Ruminating Out Loud

Malcolm Gladwell is really good. Here is story telling at its best courtesy of, yet again, TED Talks. This one is about spaghetti sauce on the surface. On a deeper level, it is a penetrating look at horizontal segmentation and the transformation of perspective in problem solving from one of pursuits for universality to that of focusing on the variability within a population and the distinguishing traits of smaller entities. Enjoy!

Truly enlightening. Here is another one from the reservoir of knowledge:

I am impressed by those who engage in a thought process about an experience that is being had. This is a great example of that active form of learning; living and learning simultaneously! Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor explains, in a vivid talk given at TED Talks – a reservoir of knowledge, the experience she went through when she “had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one.”

Biography of Dr. Taylor:

One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness …

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.”

Here is an example of the kind of intellectually edifying stuff one can find at TED talks. James Surowiecki gives a good presentation on the emergence of social media post the 2005 Tsunami as a serious contender in news gathering and asks three relevant questions about blogging and wisdom of crowds:

1. What do blogs tell us about our ideas of what motivates people to do things?
2. Do blogs genuenely have the ability to access a collective intelligence that previously remained untapped?
3. What are the potential problems of blogs as we know them?

His description of the danger posed by difficulty of retaining individuality in a networked environment is compeling. The example of the colony of ants was apt.

In the electronic age, where accessibility of and access to information has been made dramatically easier, TED Talks is a very good example of a readily accessible and effective reservoir of knowledge. There are many other places where one can find videos of educational materials. But, I would argue that those that have as a high of a signal-to-noise ratio as TED Talks are far and between.