daniprettoteam peeta
Can we just stop and appreciate Nicki Minaj’s face for a moment. She looks genuinely very concerned for Josh here, like she thinks he was actually in an arena full of kids trying to kill him, and is confused as to why no one else finds this as shocking as she does.
What do you expect? People from the Capitol just don’t understand.
People from the Capitol just don’t understand.
People from the Capitol just don’t understand.
daniprettoew no.
Duffy London is encouraging people to “bring the playground into the boardroom or dining room” with their brilliant new King Arthur Swing Table. This round table is supported by a four-poster frame, from which a Geo lampshade and hanging chairs are suspended. Not only does the design make vacuuming a breeze, but staff members or dinner guests stay engaged and inspired as they swing around during presentations and dessert courses. Available in a variety of different hues and finishes, to seat 8 or 12 diners and thinkers, it can turn any meeting area into a very silly place, but in the best ways imaginable.
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.” – George Bernard Shaw
Images by Duffy London and Tom Oxley Photography.
Missing Attachment Missing Attachment Missing Attachment Missing Attachment Missing Attachment Missing AttachmentThe article above was submitted to us by an Inhabitat reader. Want to see your story on Inhabitat? Send us a tip by following this link. Remember to follow our instructions carefully to boost your chances of being chosen for publishing!
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Post tags: board meeting, dining table, duffy london, geo lamp, indoor swing table, indoor swings, king arthur, King Arthur round table, King Arthur Swing Table, King Arthur table, meeting table, outdoor furniture, round table, swing chair, swing chairs, swing furniture, Swing Table, swinging, swinging chairs, swings, table swing, table swings
Art museums like sports, too. The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts can look forward to a new piece temporarily joining its collection thanks to winning a Super Bowl bet against the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). The New England Patriot's 28-24 win over the Seattle Seahawks secured the museum Albert Bierstadt's "Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast" (1870):
Albert Bierstadt (German, 1830–1902), "Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast," 1870. Oil on canvas, Seattle Art Museum. (Photo: Howard Gisk)
The Clark and the SAM placed a bet in advance of Super Bowl XLIX, according to WBUR. If the Seattle Seahawks had won, the Clark would have loaned out Winslow Homer's "West Point, Prout's Neck" (1900).
The losing museum has to loan their painting for three months and pay all shipping and expenses, according to the Berkshire Eagle.
Seattle Art Museum curator Chiyo Ishikawa and Richard Rand, curator at the Clark, initially suggested the wager. The curatorial staffs of both museums decided which paintings to wager, according to Sally Morse Majewski, public relations and marketing manager at the Clark. They looked for parity both in terms of subject matter and the quality of the painting, she told Vox in an email.
Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910), West Point, Prout’s Neck, 1900. Oil on canvas, Clark Art Institute (Photo: Mike Agee)
Before the game, The Clark's Rand told the Berkshire Eagle that he would rather see the Bierstadt in New England than have one of his museum's Homers go to Seattle.
"It is a completely fantastic painting, and unusual because Bierstadt is usually associated with landscapes in the Yosemites and the Rocky Mountains," he said. "It would be a wonderful guest of honor and it will be very exciting for our public — we can't often see works by Bierstadt in New England."
WBUR points out that the SAM made a similar bet with the Denver Art Museum for last year's Super Bowl. The Seahawks beat the Denver Broncos 43-8, winning the opportunity to display Frederic Remington's "Broncho Buster" for three months.
Majewski says time will tell if the Clark starts thinking about future bets.
"Perhaps if the Red Sox are in the World Series, we might consider it," she sayd. "It's been a great way to open up the world of art to sports fans."
daniprettovery interesting. and we have started to note tripadvisor is just as negative as yelp (or as we call it "the site for those born to whine)
An accommodation in San Francisco on Airbnb, lot more positive reviews than reviews for same property also available on TripAdvisor.
— Rafat Ali
A fascinating new research paper by a management professor and two PhD students at Boston University that focuses on online consumer reviews in the Airbnb era gives a nascent peek into understanding and interpreting nuances of user-generated ratings in the context of the sharing economy.
The paper, titled “A First Look at Online Reputation on Airbnb, Where Every Stay is Above Average,” was authored by Georgios Zervas, Davide Proserpio, and John W. Byers and released on Friday last week. The authors collected reviews on about 600,000 Airbnb listings and compared the “star ratings” on them with equivalent ratings on TripAdvisor. They also considered several thousand properties that were listed on both platforms and hence easier to compare variance in review patterns.
