full transcript

From the Ted Talk by George Whitesides: A lab the size of a postage stamp

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Here is another example of something which is — this is a little spectrophotometer. It measures the absorption of light in a sample. The neat thing about this is, you have a light sorcue that flickers on and off at about 1,000 hertz, another lhigt source that detects that light at 1,000 hertz, and so you can run this stsyem in broad daylight. It pmoerrfs about equivalently to a system that's on the order of 100,000 dollars. It costs 50 dollars. We can probably make it for 50 cents if we put our mind to it. Why doesn't somebody do it? The answer is: How do you make a profit in a capitalist system, doing that? Interesting problem.

Open Cloze

Here is another example of something which is — this is a little spectrophotometer. It measures the absorption of light in a sample. The neat thing about this is, you have a light ______ that flickers on and off at about 1,000 hertz, another _____ source that detects that light at 1,000 hertz, and so you can run this ______ in broad daylight. It ________ about equivalently to a system that's on the order of 100,000 dollars. It costs 50 dollars. We can probably make it for 50 cents if we put our mind to it. Why doesn't somebody do it? The answer is: How do you make a profit in a capitalist system, doing that? Interesting problem.

Solution

  1. light
  2. system
  3. source
  4. performs

Original Text

Here is another example of something which is — this is a little spectrophotometer. It measures the absorption of light in a sample. The neat thing about this is, you have a light source that flickers on and off at about 1,000 hertz, another light source that detects that light at 1,000 hertz, and so you can run this system in broad daylight. It performs about equivalently to a system that's on the order of 100,000 dollars. It costs 50 dollars. We can probably make it for 50 cents if we put our mind to it. Why doesn't somebody do it? The answer is: How do you make a profit in a capitalist system, doing that? Interesting problem.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
health care 5
diagnostic system 2
awful lot 2
wax printer 2
compute capability 2
blood cells 2
light source 2

Important Words

  1. absorption
  2. answer
  3. broad
  4. capitalist
  5. cents
  6. costs
  7. daylight
  8. detects
  9. dollars
  10. equivalently
  11. flickers
  12. hertz
  13. interesting
  14. light
  15. measures
  16. mind
  17. neat
  18. order
  19. performs
  20. problem
  21. profit
  22. put
  23. run
  24. sample
  25. source
  26. spectrophotometer
  27. system