TEDTalks as of 06.16.11 | Hacker News Reader

TEDTalks as of 06.16.11

spreadsheets.google.com

179 pointsrobg56 comments

It is still really disappointing that TED never released the Sarah Silverman talk (http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/15/the-ted-v-sarah-silverman-f...). Isn't it their purpose to expose the ideas, and ours to contemplate them?

Their handling of that whole thing was, for me, the breaking point when I could no longer give them benefit of the doubt or any longer take them seriously.

I was in the audience at the time. It was awful.

I'm glad comedians are trying to reclaim the term "retard" but I had no context for it and it just seemed inappropriate.

Interesting thought about reclaiming the word from where I sit. As a trained chef (baker), the verb "retard" is commonly used for its meaning of slowing something down. This is usually with bread making, especially sourdoughs. Yeast development can be retarded using colder environments to enable better flavor and texture. Honestly, I have a loaf of bread retarding in the refrigerator now, and I'll bake it in the morning.

Since I work often with bakers and baking companies (marketing), the word is used often and I've never once heard someone make a crack involving the word's derogatory usage. Yet, I know the word is not one considered acceptable to use to describe a person or one's actions. But how the word is used in my world obscured its obvious position as something ready to be reclaimed.

That'd be ret-ARD, rather than RE-tard.

Or do Americans put the stress on the first syllable even in the verb? Stressing first syllables is a pretty common feature of American English.

re-TARD, actually.

And it gets stress on the the first syllable where it's used as a noun, second syllable as a verb. cf "address", "attribute". (I do realize the noun–verb distinction doesn't come play in the UK for the former.)

So shouldn't TED release the talk so we can all have the opportunity to come to the same conclusion?

Think of it from their point of view. They want to be known for brilliant talks, not crap ones. If it really was an awful talk, it devalues their brand to publish it.

A good chunk of the TED talks never make it to the site.

Really? Well in that case, why are we even having this discussion?

Damn you, internet!

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that.

The word was 'retarded'. Sarah never said 'retard'.

Yeah but TED talks are _heavily_ edited from how they appear live on stage. TED puts an insane amount of effort into making the talks appear fluid and this is subconsciously I think partly why TED has been successful (everyone seems inhumanely perfect and articulate). If a TED talk bombs, it can be tricky to edit it into a coherent whole - I can imagine this is doubly hard with a comedian because timing is so important.

Source: I bombed a TED talk at TED 2011 in long beach. But I'm only 22 so hopefully I'll have a chance to do it again right in the future :)

on computer vision? (judging from your profile) Any chance it's up so that we can see how it was edited?

indirectly, yeah (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/60024/). It's not up yet (despite all my testing/preparation the WiFi didn't really work so it was a little rough) - not sure if it will go up, I guess we'll known before TED 2012 :)`

I dunno, lots of the talks are stellar in person too... People practice a lot before they are allowed to go on.

Very true, although I think in person we're less sensitive to "um"'s and "ah"'s than we are when watching video due to the expectations set by professionally produced TV and movies.

Ah, I saw this talk from a live stream! Really felt your pain but I think the audience was sympathetic. I took it as a good lesson to have a demo-fallback which also works offline, although admittedly that's not as realistic.

we did have a fallback which worked offline. the problem was that without wifi we had to rely on the iPad's compass (previously, with wifi i was proxying gyroscope data from iPod Touches tucked in the back of the iPad cases) - normally this would have worked fine. when we were onstage with so many cameras there was so much current flying around that the compasses went completely haywire and we were truly fscked. I wasn't kidding when I said on stage that if the iPad 2 had come out a week earlier we wouldn't be having any problems :)

for you who don't have flash and don't feel like clicking to download, you can download an xml format file from http://metated.petarmaric.com/metalinks/TED-talks-grouped-by...

then we can script to extract the xml file get the ted videos, like:

wget -c -O "1984/Nicholas Negroponte in 1984 makes 5 predictions.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/4837/talk/230 wget -c -O "1990/Frank Gehry as a young rebel.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/4047/talk/231 wget -c -O "1998/Aimee Mullins on running.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/5996/talk/443

...

wget -c -O "2011/Wadah Khanfar - A historic moment in the Arab world.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/11071/talk/1084 wget -c -O "2011/Wael Ghonim - Inside the Egyptian revolution.mp4" http://www.ted.com/talks/download/video/11086/talk/1086

I wrote a script to do that for you. [1] (and am having my server download the first fifty listed in the xml file). I'd like to point out that there's a little bit under a thousand talks, so I highly recommend you only download a few videos at a time. (each video is about 40 mebibytes. [2] Roughly 40 gigs of video.)

