KalahariLog

Technology Entertainment Design (TED) is a conference that has been meeting every year since 1990 in Monteray, CA. Speakers there are famous and even attendance is by invitation only and costs upwards of $5000. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, David Pogue, Bono, Peter Gabriel were among the speakers/performers in the last couple of years. Somewhat unexpectedly, given the exclusivity of the speakers and the attendees, many talks are available on video.google.com.

The most impressive talk so far has been that by Hans Rosling from Gapminder.org. He teaches global development and has studied hunger in Africa for 20 years. He argues convincingly about common misconceptions about development, economy, and statistics using spectacular information visualization to drive the points home. Seeing the effect of AIDS on Africa in 10 seconds was worth the several days it took to download the movie. This is by far, the most beautiful, insightful, and engaging visualization talk I've seen.

Ken Robinson's talk about education and creativity was also quite nice with its main message that "creativity is as important to education as literacy". The talk is a nice mix of clever jokes and serious thoughts such as "if you are not prepared to be wrong you'll never come up with anything creative" "we're educating people out of their creative capacity."