we give you think of tinkerers as trained engineers or specialists in the fields, but historically in this country tinkerers were really not specialist. they were journalists. certainly engineers can be tinkerers, but tinkering is doing their spare time, not in their work. ..

whether we teaching our kids the right things and a lot of people how come i get some offense. back into the schools, but i would argue it's not about teaching kids how to tinker. those kids know how to tinker if you give them things to play around with it will play about with them and see what they could make out of them. we become a test taking culture and teachers teach the test because they're under pressure to show higher scores for their district, but i don't think we really need how we seem to make sure we don't squash the team. too early.

my book begins with my own tinkering experience and that's when i sat on my. i was getting into the car and realized pretty quickly i damaged the screen. i realized i was working but couldn't read anything on the screen, so i took it to the local phone store, naïvely thinking they could fix it and turn in for another one relatively cheaply. it is my favorite part of the job that they don't let us do that anymore. he could sell me a new one. i said great. he said it's $450. so i went home and out of frustration did a google search

and found a group of -- videos on youtube maybe i can't get this to work. sorry. it's a technical difficulty here. in any case, i'll explain it to you. there's a video that told me how to take apart my very, remove the screen and put in a new screen. so i went online and got a special site and ordered a new screen for about $20 followed the video to the latter.

to my surprise when i opened it up, there were about five pieces. the screen, a circuit board and a keyboard and it works like new. that was my tinkering realization that we live in a culture now, where we are today needed by these high-tech devices we have an feel like we're not supposed to open them. companies tell us you're not supposed to open them because he'll void the warranty. if i was going to throw the thing out anyway, might as well give it a shot. turns out it wasn't difficult. humans made these in the first place, so theoretically it should be that difficult to figure out how to replace the screen. the book came out of the time after the big economic crisis of

2008, 2009. there's a lot of white-collar workers losing their jobs and worrying about what they actually did it, realizing we had become a huge service economy. the united states used to be a country that could make things and we don't make anything anymore. the united states still is a huge manufacturer. most of the things they make our high-end electronics items. the differences of course it these days we don't need as many people to make all of those things. we certainly are still manufacturing hub and there's been a trend of a lot of big companies like google and apple trying to manufacture some of their devices on american shores again. since that turned out to be a bit of a misnomer. i tried to pare down what

tinkering men, but also to think about whether we as a country have lost this tinkerings. -- there we go. or whether it was something that just needed to be refreshed or reawakened. as i've mentioned before, tinkering is not so much a specific set of technical skills. they tend to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. he picked up enough about textiles and models, programming to figure out how to do what you want to do and try to come up with something new. certainly skills are important, but they are means to an end. mastery isn't the point i guess.

the point is coming up with something new. before i start itself back into history a bit to talk about tinkering, i want to point out a few things right now that showed renaissance and tinkering. most people here have been to a maker fair. mark mathias has arranged some for the westport library. they're really wonderful festivals of all sorts of tinkering and electronics in art and music. another thing going on these days are these so-called hacker spaces are tinkering, workspaces where you essentially go when and there's all sorts of high-tech equipment you can play around with. it tries to address the problem that some people have mentioned, which is in the old days when

tinkering wasn't so high-tech, most people had a workshop in their basement and it has the tools they needed to do anything. today, a lot of people can't afford the more high-tech names that might be needed to do different kinds of tinkering, but you can certainly go visit one of these tech shops for a day or however long you need and try out some of the equipment. hackers are obviously something that i've come up a lot in contemporary culture. the one i focus on in my book is a young guy named george chauncey famously roped into an iphone in a few years later into a sony playstation and in particular tried to sue him, but eventually they hired him. to help him out and figure out. i guess my point is hackers can

be tinkerers too. there are some that are more at ease than tinkerers, but they certainly enter at some level. i think the main thing that's most important about tinkering is there's a certain amount of humor to it. i believe this mouse was dead by the way before they made it to a mouse. receipts. i've tinkering. all the best tinkerers will tell you they did what they did and developed innovations they did because they were enjoying what they were doing. i think that is the key element. now i'm going to go back because