The key question the authors tried to answer with this research: are the reviews on sharing economy sites — essentially open marketplaces — different than those on traditional review sites like TripAdvisor?
The topline results are fascinating:
Some reasons put forward for this difference: perhaps sociological factors are at work,
whereby individuals rate other individuals differently or more tactfully (hence the positive reviews), than they rate firms such as hotels, independent of the platform.
Airbnb has a two-way review system, where people renting these accommodations also get ratings from the property renters, this there is more incentive on both sides to stay civil, and hence positive. Or as the paper puts it, “bilateral reviewing systems, as used in Airbnb, inflate ratings by incentivizing hosts to provide positive feedback so they are positively judged in return.”
And as New York Times puts another spin to this theory in a story: “If Airbnb guests seem too critical they might get turned down by future hosts who worry they will be too demanding. Who wants a cranky guest complaining about the noise at 3am? A better approach is just to shower everyone and everything with praise.”
daniprettohe is hilarious. they all are. but will ferrell is the special kind of funny.
One of the cornerstones of Jimmy Fallon's run on the Tonight Show has been the lip-sync battles. Celebrities choose their songs and craft evocative performances to them. Emma Stone, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and John Krasinski have all elevated the art of lip-syncing.
On Sunday night, it was Will Ferrell's and Kevin Hart's turn to take the stage. Ferrell dominated the night, performing a sensuous, grinding take (that none one really asked for) on Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love":
The Tonight Show
Seeing a grown man that large move like that and mouth those words hits at a weird emotional space between alarming and hypnotizing. Fallon and Hart reportedly lip-synced some songs too, like "Since U Been Gone":
The Tonight Show
But the night belonged to Ferrell, who chose "Let It Go" as his second song:
The Tonight Show
And the world was never the same again.
daniprettogross. get with the times, az.
Katy Perry sang "I kissed a girl and I liked it" at Sunday's 2015 Super Bowl halftime show in Arizona. But Christine Quinn, former speaker of the New York City Council, pointed out that the pop star could be fired — legally — if she kissed a person of the same sex in the state, where it's legal to terminate someone from a job based on sexual orientation.
If@katyperry kissed a girl & liked it in AZ she could be fired. Change that@AthleteAlly pledge #Superbowl2015. We need antilgbt discrim laws
— Christine Quinn (@chriscquinn) February 2, 2015
Arizona is among 32 states that don't have statewide nondiscrimination laws for all LGBT residents, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Eighteen states and Washington, DC, protect workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, while another three states only protect gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers.
(American Civil Liberties Union)
"We really have to address these issues of discrimination against LGBT people in a holistic manner," Ian Thompson, legislative representative for LGBT issues at the ACLU, previously told Vox. "There's definitely a lot of work still to be done."
A 2011 study from the Williams Institute found that about 9.2 percent of openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual people were fired or denied employment based on their sexual orientation between 2003 and 2007. And 38.2 percent were harassed on the job because of their sexuality.
Nondiscrimination protections also generally apply to housing and public accommodations, such as service in restaurants and hotels. But in states without such protections, LGBT people can be denied housing or service because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
A 2013 study from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development found same-sex couples experience less favorable treatment than heterosexual couples in the online rental housing market. But the study also found that nondiscrimination protections didn't appear to change how same-sex couples were treated.
The refusal of some bakeries and wedding-associated businesses to service gay couples, based on religious opposition, has put a national spotlight on discrimination in places that serve the general public. LGBT advocates say these kind of cases — and the laws behind them — will become the next frontier of civil rights battles as the debate over same-sex marriage progresses.
daniprettoi can't find any previews that i can view in canada: please watch and rate. if good, @craig - please pvr.
Click here to view the embedded video.
This week, a new documentary series debuts that might finally change the way we look at the world around us. Wildlife biologist Dr. M. Sanjayan hosts Earth: A New Wild and turns the camera around to focus on human interactions with nature, rather than looking at nature in isolation. The five-part documentary captures amazing moments between wild animals and the people who live and work with them.
