lukegilman.com : High on the Hog Blog

Purveyor of Idle Observation

I didn’t want to be the only one who hadn’t posted this clip.

Brilliant!! Chuck; aka the Poetic Prophet, aka The SEO Rapper raps in my language.

Somehow this is the first time I’ve come across Juan Enriquez who brings a fascinating and very funny perspective on where we are (as a species) in the grand scheme of things.

• Juan Enriquez: Beyond the crisis, mindboggling science and the arrival of Homo evolutis

The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS) has been diligently offering up some of the most interesting lectures regarding the influence of psychology, cognitive neuroscience and others in the social sciences on the understanding of law, policy making, and legal theory. By making these materials available on YouTube, they are creating nothing less than a treasure trove. See their YouTube Channel for more.

I’ve previously blogged on Philip Zimbardo’s talk at the TED Conference. His talk at Harvard is longer and more in depth, elucidating the findings of his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil in the context of Abu Ghraib. See below for the videos in 11 parts. Read the rest of this entry »

Snag Films is “committed to finding the world‘s most compelling documentaries, whether from established heavyweights or first-time filmmakers.” Snag Films allows you to watch full-length documentary films for free and to “snag” a film (to embed, essentially) to put it anywhere on the web. Snag films is up to around 500 films and counting.

Theremug from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Video: Philip Zimbardo: How ordinary people become monsters … or heroes

Philip Zimbardo knows what evil looks like. After serving as an expert witness during the Abu Ghraib trials, he wrote The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. From Nazi comic books to the tactics of used-car salesmen, he explores a wealth of sources in trying to explain the psychology of evil.

A past president of the American Psychological Association and a professor emeritus at Stanford, Zimbardo retired in 2008 from lecturing, after 50 years of teaching his legendary introductory course in psychology. In addition to his work on evil and heroism, Zimbardo recently published The Time Paradox, exploring different cultural and personal perspectives on time.

Still well-known for his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo in his new research looks at the psychology of heroism. He asks, “What pushes some people to become perpetrators of evil, while others act heroically on behalf of those in need?”

One of my new year resolutions is to take notice of the things I come across on the web which are simply too good not to share, even if I myself don’t have anything to add to the conversation. Common Craft is one of those things. I think of them a little like the YouTube lovechild of Malcolm Gladwell and Bob Vila. They specialize in elegantly straight-forward video explanations of web phenomena and tools. The dynamic duo behind Common Craft, Lee and Sachi LeFever, recently stopped doing client-videos-for-hire to concentrate on educational rather than promotional content and license their educational content to others.

Visit Common Craft

Here’s a highlight reel:

Video: RSS in Plain English

Video: Wikis in Plain English

Video: Social Networking in Plain English

Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Video: Blogs in Plain English

Video: Twitter in Plain English

Video: Podcasting in Plain English

Video: Social Media in Plain English

Video: Electing a US President in Plain English

Video: Dog Robs Store for Bone On Christmas(Dog Steals a Bone)

Video: Charlie Rose interviews Malcolm Gladwell, who recently published the book Outliers