Gaga's music themes

Themes from gaga's latest cd:

Religion

Jesus

Gay

Country

Whiskey

Sax

Strings

Pop chord progressions

echo effects/delay of backups/playing chords after changing chord (see john mayer's chorus in "no such thing")

Themes from gagas former albums (fame and fame monster):

Red wine

Cherry

Club

oral sex

Thoughts on reading Freakonomics

• thinking about the probable causes of the opposite phenomenae is sometimes worthwhile in trying to explain your present phenomenae (or effect).
• looking at more than what's known as "wants" can help make up the r2 of an equation. For instance, adding biological factors can be very useful.

Third TED Talk - Majora Carter on "Greening the Ghetto"

From Feb, 2006
Talk Notes:

• Hunts point riverside park
• Took 10,000 seed grant and took it into a three million dollar park
• Defines environmental justice as: no community should have no more burdens or benefits than any other. Sadly race and poverty correlates with poor environmental conditions.
• Talks about poor government decisions or rather lack thereof - building highways, burning buildings in red lining in creating the poor conditions.
• Physical improvements inform public policy.. we need a bottom-up approach.
• She doesn't expect the govt or corporations to do things because they're moral. She says she knows that it's the bottom line that gets people to do stuff in the end. She's concerned about the triple bottom line: govt, developer, community.
• Uses Bogota as an example: don't need to cut what we already use, just tailor what is excess in correspondance to our cars, our resources. If we don't need a parking lot, get rid of it. Etc.

Wiki-all-the-web idea

So here I wrote up an idea I had that was prompted by my love for food reviews and writing them. I wanted something comprehensive, like a bible or encyclopedia of personal reviews and experiences dining certain places. I post below both my idea, and then the response I received to it from a thoughtful, Internet-savvy friend.

Idea:

I’ve been trying to synthesize this idea I’ve had about aggregating data or opinions rather from review cites. What I was wanting was a website that would assimilate data from different information sources. For instance if you wanted to look up how to use a staple gun, it would take the information from ehow.com and about.com and a website on home improvement and would some how (perhaps through user reviews or editing like in wiki) update the information to reflect the most comprehensive and accurate info. This idea sounds a lot like wikihow; however, I was wanting to expand it to user forums of businesses (to like yelp, tripadvisor and urbanspoon) to synthesize data reviewing local businesses that way you’d not have to look up hotels or restaurants on google, yelp, and trip advisor to find the best “x” within a locale, but would have one source at your fingertips to use. What I realized in conceiving this idea was that I basically wanted a user-reviewer based encyclopedia like Wikipedia to cover everything on the web definitively. Probably on its way in the form of a wiki-something…

Response:

I’ve had the same thoughts, but review sites come and go too frequently to have a one-stop shop that could keep up with it all. ProductWiki is kind of nice because you can create your own entries and populate external reviews – but it’s not for places, only things. I’ve been meaning to add another entry for the Paul Mitchell Tea Tree Hair and Body Moisturizer that I love.

http://www.productwiki.com/zepfanman/lists/

Just stick with Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor separate searches.

Second TED Talk with Hans Rosling - debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

Feb, 2006

Talk notes:

• we, as professors, don't have to confront ignorance in the college classroom, we have to confront preconceived notions of how the world is and how countries are culturally, historically, and economically
• we witnessed a social change in asia before we saw economic change in the area.
• shows graph that basically gets at the distribution of survival rate and gdp of each country, showing the diversity within a continent
• improvement of world must be highly contextualized - students get excited when they can use stats tools and data
• this guy invented gapminder.org - linking data to design and write software with world health and poverty data and animate the data with flash and powerpoint, but they need to make the data searchable. They assess 500 variables in the countries using their software. What they need (and the world needs) are databases up, free, graphic, and searchable. He says statistical analyzers won't like this because it won't provide analysis for free.

First TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity?

February, 2006.
Talk notes:

• creativity should be awarded as is literacy
• we should not be afraid of being wrong - that is key to creativity. Plan for being wrong. We get educated out of creativity.
• Focuses on the arts - and particularly the importance of dance.
• Professors are the goal of our education. They live in their heads.
• Can't afford to go on thinking that being a professor should be the goal. Too many people are good at things that aren't recognized.
  Now BA's mean nothing.
• Intelligence has departments.
• Creativity - having original ideas that have value. Comes from interaction of different perspectives.
• Educate the whole being. See our creative capacities for the richness they are, and our children for the hope they are.