in my book i sort of try to get to the campaigns and we can talk later how american tinkering differs from tinkerers around the world. but there's something about this country and founding fathers they seem to bake tinkering and to our original history. obviously, ben franklin is sort of held up as the original rate american tinkering and inventor. he invented the lightning rod, bifocals, hermione a monoceros another thing. he was also considered a huge source of wisdom, which is great and the really interesting figure. the only thing is he raised the bar kind of high kind of early. i mean, he made tinkering sound like a daunting thing. another thing interesting about

franklyn and this is the way to open things up in the book a little bit in the sense that as i understand it, tinkering is as much a mindset as a result of what tinkering on her. i argue in the book in some ways the u.s. postal service has the greatest tinkering project because it had such an impact on american society and was something he had to work out and he a long period of time before it ever goes into reality and those kinds of virtual tinkering can be a sizable as the physical tinkering as well. the other thing that is interesting about franklyn is that it wasn't the only founding father. if you look at a lot of time,

many of the original founding fathers of this country were sort of lifelong tinkerers. george washington been the biggest of all. as a young man, he pursued cutting-edge framing techniques. he wanted to find the best fertilizer come in the best way to prevent plant diseases, the best method for cultivation. he on that lot of land, said there was a real need for it. this is something he pursued throughout his life. his other passion product was the building of the potomac canal. he was obsessed with this through his presidency, through the rest of his life he actually died with the canal not finished. he had ideas about it. he wanted to hire engineers to help him build it. at that time in the country, there were no trained engineers.

they had to consult engineers in anchoring. in fact, the techniques he used to develop it ends up being kind of wrong. eventually it was built with a totally different technique, but was something he pursued because that's what he was interested in. of course thomas jefferson invented the tilt site pile, the macaroni machine. james madison invented a walking stick with a microscope to observe organisms on the ground. i think it didn't catch on because he was about five foot two. it didn't really catch on. alexander hamilton found that the federal reserve. the point is clearly these are men of wealth and leisure in some ways, but they were found in the country.

it had a lot of other things to do, but at that time they pursue tinkering is figuring out solutions to problems throughout their lives. i don't know if television changed that are sent name, but benjamin franklin was not the only tinkerer at this time -- great tinkerer at this time. to jump to contemporary tinkering, identifying the book dean kamen has been sort of the contemporary tinkerer. for those of you who don't know who he is, he's a serial inventor. he made his original fortune with a series of infusion pumps that allowed patients to receive medication around the clock without having a nurse price and, but he also invented a walking wheelchair, which never

caught on, but he built this gyroscopic technology and the idea was he met upon a wheelchair to climb upstairs, so he invented -- came up with this ingenious technology to do that. it didn't catch on. they were very expensive. he's probably best known for the segue, built on the same technology as the walking wheelchair. i guess the segue eventually became a running joke. at a party or member when the segue came out a number of years back, it was hailed as the future of transportation. it was going to change the way we lived. unfortunately, a lot of cities and their use on sidewalks. they are still in use obviously.

i know a big warehouses they use them. amazon uses them in the warehouses and there's a lot of segue tours around the country. if you are in a city come you can take a tour on a segue. the technology is around and maybe we'll have some bigger use in the future. the point is that he obviously became wealthy off of his inventions, but if you look at how they track over time, you couldn't necessarily put them together and say he knew exactly what he was doing. in fact, the way he first got in was building the slideshows that that were synchronized to music and he eventually was able to install some of that technology as a teenager at the planetarium in new york. so you know, tinkerers don't

necessarily know where they're going, but they can still end up doing great things. i also talk about thomas edison in the book. of course the inventor of the century. he was held as the wizard of admiral park. again, probably the same issue is that he raised the bar so high in terms of what people thought of tinkering that he almost seemed otherworldly. but i tell the story of my book at the mention of the device in this photo, which demanded being a novice take haitian machine. it was actually the photograph. he came up with the first photograph that was workable and relatively easy to produce, but edison hated music and he

