Randall Munroe, creator of the hilarious webcomic XKCD, gave a talk at work last week, and it was pretty interesting. I bring this up because he discussed the current comic in his talk. When the Google Labs Aptitude Test came out, Randall decided he was going to apply, but he didn't want to turn it in until he had gotten all of the questions. He ( Read more... )

Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting and author of Cable News Confidential, gave a talk at work earlier this week.

( A summary of the talk )

Mark Shuttleworth (co-creator of Ubuntu Linux) gives an interesting look at how Ubuntu is developed, and how it fits into the world. This talk, much like Ubuntu itself, isn't particularly technical although it makes reference to lots of other projects/programs that you might not recognize if you're not already familiar with open source software ( Read more... )

Google has several series of talks that are always going on. I think of them all as tech talks because that was the series I was first introduced to. However, they're apparently quite separate. Google periodically has authors come in to give talks about their books, and these are called the Authors@Google series. I've gotten to see Scott Ritter ( ( Read more... )

There is a fantastic tech talk about how to teach computer science to kids. Too often, they see the name and think it's about programming, and are consequently turned off to the subject. This kiwi teaches CS without using a computer, but has all sorts of fun, hands-on activities for kids to do as they learn about sorting and compression algorithms ( Read more... )

Google Video also has a Tech Talk on it about the history of copyright law, which was fascinating. He isn't great about handling the questions at the end, but the talk itself is pretty good.

( A summary of the talk )

Google periodically has visitors who come in and give talks on various subjects (a lot like the Nelson Series, but without a yearly theme, though most of them are CS-ey in some way). I have just found out that many of these are subsequently posted to Google Video so other people can see them, too. They're pretty great, if ever you have a yen for ( Read more... )