[1] http://pastebin.com/RXzTpbGt

[2] Average obtained by downloading 50 videos, and averaging those.

Edit: fixed bug in script.

"Download 'em all" for firefox supports metalink, no need for a script

Love this spread sheet!!! Who ever built, keep it up! There is just something so simple as a spreadsheet instead of tons of useless graphics especially when you already know and love the product.

Channel 264 in topchan.tv is for the TED videos. You can watch all of them one after another.

http://www.topchan.tv/show/public1/264

It's low on the list, but my favorite is:

Ric Elias: 3 things I learned while my plane crashed (http://www.ted.com/talks/ric_elias.html)

"Ric Elias had a front-row seat on Flight 1549, the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. What went through his mind as the doomed plane went down? At TED, he tells his story publicly for the first time."

"Don't argue about things that don't matter with the people that matter". Powerful words there.

The great thing about HN is that it provides an opportunity to do the opposite.

Love TED talks for the amount of information that is freely available to anyone with an internet connection. Alot of it isn't terribly useful, but just knowing what kind of amazing things the top minds in the world are thinking about and working on is a great way to remind ourselves what is really going on in the rest of the world outside of our current social bubbles.

TED talks sorted by "engagement": http://goo.gl/zFAp7

I just knew someone else would have done this when I looked at the original story, that was the first thing I thought was missing - some context as to which ones are popular. Awesome!

This spreadsheet is gone. Google says its might have been deleted by the owner.

Is it still gone for you? I just checked and can see it.

Does anyone know of a way to keep synching all the TED videos as and when they are uploaded? My goal is to maintain a local copy on my machine so that I can view them whenever I like. Any downloaders that can do the job?

iTunes?

The itunes app has only 117 videos? Or are you mentioning some other method? While the http://metated.petarmaric.com/ link mentions a total of 936 downloads

Ah OK. I mistakenly assumed that iTunes had them all.

Miro

https://bitbucket.org/joedicastro/ted-talks-download/wiki/Ho...

My friends love TED Talks and I thought I share the spreadsheet on Facebook. I was surprised that Facebook considers the link spammy and would not let me.

Chrome also does not allow me to bookmark it in any way.

Ok, so it's not just me. I'm really curious why.

There is another spreadsheet, I just discovered via reddit, that also includes PostRank engagement rankings:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=tWri7T3f4...

*It takes a while to load.

All the links (Disclaimer: I didn't test all of them) go to http://www.ted.com/talks/al_gore_on_averting_climate_crisis.... which happens to be the first video in the list.

use the URLs in column 3 instead of column 1

ah. right. they weren't blue, so I didn't identify them as links. Thanks!

I love TED talks, but I'm not sure what to do with such a list without a sort-by-something...

Agreed, a download is most useful to me. I'd rather play with the data.

I created a CSV version. Will that help?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/70442/TedTalks.csv?dl=1

edit: I've noticed some slight errors, but they should be easily fixed. It was a quick copy paste job, and a quick edit in TextMate to remove extraneous rows. Sorry about that. If I had the time I'd clean it up nice. Maybe someone else would like to.

This is great, thanks.

I put it in revise and did a tiny bit of cleanup, but nothing worth really publishing.

Sorted by "engagement": http://goo.gl/zFAp7

Why is it so difficult to make a private copy of this spreadsheet ? There are no download links, or an easy way in Google Spreadsheet to copy a document via URL !?!!

Thank you!

One of my favorites: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/1153

Awesome! My favourite of the ones I've watched so far is #97.

i can't help but feel that ted is all about the elite talking down to the rest of us.

The sixth of tetradecember?

I watched 10 of them from 2011 and this is my favorite: Online Filter bubbles. How people are becoming increasingly segregated, intellectually from the whole content of the web:

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

edit, and: http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_belcher_using_nature_to_grow...

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