couldn't fathom why anyone would want to listen to this debate and spend their leisure time listening to music. so he spent a number of years pursuing what he thought was the midmarket for this device, which was in office dictation machine. it didn't work out that well for him. he obviously had other success is, but he never really made much money. it's interesting also to think about the time and people didn't understand how electricity works very well at that point, so a lot of things they disregarded his magic. they actually thought he was a wizard, but he represents the connection between the origins of tanker in the u.s. and the contemporary version of it because he was sort of -- he was

a great man. he had these great ideas in a spewed out of his head so the legend went and he would have his assistants figure out how to make them work and that became the new archetype for how to tinker and innovate. in fact, you could argue that his lab was the first research and development operation in the modern sense. but again, he just couldn't understand why people would want to listen to a photograph for entertainment purposes. the company that eventually did commercialize the phonograph called american crop of phones included alexander graham bell is a partner, which was particularly upsetting because

he didn't see the telephone is being a worthwhile device either. so i guess my point in all of that is just saying it if it didn't always get it right, he was always smiling through everything, then surely it's okay for all of us as well. i mean, if you read the accounts of how most of his most famous inventions are realized, it is composed was very frustrated assistance in midnight dinners. it wasn't particularly easy. back to the idea of tinkering as something conceptual, starting in the world war ii era, i started became intrigued with a guy named thomas mcdonald, who

was really by most people's understanding a career bureaucrat. a guy who grew up in the midwest in iowa and a farming community and watched throughout his childhood, as farmers struggle to =tranfour their props on dirt roads so muddy that sometimes they would stay home for weeks at a time until the rosewood dry up and they could go out again and transport their crops. after go into agricultural college, he came under the spout of a guy named anton mark jen, who was 15 at iowa state agricultural college, who is a proponent of the good rose movement. the good rose movement was promoted the use of bicycles because cars were around when it started. the idea was to build more

public roads so people could ride bicycles more. eventually, cars became popular and he went on to become the head in washington and later created the higher education board and highway officials. the reason i think of him as a tinkerer was because he over a period of years pursued this idea that there had to be away to construct and facilitate the construction of the interstate highway system throughout the country. the big revelation he had eventually was it had to be a federal state highbred and the idea was to build roads for people were going to go over they wanted to go as opposed to where they were already going. before the, most roads rebuilt to see there was a lot of corruption and misdeeds and

nothing got done and in fact it, it was really this conceptual idea that he came up with they made the interstate highway system happy. the only other two great programs in history or that of the roman empire under julius caesar and that of napoleon's france. so of course the u.s. was the only one built under a democracy. but there's something about the idea of bringing, working a series of highway spending treats me and made me realize a lot of the innovations in the latter part of the 20th century going in today's society started with tinkering with ideas and hopefully does that

sometimes they now been two natural physical things that would change our lives. so i talk about the rant corporation, which of course is the originator of game theory. brand was an organization founded during the cold war and the idea was to protect national security. but they came up with all these intriguing ideas about how to tinker with ideas that would somehow protect us better than the ideas we are jihad, so game theory was one of those trying to apply mathematical approach to probability into human behavior. later on in the 70s, the 60s and early 70s, xerox famously, which is based in sanford, connecticut at the time,

famously created the palo alto research center known as part and palo alto, california. this was known as being one of the great research and development experiences. experiments, i'm sorry. the idea that they would fund research without any product in mind. they were going to see what came out of it and that was unheard of at the time. there was something you didn't know what would happen if it. it is a very hurtful experiment. they hired mostly former academics. not many people who have lived in corporations. one of my favorite stories about park was their version of pizza

dealer, which was an old winning strategy for the game of 21, but they use it in terms of tossing around ideas and would sit in these mustard colored beanbags in the 70s and somebody would present their idea assertive explained why it was wrong and this is a big departure from edison did in his lab, or at a or at a synod had the idea and say you guys do it. some great things came out of it. the most famous one is probably what most consider the first personal computer. in a lot of ways, it similar to what we think of as a computer that had a mouse or windows, software alleman and this came

out at these tinkering sessions. when they showed it to the seats and stanford, they said it didn't make any sense. at the time, most computers typically would be an operator and you would submit your request and the operator of the computer could execute it for you. so they didn't see a point for it. steve jobs famously wheeled his way into the labs. he traded some shares in his young company, out o. java look at what they're doing.