Read the rest of New documentary ‘Earth: A New Wild’ illustrates connection between humans and nature
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Post tags: Animals, connections, conservation, earth, Environment, home, humankind, humans, humans and nature, mankind, Nature, planet, relationships, Wildlife, world
daniprettothey look like spiders :(
These are several videos capturing the annual migration of millions and millions of tiny red crabs across Christmas Island, near Indonesia. Once a year in October/November the entire population migrates from the forests to the coast to bang each other on the beach and make babies. How romantic. UH UH UH UH UH (That's the sound of crabs humping).
Keep going for three portrait-mode videos (the last one is my favorite).
This post has spoilers about the upcoming season of Game of Thrones.
On Thursday night, the trailer for the fifth season of Game of Thrones premiered at IMAX screenings — a special treat for the die-hard fans who wanted to see the last two episodes of the show's fourth season on the big IMAX screen. Because people can't keep secrets, the trailer has leaked online (above), allowing less devoted fans a glimpse into the new season.
Fans of the book will notice that the fifth season looks to be a bolder, more confident departure from George R.R. Martin's books. Fans of the book will notice that Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) and Varys (Conleth Hill) together in what appears to be Essos is a huge move (as is the stuff that the show might be leaving out). Also, that it appears they're already talking about Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) makes it look as if the show might also be slashing (or zooming past) some integral parts about Dany's tension-filled path to the throne.
The show has been picked apart for its small changes from the source material, and now it seems as though the show is telling its own independent story rather than tweaking a few things here and there.
Game of Thrones returns on April 12.
Update: HBO has released the trailer.
daniprettokind of fun for night running!
This is the already funded Kickstarter for $150 Glow Headphones. Glow headphones (wait -- did that say $150?) come in red, blue and green and contain a laser and light-diffusing fiber cord that pulses to the music you're listening to. OR your heartbeat (provided they meet their $1,000,000 stretch goal on Kickstarter). Me? Because I'm just a figment of your imagination I don't actually have a heartbeat. Here: put your head to my chest and listen. What do you hear? "Your stomach rumbling?" Wrong, that's my left tit begging for a squeeze. Well -- go on!
Keep going for a couple more pictures and their Kickstarter video.danipretto<3
Cats Who Have Found the Perfect Box
daniprettodoctors are saints. even the ones with egos.
daniprettoscary no one thought of this sooner.
Click here to view the embedded video.
When the Seattle Seahawks face off against the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl this Sunday, the mammoth sporting event will be greener and significantly brighter than ever before. That’s because the University of Phoenix is the first Super Bowl host to light its stadium entirely with LEDs, cutting energy use by 75%!
Read the rest of The first Super Bowl lit with LED lights will cut energy use by 75%
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Post tags: Arizona, Cree, Energy Savings, ephesus lighting, green lighting, green sports, LED, LED lighting, LEDs, stadium, super bowl, superbowl, university of phoenix
daniprettothat would be a gorgeous space though! pretty creepy.
This is a tour of a Parisian apartment rendered with the Unreal Engine 4. It looks like reality. It's not though, it's just a rendering of an apartment that doesn't even exist in real life. Pretty impressive. Even more impressive? Trying to render my apartment to look real using a game engine. All the broken glass and roaches and pizza boxes -- they'd never be able to make it look right.
Keep going for the open house.daniprettoi used to love making birdhouses with my grandpa in halifax but they didn't quite look like these
daniprettogood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84924572&feature=player_detailpage&x-yt-ts=1422411861&v=xAsjRRMMg_Q
bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH5wdm1Caoo
Feel like crying at work today? Cool, just watch this. Then on Sunday during the actual Super Bowl you can feel confident going to the bathroom during the commercials knowing you've already seen them all.
Keep going for the commercial, then go home and hug your pets and cry into their fur.daniprettotigers AND foxes making a comeback? 2015 is going to be a good year.
Yosemite National Park released an image yesterday of an elusive Sierra Nevada red fox, caught by a motion-sensor camera in the park. This news marks the first time one of these foxes has been seen inside the national park in nearly 100 years. Park officials are excited about the discovery, hoping that it means the endangered mammals are doing well.
Read the rest of Endangered red fox caught on camera in Yosemite for first time in 100 years
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Post tags: animal, endangered, endangered species, fox, mammal, national park, Rare, red fox, sighting, Yosemite, yosemite national park
daniprettopunny. and gross.
In 2001 the hipsters of Portland planted the seed for a fascination with PBR that quickly spread nation-wide. So what state could be better qualified to provide us with a beer made from actual human urine? While it won’t be hitting the market anytime soon — due to regulations and all — Clean Water Services has asked the Oregon Brew Crew to turn their high-purity, drinkable sewage water into a refreshing craft beer.
