TED Community » Felipe Rocha

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Music and the arts. Improving education.

An idea worth spreading

Equality. Global cooperation. Better education. Art. All freedoms.

Talk to me about

Politics. Education. Design. Life. History.

People don't know that I'm good at

Drawing. It used to be I was known as the artist of the class, but those days are long gone now.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +1.00 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Talk: Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government

  Dec 8 2012: That's just the way things are done with git in the context of programming.
  
  Yes, git cannot check if a law is broken. But then again, what stops a legislator from passing a bad, or even a broken law? Nothing except the *discussion* they have with their colleagues before the law is passed.
  
  In the US, for example, it is possible to pass an unconstitutional law. The reason for that is simple: we can't include too many people in the discussion of those laws, otherwise we won't get much done. But that also means that not many eyes are looking at any given law at any given time, and since humans make mistake, errors end up happening all the time. So much, the US has a governmental body that checks whether laws are in accord with the constitution or not: the judicial branch.
  
  We should also consider Github's job in all of this. While at the heart of it, all that git really does is make sure people don't overwrite each other when working on texts collaboratively, Github's job is to provide a framework for discussion within the git platform. It's a easy looking website created to foster discussion. You *don't* have to use github to enjoy all the nice collaboration features git provides, but, it does wrap everything up in a nice, easy to use interface that removes any barriers anyone might have to spontaneously join a discussion.
  
  Normally, with the institutions we currently have in place, the discussion are limited to no more than ~500 people. Now, with the many tools Github provides, we can very easily scale the discussion to *tens of thousands of people.* Because there would be more people looking at a piece of text at any given time, that means less errors, less unconstitutional laws would pass, and more people would be able to directly participate in the democratic discussion without turning everything into chaos.
• +2

  A reply on Talk: Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government

  Dec 1 2012: I work with git on a daily basis (and let me add here I don't know how I lived without it before).
  
  GIT does its best effort to merge the code without any input from the programmers involved using some fancy algorithms that gives equal priority to everyone's code. If two programmers edit the same line of code, a merge conflict happens, and manual input from the programmers is required to resolve the conflict (although git will have done 99% of the job by then, so it really isn't that bad). It's the job of the programmer who did the changes last to fix the conflict- he gets a say which lines stay in code, and which do not (which is a fine thing to do, since all code must be approved by the project maintainer until it's accepted on the main codebase).
  
  GIT will not prevent you from deleting a file that is referenced by another programmers code, although, a program like that wouldn't generally compile. What the maintainer does is temporarily pull the changes, quickly compile it, and see if it passes some automated tests that were setup in advance to see if any new changes break the old code, so it'd be hard for the maintainer to accept those changes if the project is organized well enough.
  
  GIT will not protect you from screwing up your code. It will only protect you from overwriting each other's code (although one can easily write a plugin that can check dependencies for you, and warn you of the mistake beforehand).
  
  All prioritization are done by the maintainers themselves. Anyone can edit my code, but once the edits are done, I still have to accept those changes into my codebase.
  
  Does that answer your questions?

• A comment on Conversation: What about TED-based clubs in schools? TED-based classes?

  Mar 1 2011: Wow! Yeah! this is a great idea! About the curation, I think the video content in the website is already curated very well. Maybe you guys could start watching a TED talk every other week, and then having a discussion over the main ideas of that talk. Like some of the guys mentioned here, a facilitator is a must.
  Make sure to keep us updated on how this project of yours goes, so that it can then be expanded to other schools. And, maybe, who knows, this project grows enough that it spawns a TEDx of its own. :D
  (TEDxHS, TEDxHigherED anyone?)

• A reply on Conversation: How can we change the schooling system in a way that acknowledges the impact of social networks on current students' exposure to knowledge?

