Before the official kickoff of this year's TED conference this afternoon, attendees had the option of attending a number of 12-minute talks by selected "professors." The dozens of topics ranged from toy design, to how to be a successful heretic, to eight ways to get into space, to the science of fantasy football, to three magic tricks anyone can do.

Plenty of legitimate universities might disagree, but twelve minutes, it turns out, is about the perfect amount of time for class.

I opted for some of the less instructional courses, but emerged no less educated. The talk by Mark Collis, creative director of the ad agency Leo Burnett, was titled "I'm an advertising guy and I feel sick." I thought it might be about how the advertising market is in a slump, but instead it was about how he struggles with the "moral and social conflict around what I do as a professional." His answer, it seems, is to focus professionally on marketing that matters. He showed a four-minute film put together for the World Wildlife Fund on Australia's global warming awareness campaign that featured a one-hour blackout in Sydney.

It was enlightening, but, being a magazine employee, I still want to know how the advertising market is going to rebound.

Feeling optimistic and cheery, I went on to David Burk's talk titled "Culture of Death: The Torajans of Sulawesi." It featured a slideshow of poignant photographs he took while visiting a village in Indonesia twenty years ago where the culture is literally around death instead of life. Decaying bodies stack up on back porches while families work to acquire four buffalo (that's what it takes to get into heaven). They often times wait four years to lay the dead to rest. They celebrate by sacrificing the buffalo and eating their innards.

What I learned from this course is that maybe I shouldn't feel so bad about killing that mouse in my apartment last week.

And finally, Cindy Gallop enlightened me on the wave of the future in her talk titled "The Toyboy Manifesto: Why the older woman + younger man is the relationship of the future" (because, quite frankly, it sounded like more fun than "How to beat the stock market"). In the flip side of the overall conference demographics, Gallop's session was filled with more women than men, which perhaps means there aren't enough younger men at the conference. If they're here, I'm quite certain the 48-year old Gallop, decked in black patent pleather pants (don't call her a cougar), will find them.

So this is what TED is all about!

by Megan Barnett