TEDxHomer Teens Team love that you are finding ways to integrate the TED & TEDx model into your students’ learning. Check out TEDxYouth@Homer on Saturday, September 10, 2011. TEDxRedmond and TEDxSpartanburg and 18 other TEDx events will be happening 9-10-11. If you have an IPhone, you can download the TEDxHomer app-created by the teens. Happy tweeting to #TEDxHomer…

If you would like to view our work please go to: http://www.CymaScope.com
We recently imaged the sound of a star for the first time and this can be viewed in our astrophysics section.
Happy browsing!

Capitalism was founded upon basic principles: production, supply and demand, and capital accumulation. It is a social theory whereby prices are determined by profit and loss, as well as market interest and fluctuations.

Although I understand the need for a free market enterprise, such a theory should not imply that we are willing to disregard our environment, or sacrifice the needs and comforts of our humanity in an attempt to realize higher profits (a.k.a., BP, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, etc).

Capitalism may be wonderful, but like anything else, it is still a flawed system. It’s a work in progress. It needs to be tweaked here and there in order to perfect its balance and to soothe the inordinate swings that occur day-to-day in our financial markets. If left unchecked, however, such a system will prove to be our economic downfall.

How so?

Well, for one thing, there is only so much profit a business can make from a product before it is left to cut costs in both quality and workmanship. In order to continually sustain a profit, businesses have to create those same products with lower quality ingredients and cheaper labor: which means that they must pull up stakes and move to other countries like China, Taiwan, or Mexico in order to survive. What does this eventually mean for people like you and me? It means that the very financial theory that promoted our country to super power status has turned on us. It means that the American workforce is now expected to work harder, longer, cheaper, and faster if we are to compete with the global economy now breathing down our necks.

Where do we go from here?

George Orwell had it right, to some extent, when he wrote his book1984. Many years from now, money will become worthless and the global populace will be employed and subject to hundreds (if not thousands) of individualized corporations that managed to survive attrition through merger aquisitions. It will be a feudalistic society: every corporation out for blood and vying for global dominance and absolute power. Our children and grandchildren will be there too: housed, clothed and fed by these various corporate entities; all the while being sent out on occasion, like brainless automatons, to errands of war, in an effort to absorb the weakest corporations into the fold. After all the dust settles, and everything is said and done, the remaining corporations will finally merge into a one-world government.

Science fiction, you say?

(…I’m left wondering.)

Raul Mindon
http://www.ted.com/talks/raul_midon_plays_everybody_and_peace_on_earth.html
It was successful because it inspired me. This caused me to go deeper to understand his point.

How I fell in love with a fish by Dan Barber.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html

It was successful because I could relate to it. I fell in love with hunting in a similar way he did with this fish and farm.

Least successful:

The beautiful math about coral.
http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_wertheim_crochets_the_coral_reef.html

I was my least successful because I could not relate to the video. I was not sure what she was talking about and I was not interested.