Friday, October 13, 2006

eve ensler

I first heard about TED from Russell Davies (who else?). To call TED a conference is a gross misrepresentation. TED brings remarkably brilliant people from all fields, thought-leaders such as Jeff Bezos, Al Gore, Bill Gates, Malcom Gladwell, Steven Levitt, Jeffrey Katzemberg, Yo-Yo Ma, Sergey Bryn, Larry Page, and Ze Frank (the "how to dance properly" guy), with the only caveat that they can only talk for 20 minutes. TED has now started to make the presentations available for viewing and downloading. Go there, fast. In the meantime, I'll post links to the ones that struck me the most:
Eve Ensler, the author of "Vagina Monologues", she talks about her play and her crusade to stop violence against women.
Sir Ken Robinson, author and creativity guru on creativity and education.
Hans Rosling, founder of Gapminder, on how to make data more compelling.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been viewing the TED Talks for a while. Some truly excellent and inspiring material in there. I particularly like Hans Rosling's demo of data visualization.

mz

Nelson said...

thanks for the comment mz. I always thought that there's so much to learn from data (not that I'm a quanti type), but if you have good historical data, it's truly amazing to see the change in trends. And Rosling's software (more than that actually as he works with the agencies to make the data available as well) makes all those numbers really come alive.

Anonymous said...

Yes.
Other remarkable talks in my opinion are:
Richard Dawkins talking about evolution, and Ze Frank talking about comedy online.

Nelson said...

Ze Frank is a genius. I think he's the first "digital comedian" if you could call him that (do you know anybody else who's doing something similar?). Check out his website:
http://www.zefrank.com/