My view on TED talks

Down with a viral, I spent a part of the day watching TED Talks.

The first one I saw was by Sheena Iyengar, who strikes me as being completely in the Malcolm Gladwell mould. I forwarded it to a friend who promptly sent me an awesome talk by VS Ramachandran -- he spoke about his path-breaking work on understanding the human brain.

I spent some more time on the TED website and watched talks by:

• Nandan Nilekani -- He summarized his book in the TED Talk. Thanks, saves me the trouble of reading it :-)
• Aditi Shankardass -- She talks about developmental disorders in children diagnosed by observing behavior, instead of looking directly at their brains, leading to misdiagnoses (60% of autism diagnoses made by observing behavior are incorrect). Inspiring.
• Jane Chen -- She is building $25 incubators to save babies in the developing world. A noble pursuit, but while $25 may look like a huge saving from the $20,000 incubator that hospitals in the Western world have, it is STILL hugely expensive for her target customer -- the rural poor in India who cannot afford a bus ride to the free government hospital 4 hours away. This also came in for some criticism in the comments section for not having mentioned Kangaroo Mother Care which is available (freely and for free) atleast until the $25 incubator can be built and shipped.
• Ellen Gustafson -- This was a TED talk completely devoid of substance. So you get called to talk at TED just because of a marketing campaign you designed over bags?
• Nalini Nadkarni -- She spoke about her experience with trees and prisons. Mildly interesting.
• VS Ramachandran -- Yes, another one about mirror neurons. A must-watch. Behavioral research findings say children exposed to violence in cartoons and computer games get de-sensitized to violence. This talk probably holds the scientific key to the underlying reasons -- mirror neurons firing without the feedback from the sensory skin receptors.

My conclusion based on this completely random selection of TED talks: TED has some awesome nuggets buried amid talks that range from mildly interesting to complete "fluff".