so xerox never made much of the alto, but obviously steve jobs did. the point airwaves in a corporate sense, it is not enough to have an idea. there has to be a climate in which those ideas can become realized and become commercialized to make it all happen. so there is some serendipity to it and i think that is probably worth acknowledging. another tinker that i spoke to for the book is the sky, nate denver followed, microsoft's chief technology officer. he left in the early 2000.

obviously did very well and when not to do interesting things after that. some people might know him from the scope bookie put together as he's known to develop this whole school of scientific cooking, so he applied science and the book i think it's a $450 book or something. but as a whole new way of cooking. the other thing he found -- found dead with intellectual cookers, which is interesting because he was trying to address the issue that it was such a problem in the 70s, which is how do you commercialize these great ideas that tinkerers, points without either having them go elsewhere to develop

them or just not develop them because the corporate climate isn't right. intellectual adventures is not a venture capital firm. it's an intellectual or venture capital firm. the ideas he gets all different types of innovators, inventors together in a room and they try to brainstorm and come up with solutions to the world's big problems. my favorite one is a laser bug zapper they developed to help fight malaria in the bill and melinda gates foundation has gotten involved and hope to find it because apparently it's very effective, but they have come up with some novel solutions for addressing climate change and

archives of power solutions. so it's an interesting model. it's still a little early to see whether it will really grow into something big, but it is interesting. i mention alexander hamilton's original tinker. people don't think about what happens a couple years back if you think of it in a positive sense. there's obviously a lot of horrible things that came out of people on wall street. the point i make in the book is things like credit defaults loves collateralized debt obligations were initially invented to solve problems, not to create one's and in the case of the debt obligations, for

example, two people at jpmorgan looking for new ways to offset risk for some of their clients. and so that's what they were trying to do and they're putting together these mortgages and slicing them up inside them as securities because it. made sense. unfortunately, there can be a dark side to tinkering obviously. and in fact, probably the darkest part of that financial tinkering with most people, other than the people who came up with it in the first place didn't understand it. so that is something we deal with a lot in contemporary society. when you tinker at a high level with financial tinkering or technology, when there's a gap to train understanding what is being done about the average

person can comprehend sometimes creates problems. remember back to edison, they thought electricity was not shaped. as a learning curve. not to say people can't catch a. this is another guy interviewed for the book, and interesting young tinker, professional inventor named salk returned who is originally from australia, but it then had a lot of interesting thing, including wind turbines that float in the inner is supposed to be non-manque pose and allows them to get into stronger currents and therefore be more efficient and this also thought about how

to make tinkering more fun again and has come up with interesting websites and things. one is actually where the mouse is a mouse experiment, but a lot of these sites are really interesting because there's all sorts of products on their you can download and some of them are very basic and some are high-tech, but instructions are there so you can pretty much make that. i mentioned before the idea of american tinkering versus tinkering around the world. one of the things i want to look at his further things going on outside the united states we can learn from. one of the people i talked to who is not american was carlos

brandenburg. his name probably doesn't bring about that he's the father of mp3 files i created a revolution and offended the court and industry. and he -- what is interesting about how he developed the technology for the mp3 file stood in stark contrast to how we do things in this country. he's hurt for a long time at the fraunhofer institute in germany, which is a serious offense to choose all over the country that they get public money, but they also have to earn their keep the slow. so he was a professor, but he was also working on projects with moneymaking potential.

what is interesting is the mp3 technology -- the original goal was to find a way to transmit high fidelity music over a phone line. i'm not sure why, but that is what developed into mp3 is an impression technology so you can get high fidelity music into a much smaller file and transmit it much more easily. the after effect of that -- there we go -- with napster and all sorts of other things that created a lot of confusion and unhappiness in the music world in the united states in particular. a lot of the large recording

companies try to shut napster down. many other services path to. they try to essentially ban mp3 files, which never happened. it's still the most common form of music technology. so i guess my point in looking at something like that is in our country, traditionally was a lot of federal money that went towards research and development, but there's a lot less now in the u.s. compared to other developed countries and that is something that needs more looking into. and then i also looked at different kinds of conceptual tinkering. this woman is whose name is jane

