TED Briefly

Day Two was just as I expected – inspirational, insightful, compelling, and at times disturbing. I’m reminded of that hokey line… “I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.” Actually, it did.

With a jam packed schedule yesterday and today there is no time for a end of day summary (I do like to get some sleep.), but here are a few items.

Alisa Miller gave a great 3 minute short talk that visually depicted the aggregation of news reports across the world – content from the talk is also available here. This presentation showed how some stories, or even countries, are just not covered. Additionally, she described how our news feeds are quite redundant and we actually receive very little unique news stories, e.g. at one time there were 14,000 news items on Google News, but upon further study, these thousands of stories were only related to 24 unique news events.

Other TED Talks, have also used this unique view of the world with countries sized based on a variety of data. The maps come from a company called WorldMapper. I find these views of our world very compelling and an excellent way to visually depict worldwide data sets. WorldMapper currently has 366 of these maps available from their website.

Even on Day Two, I am still thinking about Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk on the stroke she experienced. If you can’t wait for the TED Talk, you may want to purchase her book, My Stroke of Insight, A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey available on the self-publishing site Lulu.

NOTE: eman’s views has now moved to emansviews.com. I hope you’ll stop by. 

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