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The birth of a word - Deb Roy

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TED Talk

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MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son's life, then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch "gaaaa" slowly turn into "water." This astonishing, data-rich research has deep implications for how we learn.

Deb Roy begins his talk by suggesting, “Imagine if you could record your life—everything you said, everything you did, available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them, or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered.” Would you want to do this? If yes, what would you hope to recall or discover? If no, why not?

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