Last night, acclaimed author and biologist (not to mention public enemy to skeptics and atheists) Rupert Sheldrake gave a lecture in Maryhill, Glasgow.

At the talk, Sheldrake spoke about his recent experience of being censored by the TED organisation. If you are not aware of the story, this past January in London Sheldrake was invited to give a TEDx talk on his book The Science Delusion—a book that calls into question some of the fundamental beliefs of science—which was filmed and uploaded to the TED website.

Sheldrake’s video was subsequently removed from the site as it was deemed to be “unscientific,” and his own reputation was called into question (along with fellow speaker Graham Hancock, the video of whose talk on consciousness was also removed). Understandably, this action upset quite a lot of people, both members of the public and professionals in various fields of science alike. A group of scientists and philosophers have publicly addressed the issue, and the response from TED’s Chris Anderson, at the Huffington Post.

In this audio clip, which was recorded by Innes Smith (of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research) Sheldrake talks openly about the controversy, the people he thinks were behind the initial censorship, and, having spoken to Anderson directly,  believes he was pressured into the removing the video and now regrets it:

 
With thanks to Innes Smith. The Scottish Society for Psychical Research can be found here. Sheldrake’s talk can be found here.

 
NBC-Universal Entertainment’s Lauren Zalaznick, head of cable’s Bravo network, delivered this brilliant, thought-provoking talk at TED Women on the ways television mirrors our national psyche. In it, she discusses the findings of an unusual study that correlated five decades’ worth of data about what we were watching with what was going on around us in a larger societal sense.

Zalaznick is someone who obviously must think a hell of a lot about these matters, yet the peanut gallery on YouTube has been unkind to her thesis, as if she was presenting it as hard science, which she’s not. Yes, there’s a fair amount of educated conjecture going on here, but there are a lot of valid directions she opens up that research like this could take. I, for one, found this talk fascinating (It would make a great book, too).
 

As a companion to the story about the UCLA near-riots, here’s a DIY education chaser courtesy of GOOD magazine.

We live with an economy and country where education is increasingly becoming either priced out of availability or a lifelong financial ball-and-chain turning students into indentured servants to the state that has paid for their education?