can, her most famous building as the article building, a residential condominium. this herb concrete balconies to create the site building is on michigan said they are echoed in the lake. it was interesting about how it was developed is the way her firm marks, in which is a collaborative tinkering environment where they work in small groups and she works in an office that's only slightly secluded, so she can come look at what everybody is doing. i've seen a few other companies, particularly computer software companies or they have two engineers had a computer at the same time to get anything done. the idea is you don't know which

are going to stumble upon and it takes two to make sure you capture all that tinkering goodness. i also looked back overseas at the creators of angry bird, a company started by a guy named nicholas had and what was so interesting about the way angry birds has developed, again commend these guys are starting their own gaming software company, but they couldn't afford to spend their time develop name this new game they had an idea for her, so they would only work on angry birds in their spare time. instead of market research unit, they just kept working on it and basing this solely on the face programmers that was fun and it took them a long time to do it, but obviously angry birds became

a huge success. so again, i get the idea there's a reason why startups, particularly -- sorry, i stalled out here. there's a reason why startups typically perform better. [inaudible conversations] sorry, this is not trained to resolve. we had to change computers. we took the connections to the videos of, so we'll play a video set up a.

>> there is a reason why startups tend to come up with a lot of great innovations these days, not large corporations, but how we might get to start a house. on the imac [inaudible] >> i am a contract computer science by trade, but i'm the founder of something called the tinkering school. it's a summer program, which aims to help kids learn how to build the things they think of.

so we built a lot of things and i do put power tools into the hands of second graders. so for thinking that sending your kid to tinkering school, they do come back scraped and bloody. the book is called 50 dangerous things. the number one, play with fire. learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in nhl's personal history. but they remember it or not, it's the first time i get control of one of these mysterious things. these ministries are on the field to those who get the opportunity to play with it. one of the great things we ever discover. they learn basic principles about and take, compression, exhaust.

these are the three working elements of fire you have to have. you can think of the open pit fire. you don't know what they're going to learn. let them fool around on their own terms and trust me, they are going to learn things you can't get out of playing with dora the explorer toys. number two, on a pocket knife. pocket knives are drifting out of our consciousness, which is a terrible thing. ♪ >> welcome to five dangerous things you should let your children do.

i don't have children. i borrowed my friends children so -- [laughter] take all of this advice with a grain of salt. i'm gabe bertolli, a contract computer scientist by trade, but the founder of something called the tinkering school, a summer program, which aims to help kids learn how to build the things they think of. so we built a lot of things. i do put power tools into the hands of second graders. if you think about sending your k. to tinkering school they do come back blues, scraped and bloody. number one, play with fire. learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in nhl's personal history. whether we remember or not, it

is the first time we get control of a one of these mysterious things. these mysteries are revealed to the people who get to play with it. this is like one of the great things we ever discover, fire. they learn basic principles about fire, intake, combustion, exhaust. these are the three working now amends. you can think of the open pit fire assay laboratory. you don't know what they're going to learn from playing with it. let them fool around on their own terms. trust me, they will learn things that you can't get out of playing with dora the explorer toys. fastmac number two, on a pocket knife. pocket knives are drifting out of our cultural consciousness,

which i think is a terrible thing. [laughter] your first pocketknife is that the first universal tool you are giving. it is a spatula. it's a screwdriver. it's a powerful and empowering tool. they give knives as soon as their top players they have knives. these are children cutting whale blubber. and left a lasting impression to see babies playing with knives. kids can develop an extended sense of how at a young age. always cut away from your body. never force a end user thinks kids understand and practice the. i have some terrible scars in my

legs from where i sat myself. but they are god. they heal fast. [laughter] number three, throw a spear. it turns out her brains are wired for throwing things and mike muscles, if you don't use persevere. come and they to atrophy over time. when you exercise them come at any muscle as strength and that applies to your brain, too. so practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal lobes, which have to do with visual acuity, 3-d understanding and structural problem solving. it helps develop their projects of ability. throwing as a combination of analytical and physical skill, so that's good for whole body