  Feb 27 2011: Well... that is one way you could use social media, but it is much more than that.
  One good example of how social media could improve education would be having a wiki all the students could edit on a particular topic. Then, say I found the second paragraph particularly useful in my study for my exam, I could "like" that paragraph. Then, my classmate sees that I liked that paragraph, he will notice my "like", and concentrate on studying the topics of that particular paragraph.

• A reply on Conversation: Are we too quick to write God off of our lives?

  Feb 27 2011: "Well. I guess I'm limited to merely accepting that god exists in your mind. Not more."
  
  I don't know what you mean by that...

• A comment on Conversation: How can we change the schooling system in a way that acknowledges the impact of social networks on current students' exposure to knowledge?

  Feb 26 2011: As a student and web developer myself, I caught myself thinking about this very topic the other day. Although I think the educational system should be more open to utilizing social tools, the reason the education market hasn't naturally converged into using these tools is just simply they do not add much value when it comes to school work yet.
  
  It is hard to use Facebook and Twitter in the classroom, because interacting with one's friends is, at the very core, very very different from interacting with one's classmates. Tools like blackboard, and other educational software are very slow, unimaginative, and not up to par to current web development standards.
  
  So, to answer you question, its not so much that the educational system is not trying to take advantage of this new technology, but the technology itself is lacking. Therefore, more money should be invested in developing well designed social tools that integrate seamlessly with both current social networks and school settings before anything else can be done.
  
  But I do agree with you, social networks will become assets in ones education in the future, because the possibilities are endless. :) And, once that happens we'll have an education boom like no other.

• A reply on Conversation: Is the TED site too slow for advanced operations like TED conversations?

  Feb 26 2011: I just sent a comment to one of my conversations and the website responded immediately. :)
  I also was finally able to change my profile picture, which I had been trying to do for a while now. Great job guys!

• A reply on Conversation: How can we change the schooling system in a way that acknowledges the impact of social networks on current students' exposure to knowledge?

  Feb 26 2011: I believe thats a rather shallow way of looking at the connection between education and social media. After all, getting an education is inherently a social experience. As Facebook has proven, social media is here to connect people in places where they couldn't before, because in the internet there is no distance. Everything is seconds away from you.
  
  Social tools, employed the right way, would allow students to study better, faster, and create more connections between different topics by allowing students to ask each other questions and receiving instant feedback from their classmates.
  
  Because of the way these tools work, a classroom of 500+ students, common in many college freshman courses, could easily collaborate with the same ease as a classroom of 30 students would. Students in that live in low income areas, such as in africa(through the one laptop per child or community lan houses, for example), could more easily communicate and improve their education. And these are only two examples of how social media could have real impacts in education.

• A reply on Conversation: Are we too quick to write God off of our lives?

  Feb 26 2011: You make a very good point. Some scientists have taken their beliefs to such an extreme that they are starting to sound like religious extremists, mainly because evolution is such a good attack on creationism. But that's all that it is: a good attack on creationism. Like many pointed out in here, evolutionism isn't creation. God hasn't been written off, just one theory about him has been written off.
  
  As far as we know, whatever God is, he could have started evolution and used that as his mechanism to create the world.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: Are we too quick to write God off of our lives?

  Feb 26 2011: I am purposively avoiding a more specific definition of God. The reason for that is that there is no way to get to such a definition without making a theological statement to what is the nature of God. I don't know if God is a metaphor, or if God is similar to us, for this discussion that doesn't matter.
  
  Since we are on the the topic, we also don't know if God is really omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, and/or omniscient. All we can say about God is that, whatever he(and I am also using he in this phrase for convenience, because we also cannot make statements about his/he gender) is that he possibly created us.
  
  I take it that by extracting ribs from men to form woman you are referring to the judeo-christian God, and no, that's not what I mean. Although I don't see what's wrong with the possibility of God having formed us so that we would look similar to him, or that he would extract a men's rib to form a woman. What I am trying to avoid is exactly that, make a statement about what I think God is or isn't. That kind of statement is beyond what science can answer.