Best of TED (Part 1)

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and is an annual conference in California. There a lot of scientist, engineers, politicians, entrepreneurs meet. In the talks some of them present their current work or the current state of their field. The talks cover a wide variety of topics.
On the homepage ted.com some of the talks are available as videos. Every weekday a new video is added from some previous conference. The talks are always very interesting, and one learns quite a lot.
So far I have watched about half of the videos that have been published. Most of the talks are really good and worth watching. However, I have compiled a list of talks I liked best so far.

This list reflects my personal opinion and is not an official list published by TED.

The ratings under the videos are the ratings that have been given by the community on the TED-homepage. Even though I generally agree with those ratings, they do not necessarily reflect my opinion.

The list is in no particular order, so it is not a statement, whether a talk is on top of the list or the bottom.

For those who want to see more TED-talks, the full list of videos is available under: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/list.

I will continue watching the remaining videos and collecting the best of those talks. So when I have gathered the 50 talks, I will publish them as well. This, however, might take a while.

Video-Statistics:

David's Best of TED-List:

Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration
Adam Grosser and his sustainable fridge
Peter Diamandis on Stephen Hawking in zero g
Robert Full on engineering and evolution
Wade Davis on the worldwide web of belief and ritual
Robert Ballard on exploring the oceans
Brian Greene on string theory
Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks
Stephen Hawking asks big questions about the universe
Neil Turok makes his TED Prize wish
Jill Bolte Taylor's powerful stroke of insight
David Pogue on the music wars
Gever Tulley on 5 dangerous things for kids
Larry Lessig says the law is strangling creativity
Erin McKean redefines the dictionary
Patrick Awuah on educating leaders
William Kamkwamba on building a windmill
Rives on 4 a.m.

  • Rives on 4 a.m.

  • 09:16 Posted: Jul 2007

  • Rated: Funny Ingenious Fascinating

Rives controls the Internet
Richard St. John's 8 secrets of success
Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia
Julia Sweeney on letting go of God
David Pogue says "Simplicity sells"
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
Nicholas Negroponte, in 1984, makes 5 predictions
Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen
Peter Donnelly shows how stats fool juries
Charles Leadbeater on innovation
Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice
Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?
Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows
Amory Lovins on winning the oil endgame
Jeff Han demos his breakthrough touchscreen
Carl Honore praises slowness
Seth Godin on sliced bread
Al Gore on averting climate crisis
Al Gore's new thinking on the climate crisis
Tony Robbins asks why we do what we do
Rick Warren on a life of purpose
Laura Trice suggests we all say thank you
Ursus Wehrli tidies up art
Garrett Lisi on his theory of everything
Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child
Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, two years on
Nicholas Negroponte takes OLPC to Colombia
Benjamin Wallace on the price of happiness
Dan Gilbert researches happiness
Tim Brown on creativity and play
Scott McCloud on comics