training. these kinds of target these practices also helps kids develop attention and concentration skills. number five, there is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher. next time you're about to throw out an appliance, don't throw it out. take it apart with your kids. even if you don't know what the parts are, but they might be for is good to get this sounds they can take things apart and no matter how complex they are, they can understand parts of them and eventually they can understand all of them. so these but fox is we take for

granted are actually complex things and you can understand them. number five, a two-parter. break the digital millennium copyright act. last night [laughter] >> so he's a really interesting guy. he's down at the summer program originally called the tinkering school and at the tinkering school, kids go for a few weeks and use real tools to do things

like both suspension bridges in working roller coasters and ulcers of cool stuff. he became all know for this excerpt called five dangerous things you should but your kids do. we saw the first three of those. the last couple were break the digital millennium copyright act, we talk about filesharing and the other is that your kids drive a car. penny stacking about little kids. but you know, the idea is now he's cofounded a private school called her at work's, based on the same principles and the idea is immersive learning, that why you are learning things out of textbooks, you can also actually do them. so you can do the physics

experiment and do all these things simultaneously. it's an interesting approach on how to not so much teach kids how do tinker, but what they already want to do. so you now, back to the contemporary world, it's amazing every single day now it seems there are new source of indications that tinkering is taking on a sword of the earmarks of a mass phenomenon. make magazine, which is also part b. o'reilly media empire that helped start the affairs is a pretty cool magazine filled with experiments you can do on projects you can build. probably one of the best known

phenomenons that today's tinkering mode is kick starter. for people who aren't familiar with it, it's very tinkerers and inventors can pose products and, with a video pitch. people can go on and crowd fund innovation, which has created a system that has never existed before because you are essentially taking out the middleman that people have traditionally needed to get realized in two projects. some amazing things have happened. in the last week was an amazing campaign at a company can i really just two people called bauble works made happening.

they had this 3-d printing pen. i don't know if you're familiar with printers. we'll talk about that in a few minutes. but these pans you can draw 3-d objects with them in plastic comes out of the pan and it quite amazing. they had a pool of $30,000 to make this a reality. you can see what they're up to now. the idea is people who go onto the second pledge to the project and either go get the project when it's nadir sometimes there are some prizes if it's too expensive to be handing out to people. but it's an amazing phenomenon and it's going to be a very large company in the last couple years. there's other innovation

websites out there. you're seeing more and more tinkering incubators going online, which seems to kind of supercharged fan and i think that is a cutting-edge trend right now. i mentioned 3-d printing. the westport library as they had done this. the westport library purchased to 3-d printers and very safe third or fourth in the works now. this has become the new symbol of today's tinkerers. if you haven't seen one action, the ideas you can design a three-dimensional object on your computer and then printed out.

it's an amazing thing for inventors who can create a prototype very cheaply and kids enjoy them a lot too. if you can see upstairs in the westport library, we've got some young tinkerers assembling a new 3-d printers at the library just purchase, that is cheaper from the previous ones. the only trick is to have to put it together. they know their audience clearly. i just want to talk for a few minutes about what's been going on at the westport library because they mentioned at the start of my talk, by sheer coincidence as i was working on this but, the westport library was delving into this phenomenon

and bringing the maker movement into the library. so also is a projects are being realized on a daily basis amidst all of the books. and i think those three guys are in there right now. but it has been a great resources and there's other great plans in the works. the library staff has got involved, too. these are photos from a recent staff day at the library, where the staff members learned how to solder, which you wouldn't connect librarian soldering, do you think he will in the future because that knowledge can come from all different directions and you always need to know how

to solder if you put something with technology together. also, westport has hosted a mini maker fair and there's another great way to see where people from different walks of life are working on. i know that i went with my kid to the last one that we saw also assist us, photos of the 3-d printers the kids were making fun stuff with. one of the biggest head from last year but is the basketball playing robot, which were astonishingly accurate when they were being controlled by high school students about them with laptops. what's interesting is the robots were built as part of the first robotics competition. so again, it's not just a lot of

