2 TED videos, on Storytelling and about Introverts

I recently saw two interesting TED Talks.

The first was by Andrew Stanton (director of such films as WALL-E) speaking about his guidelines for storytelling. The opening joke is superbly told. He spoils the rest a tad by glancing at the monitor for help once too often.

The other is by Phoebe Buffay Susan Cain, speaking about how society needs to make itself more comfortable for introverts. As an introvert, I agree, but not with all the reasons. There have been a few articles about introverts (especially the one by Jonathan Rauch linked to in this post) over the years which have already nailed the topic. The talk becomes too sentimental for my liking.

Simplicity through Complexity: great information visualisation approach to problems

Eric Berlow, an ecologist, has a fine TED talk (or micro-talk) where he takes an example of how we could use information visualisation to get to grips with seemingly complex (and perhaps complicated) problems. The example features the notorious Afghanistan graphic that came in for great scorn (rather unfairly, I thought) and as an easy means of Powerpoint bashing.

The video is only about 3-4 minutes long, and Berlow makes his point very succintly.