Read the rest of Looking for a beer made from actual human piss? Urine luck.
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Post tags: beer, clean water services, drinking water, Drought, high purity water, home brew, homebrew, Oregon, public health, recycled water, safe water, waste water, wastewater, water treatment, West Coast
daniprettoi wonder what he's watching
daniprettored pandas look like raccoons (warning: video too long - only need to watch for a few seconds)
These red pandas at a Japanese zoo are very, very interested in the apples and grapes their caretaker has brought them.
daniprettook ish. cute i guess.
Because a lot of businesses are worried the New England Patriots will steal their Super Bowl commercials before the big game, some companies have decided to take a proactive approach and begin releasing their ads early (previously: Bud Light's Pac-Man commercial). This is Mercedes Benz's Tortoise And The Hare themed commercial for the AMG GT. The AMG GT starts at around $130,000, so obviously I just ordered two in different colors to match my outfits. "You're wearing athletic shorts and no shirt." I know -- one's for now, the other is for when I get tan.
Keep going for the commercial.
The share of workers who are union members slipped again last year to the lowest share since 1983 -- the earliest year the Labor Department has available.
The slip looks small, since the share fell from 11.3 to 11.1 percent, but the drop is still significant. It's the latest indicator that the waning influence of Big Labor in the American workforce is going to continue. So while both political parties grapple with what to do about stagnant wages and inequality, unions is looking less and less likely to be the answer.
In 2014, there were nearly 14.6 million union members in the US, up by only around 50,000 from 2013. Over that same period, the number of workers in the US grew by more than 2 million.
That decline in union membership rates has been entirely in the private sector — the total number of public sector union members has grown over the years, as this graphic from the Pew Research Center shows, while private-sector union membership has shrunk to a far greater degree. Indeed, 35.7 percent of public-sector workers today are members, compared to 6.6 percent for private-sector.
What's dragging unions down? That's a topic of intense debate. The rise of right-to-work laws in some states is often blamed, along with laws that restrict union activities, like the 2011 Wisconsin law prohibiting many types of collective bargaining on the part of public-sector unions. One theory from economists Alan Krueger and Morris Kleiner links shrinking unions with the rise of occupational licensing. Meanwhile, Evan Soltas (writing at Bloomberg View last year) points to the rising dependence of labor upon capital.
Interestingly, Pew has found that public support of unions has held steady over the years. Still, organized labor is still slipping, and it's hard to see it regaining its former strength.
daniprettoi want a scooter. any scooter will do.
Increasing traffic congestion—along with energy, pollution, parking and maintenance hassles—are definitely creating a demand for smart, two-wheel solutions for getting around cities, university campuses and other congested areas. GenZe – a pioneer in energy-efficient, hassle-free transportation – has developed a brilliant solution to this issue with a new all-electric scooter platform set to reach the market in just a few months. Unlike some other electric transportation options, the GenZe will not rely on the development of a new power infrastructure. Its removable lithium-ion battery is rechargeable at any standard electrical outlet. In other words, it leverages America’s existing power grid and ubiquitous AC electrical sockets to make sure its riders keep moving, wherever they are.
The article above was submitted to us by an Inhabitat reader. Want to see your story on Inhabitat? Send us a tip by following this link. Remember to follow our instructions carefully to boost your chances of being chosen for publishing!
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Post tags: electric scooter, electric transportation, electric vehicles, GenZe electric scooter, GenZe scooter, GenZe urban travel, green commute, green commuting, green transportation, green travel, rechargeable scooter, urban commuting
daniprettoyikes. anyone want a scarf?
In a desperate attempt to save the endangered mountain caribou of British Columbia, Canada, the government there has ordered a death sentence for up to 183 grey wolves. Populations of South Selkirk mountain caribou have dwindled into the double digits, and the provincial government blames the iconic wolf species for putting the caribou in danger of extinction. Wolves are often made out to be “the bad guys” when another species is in trouble, and then targeted for killing, but there is a lot of controversy surrounding their relative guilt or innocence.
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Post tags: british columbia, canada, caribou, conservation, cull, culling, endangered, endangered species, extinct, extinction, killing, population management, populations, predators, shooting, Wildlife, wildlife management, wolf, wolves
daniprettoyay tigers!
