There’s a superb talk over on Google Videos of Barry Schwartz speaking about “The Paradox of Choice”. He covers how we are faced with far too many choices on a daily basis in modern life and how often increased choice leads to greater dissatisfaction. The talk is filled with some compelling evidence and some amusing anecdotes. Towards the end of the talk Barry relates the Paradox of Choice to user interface design. He’s written a whole book on the subject that I’m very interested in reading now. I can definitely identify with where old Bazzer is coming from to quote some of my favourite Tool lyrics “over stimulation numbs me”.
It is a long talk at 1 hour 4 minutes but well worth watching, you can always check your emails in the boring bits 
. The quality of the video is very good, much better than most of the videos on YouTube. Here are some of the other talks I’m planning on checking out:
- Debugging Backwards in Time
- How To Break Web Software – A look at security vulnerabilities in web software
- Scrum et al.
- Computers versus Common Sense
Let me know if you find any especially good tech talks over on Google Video or anywhere else.
# Pete Graham
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