tinkering amongst adults, but a lot of interesting affairs to get kids involved as early as they can and trying to awaken the curiosity and the instincts of having fun that is so intrinsic to tinkering. here's just a few other things. the homemade submarine was pretty cool and i remember there is a brooklyn company that they had these plain cakes and essentially soldiered the mechanism and you could put it together yourself. so in conclusion, i want to save for me, doing my book became a much more exciting project than i thought it would be at the

outset, although i obviously have a deep interest in the starter. but i think that there's something intrinsic to the americans. they really works well with tinkering. the fact we still see brave people around the world to study and to work in the united states and a lot of high-tech fields is evidence that there's a lot of other enough to cause the frontier spirit or the cockeyed optimism americans have that tinkering seems to go so well with. i tend to be not to mess and think this whole new way of tinkering is going to bring on a new age of innovation. the key is from a corporate standpoint, figuring out how we

can not squashed too many innovations before they become fully realized. i want to thank you all for coming tonight. i know we are supposed to have a question-and-answer period. i think we have a microphone. i then am i >> that's a good question. i actually do talk about patents because there's interesting things about the patent law has evolved in this country. one thing that i've learned during research for my book is that the idea that invention has

some great new idea is sort of incorrect. .. people come up with a great idea and they are afraid they're going to steal it, but the reality is that it doesn't usually work that way. usually people try to steal that wants it is successful. so if you can get to the point, then you have a high-class

problem. i think it's natural for people, especially young people who think what they have come up with is, has never been done before but chances are, if you look back at the history of the airplane, before the wright brothers, people have been trying to build a flying machine or hundreds, thousands of years before that. they just happened to figure out just how they might do it in the way that it worked. >> i just wonder, are you a tinkerer, and if so, have you invented anything? >> i like to think that writing is tinkering in some regard. because you certainly play around with things that already exist for a long time and hope you're creating something new. so i do a lot of that. certainly as a kid, i tinkered a lot whether it was, our member having radioshack used to make these kits where you would connect wires and you could

build a radio or a flashing light array. i remember using those and chemistry set and all sorts of things. have i invented anything? no, i don't think i have. but you brought up a good point in the sense that i think the message of my book ultimately is not that everybody is an inventor, everybody is an innovator or even everyone is an entrepreneur, but, in fact, some of these ideas about tinkering and the tinkering mindset are very useful. i think the idea that coming up with something new involved a certain level of risk. oftentimes failure. i think we have become a society sometimes, particularly with kids where we try to protect them so much, but, in fact, failure is such an intrinsic part of creating something new and success that i think that, that's another reason why it's important to get kids involved

in tinkering when they're young. because i think that's how the world works. >> thank you for fixing the display by the way. >> you're welcome. do you see pockets in a country where there is the most tinkering happening? for example, -- from the east coast, the majority of those -- >> it's interesting. in fact, working on this is called the top 10 tinkering cities in the country, and so i may have an answer. year ride that obviously silicon valley has been for quite a while sort of tinkering central, ma but, of course, on the east coast you've got mit, the cambridge area. what's also really interesting though i think is that over time as you see these areas, cities

we don't necessary think of as being tinkering cities, that because they had made an effort to attract that kind of activity, have started, you know, growing into tinkering hubs. one that comes to mind right now is tulsa, oklahoma. i know that they have a big medical technology hub there, and there's a lot of start up companies happening there. going around the country there's just a lot of smaller cities that are seeing, well, this is a way to attract economic growth. so yeah, i think that there are a lot of other places happening. of course, with the internet it's becoming so much easier to share knowledge and, whether through skype or some other means, communicate in real-time

so that there are no longer the cultural and geographical reasons why tinkering what happened certain areas of the country. any other questions. can you turn that on? >> maybe we lost it. >> daniel, i don't think they can hear us. >> here we go. >> hey, guys. >> a. >> can you hear me? >> i can hear. >> i just want to ask you about what you guys are working on up there? >> right now we're working on a

$400 for deeper into. we have a portable assembled right now. this will move from side to side and then these rails are what gets mounted on. this news up and down. that's what we've done so far, and we're making pretty good progress. >> how long have you been working on? >> this is our second day working on it. not full days. when we got the printer initially, we build for a few hours, and today we've been working on it only a few hours. so we've made a pretty good amount of progress. >> when do you think you will be done? >> i think we will be done pretty soon. either late tonight -- probably next time we start building again, we will probably have it done in that session.

