The list of the top 20 most viewed TED talks on disability is one of the more popular pages on the this site and periodically I go through my high-traffic pages and give them a polish to make sure that there are no silly leaps of logic or typos.
This week I was horrified to find that the list was wrong. Not even a little bit wrong: the code I’d written to work out the results had a serious bug in it and I, equally motifyingly, hadn’t made enough of an effort to check it by hand.
Today I’m updating the list, and this time I’m doing it correctly.
This is the process:
TED.com is searched for all talks involving the words ‘disabled’ or ‘disability’. This gives 67 talks (you can view the list here).
I add all the other talks that people have sent me since the previous page went up, which gives me 76 talks (See them here). A
combination of wget and grep is used to pull out the viewing figures.
I then work down this list getting rid of anything that isn’t actually disability related.
As before, there are a lot of talks that mention disability only in passing, or in the sense of “disabling the security”. So I ended up removing quite a few (I removed Dave Eggers with a heavy heart – I liked his so much that I went to visit the project in San Francisco). The problem, of course is that, this being TED, *everything* is inspirational and wonderful. Stephen Hawking even had his removed because it’s about the universe (it’s excellent, it’s just not disability-facing). Alice Dreger, as it happens is where I’m putting the boundary for now.
After doing all that, you are left with 43 mainstream disability TED talks. Please let me know in the comments all the ones that I’ve missed and then I can iterate the list in the same way as my list of disability blogs.