The wild tiger population in India has jumped from 1,706 to an estimated 2,226 since 2011, marking a 30 percent increase in numbers for the endangered big cat. As a result, India is now home to around 70 percent of the world’s tigers. That’s much better than good news; it’s downright spectacular.
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Post tags: Animals, big cats, breeding, conversation, efforts, endangered, endangered species, government, Growth, habitat, increase, India, population, protection, repopulate, tigers, Wildlife
daniprettomight have to try this! likely doesn't taste as good but might let me drink it again!
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daniprettoall click through videos but sharing for rose re: super mario cheat. basically, this guy has figured out the code that is written for each movement a player makes within the game and some obscure cheat that beats the game doing stupid little things within the very first level. please tell me these guys don't have a few better things to spend their time on?!?
This is an almost-hard-to-believe-somebody-is-really-that-stupid video of some idiot who thinks the right way to use tow straps to pull a stuck vehicle is to make sure there's a lot of slack ("I've got 30-feet of strap"), then slam the truck in reverse as fast as you can. Obviously, the results are very pleasing to us, the viewer. The guy filming it seemed to enjoy it too. Man -- stupid people. It just sucks they exist in real life too and not just Youtube videos.
Hit the jump for the video, but be sure to check out our sister site Hedonistica for more of the latest videos including this dude beating Super Mario World in in six minutes using some glitch that makes no sense, a cartoon about a stormtrooper who misses home, and Microsoft's latest augmented reality concept.daniprettosuch a happy puppy!
by uaiHebert
daniprettomore love for the gates
Melinda Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says that vaccine denial is a privilege that those in developing countries, which see the daily toll of diseases like measles, simply don't have.
"We take vaccines so for granted in the United States," Gates told the Huffington Post in a prerecorded interview aired on January 22. "Women in the developing world know the power of [vaccines]. They will walk 10 kilometers in the heat with their child and line up to get a vaccine, because they have seen death. [Americans have] forgotten what measles deaths look like."
She added, "I'd say to the people of the United States: we're incredibly lucky to have that technology and we ought to take full advantage of it."
In response to the Disneyland outbreak in January 2015, pediatric infectious disease specialist James Cherry told the New York Times the outbreak was "100 percent connected" to the anti-vaccine movement. "It wouldn’t have happened otherwise — it wouldn't have gone anywhere," he said.
The key is what the scientific community calls herd or community immunity. If every American of age was vaccinated, measles wouldn't spread much further even if foreign travelers came into the country with the disease — as appears to be the case with measles. Vaccinated people essentially act as barriers to measles outbreaks, since the disease can't pass through them and infect other people. The awful truth of the anti-vaccine movement is that it puts the most vulnerable populations at risk: infants under 12 months of age, who can't get vaccinated and are more susceptible to infection, and the elderly, who have a higher risk of death if they contract these illnesses.
Like this video? Subscribe to Vox on YouTube.
daniprettoi feel like he thinks of himself as a sort of god - able to do and change anything in the world. and i'm ok with that. i agree with him. money does make the world go round.
On Wednesday, January 21st, Bill and Melinda Gates made a very big, very public bet: "The lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history," they wrote in their annual letter. "And their lives will improve more than anyone else's."
Beneath that bet were some very big sub-bets: that the world will cut the number of children who die before the age of five in half; that we’ll wipe four major diseases — including polio and Guinea worm — off the face of the earth; that African farmers will be able to increase their yields by half.
The optimism comes at a time when Americans, in particular, are feeling pretty pessimistic. 2014 often felt like a parade of horrors, and a majority of Americans say their country is on the wrong track. So when I spoke with Gates, I wanted to know why he was so confident about the future. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Ezra Klein: We've just gone through this year that felt, to many in America at least, like this unrelenting march of horrible news. We saw Ebola rampage through West Africa, we saw a caliphate establish itself in the Middle East, we saw Boko Haram kidnapping women in Nigeria.
And amidst all that, you say you think the lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history. What gives you that confidence?
Bill Gates: It’s the nature of the news to highlight the really bad, really sudden incidents. Look at the deaths of children under five — there were six and a half million of those deaths last year — the percentage that were connected with any headline is less than one percent. The daily deaths from pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria — there's no news hook to those. You could study the headlines very carefully, and you wouldn't have a sense of what's up with the bottom two billion.
