Last February, at a TED (Technology, Education, Design) conference in California, a PhD student named Lior Zoref brought an ox onstage to perform a social experiment. He had each person in the crowd write down what (s)he thought the animal weighed and turn it in. While his assistants were tabulating the answers, he then went on to talk about the wisdom of crowds. James Surowiecki posed the same argument in his 2004 bookThe Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Its central theme …

The 2011-2012 winter was an intense and emotional season due to a very lean snow year that contributed to an unusually weak overall snowpack structure and layering. Trent Miesenhiemer and Craig Gordon produced this video for the Utah Snow and Avalanche Workshop that is held annually in early November. It is a very powerful piece that will remind you just how intense that season was. Here are some thoughts on the video from Trent's cousin Mark Seguin's blog: This video frames, what I will call, Snow …