TED talks, allow yourself to be inspired

Sometimes one has the unbelievable luck to find a true gem on the internet. This particular gem that I recently was introduced to is called TED and the website is plain www.ted.com. For anybody with a smidgen of intellect, which is all of you out there, this is a site to visit for a wow experience.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. The organisation which owns TED, hosts an annual conference which provides the opportunity for fascinating thinkers and doers to speak about their current obsession. The site showcases these talks via online video broadcasts. Treat yourself.

It’s almost impossible to decide which talk really grabs ones attention more. I was particularly fascinated by the presentation of a computer scientist and artist whose work is amazing. It so impressed me that it made me think of the new list of the seven wonders of the world.

I realised that none of the new seven wonders, see Wikipedia for full details, as recently voted for by a sort of public referendum, were in fact modern ones. Sure the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro was opened in October 1931, but the subject matter and presentation of the statue is hardly modern.

This list was compiled by popular vote. New inventions didn’t capture the people’s imagination. This is a real pity. People are imagining and creating some amazing new modern ‘wonders’. The talk by Jonathan Harris at the TED conference certainly took my breath away. He demonstrated several projects he had worked on recently.

The first one he demonstrated was a project called “We Feel Fine”. The software application he and some co-workers developed searches through blogs across the universe, collecting people’s emotions by searching for the words feel or feeling in sentences or statements.

Certain other statistics are collected such as time when the emotion was recorded as well as where the writer was and if possible age and gender. These feelings are then transformed into animated coloured dots of different sizes depending on how long the description of the feeling was. These dots dance around on a dark back ground. The software comes with all sorts of tools that allow one to analyse the information further.

A further project that he showed for the first time at the conference was called Universe. It is a software application that searches through news of the world and then compiles the events into a constellation of words and images. It’s like a tag cloud of the world’s collective consciousness.

All words, graphics and images are shown against a backdrop of the sky, imitating the idea of a constellation. Once one has selected an event, concept or person of interest the related points of interest revolve around the main selection as if it were orbiting around a world. It’s a fascinating visual design underpinned by an awesome software application.

Besides Jonathan Harris, there are many other fascinating presentations. In each one, one is amazed and excited to see the imagination and creativity that human mankind is capable of. An excellent article on the subject of imagination may be found here. I have had to limit my viewings of the TED site to a few a day. It is just too much ‘wow’ for me otherwise.