EconTech

That’s right. If you are like me, and ignore 90% of YouTube clips that get across my screen due to the surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) small hit rate for clips worth watching, you can now sit down to some rather nice videos (and often, mp3’s, you can even avoid flash by downloading the mp4s) without having to worry about losing a significant number of brain cells in the process.

Welcome to TED Talks. Ok, so the site has some deficiencies (can you say, DIE FLASH DIE? I’ll leave that rant for another day) which causes it to be a bit slow, but on the whole, it is easy to navigate and has great content. Could it be better? Without a doubt. Suggestions for improvement? Link to the academic work behind the speeches: data sets, papers (published or draft form), books, etc. I was going to say, an RSS feed, but alas, I found one [see edit] Surprisingly difficult to Google. Apparently there are a lot of people named Ted or something.

While I’ve known about TED for some time, apparently I never spread the word about it. Some of my closest friends had no idea it existed. I’ll link to some of the ones I have most enjoyed (though I have only watched a handful of them, so I will not claim these are the best).

Emily Oster, What Do You Really Know About HIV in Africa? I still have to say, and this is very rarely said: A decrease in prevalence of an incurable, deadly disease is not success. Prevalence is the percent of people in the population infected. Incidence is the number of new infections, often as a percent of the population, sometimes as a growth rate of the disease. For prevalence to decrease in an incurable disease, THAT MEANS PEOPLE ARE DYING FROM IT AT A FASTER RATE THAN THEY ARE BEING INFECTED. Sure, incidence does appear to have dropped off significantly in Uganda for some time, but making the necessary death rate overcoming incidence lower still does not bode well for the people who died. To be fair, many of these deaths occurred before there were effective ARVs. Still, this is a pet peeve of mine. Nevertheless, the paper behind this talk is very impressive.

Hans Rosling, Debunking 3rd World Myths With the Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen (this is not an exaggeration, if you want to see data come to life in almost a literal sense, watch this. NOW. I’m sure publishers shudder in their boots at the prospect of paper becoming obsolete even for academic work.)

Blaise Aguera y Arcas Graphics on a 2D Display Like You Never Thought Possible, Image Linking Based On Visual Apperance aka aggregation of image metadata.

EDIT: Ok, so I put that podcast into my aggregator. Only to find out that it looks like it has every TED talk ever in it. So my aggregator is currently dieing from trying to download al of them. You have been warned.