Improvements come in small, daily, person-by-person increments — they come from growing more food, getting better schooling, fewer children dying under the age of five. Take Nigeria, where Boko Haram is an awful problem. At the same time in Nigeria, we had our last polio case in July. The Lagos State health people and the polio people were able to stop Ebola from coming into the country.
I can understand how people see things if they just read the headlines. But in terms of African GDP, African agricultural productivity, science coming up with better understandings of biology that create concrete tools that can deal with epidemics, it was actually quite a good year.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Ezra Klein: In the beginning of your letter this year, you draw a line from the bet that you and your colleagues at Microsoft made on software and the bet you're making on human development now.
The work you did in software was work that used technology to scale. But so much of the work in human development is using tremendous amounts of manpower to spread basic, low-tech solutions across huge land masses. How do you see those bets as connected?
Bill Gates: The work of the foundation can be divided into sort of an upstream R&D piece, where we’re trying to create an HIV or malaria vaccine, that is more analogous to the core work of Microsoft, where you're picking great scientists for a a five-, six-year project that has a chance of meeting these problems.
Downstream of the foundation, the most critical partner is actually the country that we're delivering in. We’re working with the government of India or Nigeria or Ethiopia and learning about why sometimes governments in poor countries work very well, like say the vaccination system in Ghana or Rwanda, and why sometimes they work very poorly, like in northern Nigeria.
In some ways, I was more prepared for the upstream part of this work. The Microsoft downstream equivalent was to get word of mouth going and build an enterprise sales force and a product support team and go speak at user groups. Way easier. It didn't force me to figure out totally new partnerships or work with organizations I didn't understand.
Ezra Klein: I'm interested in this upstream/downstream distinction you're making. What are the problems where the impediment right now is a lack of mobilization and coordination of our existing resources? And what are the problems that, in your view, are waiting for a technological breakthrough to become solvable?
Bill Gates: Mankind went until something like 300 years ago with average lifespan staying at 26 years and under-five mortality being over 30 percent in the very best countries.
There's no doubt that energy intensification, which led to mechanization, which led to electrification, which led to the ability to deliver food year round — they are the things that have allowed us to get under-five mortality from 30 percent to now five percent. We’ve got average lifespan worldwide up to 62 years from 26.
But take northern Nigeria, which is actually financially better off than some other countries. Why does it still have about a 13 percent under-five mortality rate, when you can go to poorer countries like Ghana or Rwanda and they have half that? That’s a delivery system that is working very poorly.
So, yes, the world would be way, way, way better off if you could get maximal usage and competent delivery systems and explanation to everybody in the world. You ought to be able to counsel safe practice, like use condoms with people you might be at risk of acquiring HIV from. And in some countries, that message — in most communities in some countries, that message absolutely gets across. But we're going to need more than that before we can go for HIV eradication. When we finally defeat HIV, there will be at the core of that a drug or — almost certainly a vaccine — that's pretty phenomenal. And then you'll see the uptake in some countries will be very rapid, and the other countries won't be.
Ezra Klein: One of the things I was interested to see in your letter was the optimism about using online education as a way of revolutionizing school systems in the developing world. There's currently a lot of online education experimentation even in the US, but it hasn't caught on in a way where it’s a substitute very often for more formal education.
You've done a lot of work in this area. I'm curious what you've concluded, what you think are the approaches that have promise and what you think needs to be changed from the model most people think of when they hear "online education," which is a teacher in front of a camera connected to a broadband connection.
Bill Gates: That’s what online education started out as 15 years ago. The idea was if we stuck a camera in a Harvard classroom and just let somebody click on that, then the world would magically be changed and tons of people would watch those things. In fact, I did watch a ton of those things. My favorite course on crystallography and physics happened to be on open courseware.
But for most people, it just wasn't enough. They could turn on that first lecture, but as soon as they'd get confused, they'd drop out from it. It didn't have the kind of social structure and supports that we think of in typical education.
When we think of the potential for online education, there are two different ways to look at it. One is to say, "What about the motivated students that really know they want to learn?" You know, this is the equivalent of when a Carnegie library would go up in a town, who were the strivers that actually went in there and started checking out books and got a real uplift because of that availability. Is that 10 percent of the kids, 20 percent of the kids? Now add online support, bulletin boards, interactivity, feedback, personalized progress. We will get those things in different languages for different subjects in extremely high quality for free, delivered even to fairly small screen sizes, connected up over mobile networks.
