the robot in the laboratory. They have used state machines to drive the "emotions" of a robot to explore the human interactions. The state of the robot is relayed to the human through eye, eyebrow, lip and ear movements.

This video was created in 2003, but it was posted in 2008. The talk discussed a couple of major issues that may arise in the future; Will Robots have Rights and will Robots "Take Over" our world? A very important point was made about the video game "Pong" was introduced in the mid 70s and look where the computing industry is today. The same may be true of how we have the Lego Robots today and what our world may look like in 30 years :)

media type="custom" key="7012817" =Hod Lipson talks about using nature to design Robots = This talk was created and posted in 2007. Mr. Lipson suggests that we throw all the parts that robots need to evolve into a giant primordial soup and let nature take her course. He demonstrated how a robot could learn to move (walk) using a reward system. He did not go into much detail on what constituted the rewards.

He also demonstrated how robots would learn how to self replicate and drew parallels to nature which embeds into her creatures the drive to replicate. The beauty in this talk is not in the details (since specifics were skirted), but the concepts of how we can allow robots to learn. A very cool concept which may hold great power in future design.

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 **Absolutely Wonderful!** Don shared with us visually, what **NOT** to do on power points. Such as: Don’t put every word on the PowerPoint that you are going to say. Don’t have words move, spin, or blink. Font size needs to be large … but not too large. The use of too many bullet-points will cause the bullets to lose their effectiveness .
 * Don McMillan talks about all the wrong things to do in PowerPoint. **

Be careful about what font you use … it says something about you. I use the default most of the time (Times New Roman), so I must be Lazy, Apathetic, and Unimaginative.

**S.A.O.D.** Sever Acronym Overload Disorder was very funny section of the Talk and I agree with Don, we do have a large number of acronyms that we use as teachers. The IT field also has many acronyms … so when you merge the two you really need to use K.I.S.S to aid in any presentation, Keep It Simple Stupid.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 130%;">I enjoyed the display of the many charting capabilities of PowerPoint given by Don. His bar chart using various alcoholic beverage containers was very funny, but it drove home the point of how you can use creativity to really grab the attention of your audience. It shows you can overuse charts, but they can really give punch to a point when used appropriately.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 170%;">Please take time to show me you know Binary ... Thanks !!!!!!!

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<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 170%;">One more time dude(tt) ... Thanks !!!!!!! media type="custom" key="7452791" align="center"