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I've recently stumbled across something which I thought I would share with Barbelith, as I think a lot of people here would get a whole lot out of it.
That thing is TED Talks. TED is an annual four day conference in Monterrey California, and is attended by luminaries from across the spectrum of technology, entertainment and design professions and academia (hence TED). It's invite only and costs $4,000 to attend, but they've got pretty much every talk from the last three years of TED online, for free, in downloadable mp3 audio and MPEG4 video. I've been going through these archives for the last couple of days, and have been absolutely blown away by some of the talks on offer.
One nice thing too, is that attendees are limited to 20-30 minutes, which makes these a rather splendid download for listening to in the car or on the train. I have these playing in the background while I work, and they're just brilliant.
Here's a few highlights:
* Ben Saunders, 4th person to ski solo to the North Pole
* Dan Gilbert of Harvard on the synthesis of happiness
* Malcolm Gladwell talks about the theory of chunky spaghetti sauce and consumer choice
* Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics shows the parallels between McDonald's franchises and inner city crack dealers
* Eve Ensler talks about the founding of the Vagina Monologues
* Ze Frank talks about the democratisation of media creation through the provision of easy to use tools
* Jimmy Wales talks about the founding and evolution of Wikipedia
* Cameron Sinclair talks about the founding of Architecture for Humanity, and 'designing like you give a damn'.
* Al Gore talks about climate change, in an addendum to 'An Inconvenient Truth'
* Sir Ken Robinson talks about reforming education to focus on creativity.
These are just those I've managed to watch so far, and I hope other 'Lithers will have a dig around and unearth their own jewels.
Two meta-topics
1. Are there other resources online with this kind of fascinating, diverse content?
2. While these talks look amazing, it would seem to be a shadow of what the conference itself would be like - but the highly exclusive nature of the event itself seems to shut out both huge potential audiences for this kind of thinking and also creative input from those who can't attend, whether financially or simply demand (invitations are limited to 1000 people). What's the alternative? Is there one? |
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