TEDxTartu 2014

I am sure everybody knows what is TED and TEDx. On last Saturday we had TEDxTartu in my town. It is not about IT, more about sociology – the same we can say about testing. So I want to share some interesting ideas from there.


All pictures are taken from TEDxTartu 2014 Facebook album
First of all, I like that they determine talks by speakers, not by topics. There is no titles in program, there are only names (plus description of the talk is available in web). More I participate in different conference more I am convinced that this is better approach.

Margo Loor
Loor was talking about rationality. He believes that absolutely all people can master the art of argumentation – all you need is a little bit training and a lot of practice (my comment – many people think that arguing is inappropriate and rude, so they don't have practice). And his experience says that every kind of people can learn to be rational.

Loor asked some people to draw rationality and showed us some drawings. I really liked this one (in my reproduction):

It's like there is the Truth and you just moving in right direction.
One more good visualization of difficult thing (in my reproductions again):


Julius Juurmaa
Juurmaa was talking about creativity. He says that creativity is a new concept, for example, in Middle Age human didn't create anything – he did something. Also he was talking about some brain studies and the interesting thing is, that when our brain doesn't have any task (let's say it's resting) it still do some work and this work is shuffling different combinations of what we saw, what we did and what we know. And in that resting moment we can find some new ideas (= smart combination). That means, the more we experience – the more smart combinations we can find.

Riina Raudne
Raudne was talking about alcohol, but interesting thought that I had is philological. Estonians and Russians (I guess that other nationalities also) are using Facebook terminology in English – they say like and share, just in their language manner: for example, in Estonian [ˈlīkema] and [ˈshēērēma]. So they don't translate these terms and separate liking on real life and liking in the internet (unlike English speaking people). I guess it says something about role of internet in cultures.

Mait Müntel
Müntel has PhD in physics and had research experience at CERN. But he was talking about lingvist.io that he found. It's an online language learning program that helps you to learn new language in 200 hours. He was talking about his personal successful experience of learning French in smart way (way that is used in lingvist.io). So I hope to learn French there.