We’re all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits — from happiness to obesity — can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know.

Mae Jemison is an astronaut, a doctor, an art collector, a dancer … Telling stories from her own education and from her time in space, she calls on educators to teach both the arts and sciences, both intuition and logic, as one — to create bold thinkers

Stuart Brown on play, and not from the usual “it prepares for life” perspective – quite the contrary – a really interesting Talk from TED, as usual. And if you are interested in more on play, check out the website of The National Institute for Play.

TED, as always, brought us some really good entertainment. The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra led by Gustavo Dudamel, plays Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, 2nd movement, and Arturo Márquez‘ Danzón No. 2. Turn up the volume, lean back, and enjoy.

I just found the link to Academic Earth on Kereső Világ, the blog of Endre Jóföldi – the blog is written in Hungarian – and I thought that even if I planned to post only the Interesting Links post today, I will put this one up too.
After checking out Academic Earth it instantly moved to the same category as TED. Academic Earth is a site with thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars – lectures from Yale, Stanford,MIT, Berkeley, Princeton and so on. So head over and dig in.