While preparing for a visit to the University of Michigan, I was directed by one of my hosts to a fantastic source of free videos of lectures by a range of distinguished experts who speak about quite complicated subjects, mostly in a very accessible way.
If you don’t know it already, I’d strongly recommend a visit to TED – where you might like to start by watching Professor Peter Donnelly, an Oxford mathematician, who makes probability theory sound far more fascinating than anyone who ever tried to teach me maths or statistics.
The website introduces TED as follows:
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
2 comments:
Give http://poptech.org a try too.
Cheers!
- Lech
TED is an unbelievable website and I have spent quite a hefty percentage of my life on it. My favourite talk by far is the one given by Hans Rosling on his website "Gapminder" and the wonderful program he has developed to display complex datasets as easy to understand animations.
TED is WELL worth a look, and then another, and another etc etc
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