TEDxLondon - Sir Ken Robinson - YouTube

Sir Ken Robinson, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in the development of education, creativity and innovation. He is also one of the world's leading speakers with a profound impact on audiences everywhere. The videos of his famous 2006 and 2010 talks to the prestigious TED Conference have been seen by an estimated 200 million people in over 150 countries.

He works with governments in Europe, Asia and the USA, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies and some of the world's leading cultural organizations. In 1998, he led a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK Government.

All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education(The Robinson Report) was published to wide acclaim in 1999. He was the central figure in developing a strategy for creative and economic development as part of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, working with the ministers for training, education enterprise and culture.

The resulting blueprint for change, Unlocking Creativity, was adopted by politicians of all parties and by business, education and cultural leaders across the Province.

Guitar and computer join forces to teach you how to play

The Tepoe Guitar kit includes a guitar (available in four different colors), headphone practice amp, headphones, digital tuner, guitar strap, computer screen protector, amp adapter plug, USB cable, wall charger, cords, pick, and gig bag

During those important early stages of learning to play guitar, when you need to grab every possible opportunity to practice, digital teaching aids like iPerform3D and the upcoming Rocksmith can be on hand whenever the mood grabs you.

There are also solutions that make learning available wherever your instrument happens to be - such as Castiv's Sidekick (along with an iPhone and the Rock Prodigy app) - and it's to this camp that the Tepoe Guitar belongs.

Rather than positioning the device screen at the end of the fingerboard, inventor Michael Tepoe Nash has sliced away a section of the upper horn of the guitar and placed a small computer there instead.

The guitar itself has a Maple neck, a 22-fret rosewood fingerboard and a humbucker-single-humbucker pickup configuration. Looking down towards the neck, the learner is faced with a small computer screen with physical, push-button controls that supports 720p high definition playback and has 8GB of internal storage (with expansion possible via SD card).

Nash has pre-loaded the Tepoe Guitar's computer with over 30 video lessons, more than 800 instructional diagrams, a music theory e-book, and drum and backing tracks to which students can play along.

Users can also upload their own content - such as video lessons from a favored instructor - from any Windows 7, XP, Vista, and 2000 PC via the included USB port.

The device is also capable of playing NES.net, GBA, and some 32-bit BIN and 64-bit games utilizing the game program of the guitar.

The computer includes its own external speaker, but audio can also be routed to headphones or onward to an amplifier via a 3.5 mm jack.

"For now we only have this one electric model which is geared primarily to teach the beginner," Nash told Gizmag.

"We do have plans on developing a more advanced model for the professional in the future similar to the earlier acoustic prototype, which has the capability of the contemporary laptop computer - including a digital recording studio, effects processor, Bluetooth, touch-screen, 60GB of memory, tablature editor, and many more features that will help the professional guitar player."

The Tepoe Guitar kit includes a guitar (available in four different colors), headphone practice amp, headphones, digital tuner, guitar strap, computer screen protector, amp adapter plug, USB cable, wall charger, cords, pick, and gig bag - and is available now for US$499.

Canine connection: Study explores how dogs think and learn about human behaviour

Dog owners often attest to their canine companion's seeming ability to read their minds.

How do dogs they learn to beg for food or behave badly primarily when we're not looking? 

According to Monique Udell and her team, from the University of Florida in the US, the way that dogs come to respond to the level of people's attentiveness tells us something about the ways dogs think and learn about human behaviour.

Their research, published online in Springer's journal Learning & Behaviour, suggests it is down to a combination of specific cues, context and previous experience.

Recent work has identified a remarkable range of human-like social behaviours in the domestic dog, including their ability to respond to human body language, verbal commands, and to attentional states.

The question is, how do they do it? Do dogs infer humans' mental states by observing their appearance and behaviour under various circumstances and then respond accordingly? Or do they learn from experience by responding to environmental cues, the presence or absence of certain stimuli, or even human behavioural cues? Udell and colleagues' work sheds some light on these questions.

Udell and team carried out two experiments comparing the performance of pet domestic dogs, shelter dogs and wolves given the opportunity to beg for food, from either an attentive person or from a person unable to see the animal.

They wanted to know whether the rearing and living environment of the animal (shelter or human home), or the species itself (dog or wolf), had the greater impact on the animal's performance.

They showed, for the first time that wolves, like domestic dogs, are capable of begging successfully for food by approaching the attentive human.

This demonstrates that both species, domesticated and non-domesticated, have the capacity to behave in accordance with a human's attentional state.

In addition, both wolves and pet dogs were able to rapidly improve their performance with practice.

Read more: Canine connection: Study explores how dogs think and learn about human behavior

The United Nations of science: We really need it

The United Nations of science: why we really need it - New Scientist

AS THE disappointment of the Copenhagen climate summit sinks in, you could be forgiven for despairing of science ever being put at the centre of international policy-making. But scientists are not giving up the fight.

This week, an important meeting is taking place at the Royal Society in London. The outcome will determine how the world's finest scientific minds engage collectively with governments worldwide to make sure they have the benefit of the best possible scientific advice.

The meeting is of a body you may never have heard of: the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), a global coalition of national science academies from Albania to Zimbabwe. Its task this week is to agree a way forward for scientific advice to government - how the world of science, speaking as one, can reach out to policy-makers to help solve the critical global challenges we now face.

The IAP was founded in New Delhi, India, in 1993 in response to growing concerns about world population. It has since grown in size and reputation as more and more academies have joined its ranks and new ones have been founded. From the Royal Society, the oldest academy in continuous existence, to the academies of Mozambique and Nicaragua, both founded a year ago, the IAP now has 103 members. The most recent member is the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan. It is the United Nations of science.

IAP has worked on issues as diverse as population growth, ocean acidification and the teaching of evolution. The organisation's ambition is to become the most influential voice for the world's scientists amid the clamour of politicians and lobby groups.