TED & other discoveries

My batch has some interesting minds. One such person is Sachin Rawat a big Machiavelli fan and a practitioner who has many interesting stories to tell from his work in the Uttaranchal power corporation. I have never met anyone who has actual experience of putting in place concepts from game theory, plea bargain, politics etc ( Rawat is also a Union leader). During one of my thought provoking discussions with him, I was trying to explain the discoveries of the famous nuroscientist Dr. V . Ramachandran. Dr Ram was referring to some interesting work on motor neurons, empathy among other things in his talk on TED ( http://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.html ). It is an interesting talk to say the least.. more on it I will reserve for some other day.

TED is the beautiful repository of interesting lectures. "Power of Ideas" I think is a powerful concept. I  also came across Piaget and Vygotsky during a lecture by Sugata Mitra on his famous "Hole in the wall" experiments. I have known about Sugata's experiments for a long time now. He used to present some educational programs on doordarshan. I remember him from those days. Nevertheless its good to know that his ideas are now known to the world. 

Another discovery was that of a designer called  Stefan Sagmeister. I was impressed by his work. Art has been a less understood subject in the technical sense by general population. I feel that people tend to appreciate art more or less like I do music. If it looks good, sounds good.. great I like it. Most of the times one likes art/music and one tends to appreciate it purely based on instinct. I came across an interesting scale in art from Stefan's talk and I think that can be used in many different things especially in marketing. Its called scale of happiness in design (refer pic).








I was impressed with his idea of the difference between happiness and the visualization of happiness.. but more on that later.

I haven't taken keen interest in art, design etc even though I draw OK and do not have too poor a sense of art. So my journey into art also took me recently into an advertising group WPP more at  http://www.wpp.com/wpp/companies  and to an advertising genius called  Leo Burnett and his firm. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Burnett_Worldwide as well as at their super artistic website http://www.leoburnett.com/.

My continuous rambling also meant that I also came across terms like  conspicuous consumption and conspicuous compassion. Sometimes jargons are very important to know and wow the audience. These neologisms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neologisms) and protologisms are another interesting concept I came across through my readings today. Another discovery that actually led me to neologisms was  the concept of anti-pattern. An organizational anti-pattern that I could instantly recognize is "Analysis Paralysis" more at ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern .)

I think this particular blog very much captures some of the important high-points for me from an intellectual stimulation standpoint. I am pretty impressed with myself that I have finally been able to capture some of it in text.