This week in PopTech: Violence interruptions, strange stirrings and gap year options
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Friday, January 28, 2011 UTC
There’s always something brewing in the PopTech community. From the world-changing people, projects and ideas in our network, a handful of this week’s highlights follows.
- According to Roger Ebert, The Interrupters, a documentary that reveals the amazing work of our friends at CeaseFire, is “Oscar calibre”. CeaseFire is a national and international public health strategy based in Chicago that has been scientifically proven to reduce shootings and killings using behavior change and disease control methods. The Interrupters had its World Premiere at Sundance 2011.
- Last week Clay Shirky took on Tunisia and the political power of social media on Public Radio International’s The World. This week Shirky was part of a panel focused on WikiLeaks, a production of the Personal Democracy Forum.
- Social historian Stephanie Coontz talks about her new book, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s on Fresh Air.
- Global Citizen Year was cited as an example of how a gap year between high school and college doesn’t need to break the bank by offering scholarships to help defray the cost. “What we’ve seen so far is our kids after this year are hungry for college,” explained CEO Abby Falik. “They have a skill set that will help them be much more self-directed.”
- 2002 PopTech speaker, Stephen Wolfram compares the alternate ways that Wolfram|Alpha and IBM’s Watson approach answering questions. In brief, Wolfram|Alpha deals directly with raw, precise, computable knowledge while IBM Watson relies on statistical matching procedures.
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Image: Stephen Wolfram
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