If you've ever wondered when you can call yourself an expert, this is the TEDx Talk for you. Business Growth Strategist, Speaker, and Stand Up Comic David Mitroff shares his story and talks about how, if you're doing the work, you can just start calling yourself an expert.

(RED) Read the rest

Digging through vinyl is for the patient. It can take years, if ever, for a record collector to come across a "Holy Grail" album in his/her travels.

In this TEDx Montreal talk from November 2016, Quebec-based collector Alexis Charpentier (aka DJ Lexis) talks about how obsessed record diggers get while looking for their "needle in a haystack" and how their efforts can reap bigger cultural rewards.

He shares a wonderful story of how a collector named Kobal found a nearly-forgotten 1-in-2000 vinyl album recorded by Haitian musician Henri-Pierre Noël in the late seventies.

Henri-Pierre Noël

Turns out it was quite the find.

He was in a flea market surrounded by thousands of other dirty, dusty, moldy records. That's where he found the "Piano" album. He wasn't specifically looking for it. Actually, you could say it sort of found him. You could also say that after 20 years of record digging every single week, he had developed a sixth sense for finding the gold. He took the record and inspected it: the front, the artwork, the back, the liner notes, and he was intrigued by the fact that this Haitian musician made a record in Quebec in the late '70s, so he was intrigued. He took out his little, plastic, portable turntable that he brought with him whenever he was on these digging quests and put the record on. He fell in love with the music instantly, but he had to know the backstory behind it. He didn't know where it came from.

In this thoughtful TEDx talk, Mars rover engineer Abbie Hutty argues that rather than trying to entice young people to STEM fields with gregarious, genius role models like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, we need hardworking, introverted role models who demonstrate what most STEM professionals are actually like. Read the rest

Johannes sez, "monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner gave a short presentation about traditional narrative cinema, the problems of storytelling in the digital age -- and monochrom's feature film project 'Sierra Zulu.'"

Sierra Zulu at TEDxVienna: Video online

(Thanks, Johannes!) Read the rest