The much harder question is the goal of motivating and educating virtually every child in the society. Without a very strong teaching core that can create the strong social structure and the sense of why you need to do those things, you're not going to get every kid in the inner city in the US or the global equivalent. There, you've got to improve the teaching itself. But that, too, is subject to online tools where teachers can see what others do well, or they can get feedback.
If I told you a math teacher 50 years ago was better than any math teacher today, you couldn't say, "Oh, that's silly." Their blackboard, their chalk, were capable of expressing and motivating kids as well as most tools we use today. Saying this will be a magic 15 years in education, that's predicting something that there is no precedent for. It’s just like saying that we'll eradicating four diseases — that's unprecedented.
Ezra Klein: Before we go on to disease, I want to ask you about something implicit in the vision you just laid out. You talked about how a lot of these products are of incredible, incredible utility to the motivated. Kevin Drum, who writes for Mother Jones, has a line I've always thought was interesting, which is that the internet makes dumb people dumber, and smart people smarter. Do you worry about the possibility that the vast resources the internet gives the motivated, including online education, will give rise to a big increase in, for lack of a better term, cognitive or knowledge inequality that leads to further rises in global inequality?
Bill Gates: Well, you always have the challenge that when you create a tool to make activity X easier, like the internet makes it easier to find out facts or to learn new things, that there are some outliers who use that thing extremely well. It's way easier to be polymathic today than it was in the past because your access to materials and your ability if you ever get stuck to find people that you can engage with is so strong.
But to say that there's actually some negative side, that there actually will be people that are dumber, I disagree with that. I mean, I'm as upset as anyone at the wrong stuff about vaccination that's out there on the internet that actually confuses some small number of people. There's a communications challenge to get past.
But look at IQ test capability over time. Or even take a TV show today and how complex it is — that's responding to the marketplace. You take Breaking Bad versus, I don't know, Leave it to Beaver, or Combat!, or The Wild, Wild West. You know, yeah, take Combat! because that was sort of pushing the edge of should kids be allowed to watch it.
The interest and complexity really does say that, broadly, these tools have meant that market-driven people are turning out more complex things. Now, you can say, "Why hasn't that mapped to more sophistication in politics or something like that?" That's very complicated. But I don't see a counter trend where there's some group of people who are less curious or less informed because of the internet.
I'm sure that was said when the printing press came along and people saw romance novels and thought people would stay indoors and read all the time. But I just don't see there being a big negative to the empowerment.
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Ezra Klein: Sure. You said you believe we’re going to be able to eliminate four diseases in the next 15 years. I wanted to get you to expand on that a little bit. We've been through this year where an infectious disease was more prevalent in the headlines than I've ever seen one before, despite the fact that as horrifying as Ebola was, its toll was much lower than diseases like malaria and pneumonia that we know much better. Where are we now, and where do you think we're going to be able to go in the next 15 years?
Bill Gates: I'm saying all these positive things, so let me just say one negative thing. The world is way less prepared for the next epidemic than it should be. And the only good thing that can be said about Ebola is there's a chance, and just a chance, that we'll look at how slow we moved and the decisions that were made and get better prepared because the chance of something that's more infectious than Ebola coming along is high enough that it would be very wise to be prepared.
If you take some high threshold like 10 million or 50 million deaths, what's the chance that 10 million or 50 million people will die in the next 20 years because of some event?
Well, there's no earthquake or volcano that would get to that magnitude. It would have to be a pretty large war. You know, that's a big war. You really only get World War I and II in recent past up at those levels. And look at the resources we put into being prepared for war. I'm not saying that's a mistake, but it's quite gigantic in terms of equipment, training, planes, and people who could go anywhere. An epidemic like 1918 Spanish flu was capable of getting up to those death levels.
Ezra Klein: Related to what you were just saying about pandemics, what do you think people in the developing world should be most worried about? We talked a little bit earlier about how the news media tends to focus on very pressing, spectacular threats that are often blown out of proportion to their actual risk level. What’s beyond the scope of your organization that keeps you up at night?
Bill Gates: The one problem of great importance that we don't address directly is the quality of governance in poor countries. In most developing countries, the quality of governance is really holding them back. Nigeria is kind of exhibit A here. The last two countries we had polio in are Nigeria and Pakistan. So I've gotten to learn a lot about Nigeria and Pakistan. If the Pakistan government was really good, how many more children would survive? How many more children would get educated?