>> and do you have ideas of what you want try doing on it first when you're done with its? >> first want to see what kind of resolution it has and what it is capable of doing. then we might use it to print small objects and use the replicators we have four more long-term detailed objects we have. >> can you think of an example, what kind of object? >> a lot of things are like, we like to print whistles. there -- those are always fun to be. they could be little toys, too. >> are these things that you designed or our -- >> most of them are from the website, which is the website where people upload their design and you can download them for free. it's a great community and people have cool models. some of the stuff we've made ourselves, but a lot of the time you can find some pretty cool

stuff speak what was the thing that first got you excited about the 3-d printers? speed you hear a lot about on the news, on newspapers like the new your times. pretty much everywhere now. and when i started working at the library, once i had access to the 3-d printer, it was just a whole lot of fun because i could experiment on my own and learned a lot about that on my own. >> thanks are talking about it. good luck with the project. i can't wait to see when it's done. [applause] >> thank you. >> i've read about intel and other companies that are developing 3-d chips. are there any particular companies that are particularly involved in 3-d chips or

prominently -- >> i know that there's, i'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but i know there's a lot of companies right now developing 3-d technology so that you can, for example, control your computer or your television without a mouse. so it's all just your oriented, and it's all 3-d oriented, and there's a number, i know that, can't remember the name of the company, a small company that is partnering with asus and it's all going to be gesture-based. and i know there's a plug-in product you can buy at best buy this month i think that does the same thing. so we will be seeing a lot more of that. >> [inaudible] >> i'm trying to remember what

-- its gaping -- ever think about it for a minute i could probably remember. can talk to you after. i can look it up and i can county. but yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff like that going on. it's funny, even in the course of the past few years, i mean, you know, we have lived in this world of the personal computer for quite a while, but it almost seems like the computers are -- the personal computer will disappear in the next few years, and you will have some tablet base or one intriguing thing that's happening right now, i guess still in prototype is the google glasses we put on a pair of glasses and you are in the computer. you don't need the computer anymore. who we will see a lot more stuff like that. >> [inaudible] >> well, i guess you always need keyboard. maybe it will be a virtual

keyboard under the virtual keyboard -- there's another technology out there already where you can, it just projects a keyboard on your desk and you can type on that. >> any more questions? >> just a note, the three printers at the library were all donated, the three we have. >> thanks everybody. it was a lot of fun. [applause] >> every weekend tv offers 40 hours of programming focus on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. >> eric deggans is next on booktv. easy tv and media critic for the "tampa bay times," and argues that the need is fractured into even smaller divisions popular by pundits who play upon the fears and prejudices of their viewers to garner larger audiences. this is about an hour and 10

minutes. >> thank you very much for having me. of you to talk about some of the themes from a new book, "race-baiter." it's interesting. i got the idea a while ago to basically take all the writing that have been doing about race and societ society and media and of put into one book. and it was interesting. it was an arresting and it was depressing, to be honest. i was bring in this book right around march of last year. if you guys remember, around march of last year was when the trayvon martin situation became huge national story. and i'm sitting in florida close to ground zero. so with all this reporting going on about this 17 year-old kid, african-american, walking in a subdivision in florida, seemingly possibly mind his own business, and he winds up in a fight with the neighborhood watch volunteer and gets shot to

death. three weeks before my deadline, right? so all of a sudden i figure out how to incorporate all the stuff about race and media that came in the wake of that really explosive international story. and just as that is turned way down the sandra fluke situation happens with a student at georgetown university went before a congressional committee, wanted to talk about having her insurance cover contraception, and she gets called a prostitute and a slot by rush limbaugh on national radio. and that cost him 50 plus advertisers and actually threatened the whole business model of talk radio. so the talk reader chapter get to work over, right? so what it also convinced me of is a with the important idea, which is that america's trying something that is messy, complicated, but also really important. we are trying to build a country