TED Blog
14 February 2012
“A world without love is a deadly place”: Celebrating Valentine’s Day with the launch of TED Quotes
Everyone loves a good quote. They challenge us. They change us. They make us think and make us laugh. They are — in their most compressed and contagious form — ideas. So today, we’re launching TED Quotes, a new initiative that collects memorable quotes from TEDTalks, groups them by category, and makes them as easy to share as our talks themselves.
To celebrate our Valentine’s Day launch, we offer you these heart-fluttering favorites:
“A world without love is a deadly place.” — Helen Fisher
“[You need] eight hugs a day. You’ll be happier and the world will be a better place.” — Paul Zak
“People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It’s one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.” — Helen Fisher
“My wife could turn to me and she may say, ‘Why do you love me?’ And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, ‘Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors.’” — Robin Ince
Designed to make TEDTalks even more accessible, digestible and shareable, the TED Quotes section of TED.com serves as a resource for both discovering new TEDTalks and finding culturally relevant quotes for any purpose, from a boardroom pitch to a wedding toast. We’ve sorted hundreds of the best quotes into TED-like topics, from technology, entertainment and design, to collaboration, DNA, and, yes, love.
But this isn’t just about a greeting-card quips. In today’s social-media driven world, quotes have a new power: They’ve emerged as one of the most widely shared content forms online. So with this initiative, we’re now treating individual quotes within TEDTalks as shareable media objects.
When you share a quote, you’re linked back to a page that allows you to either watch the full talk, or jump straight to the moment the quote was uttered. Viewers can then, if so inspired, re-share the same quote on Twitter, Facebook, email and other channels. By making the ideas within a talk even more findable and shareable, we hope to spread ideas even farther …
Explore ted.com/quotes >>
11 February 2012
Have you visited Inside Out Project lately?
Since the Inside Out Project launched last year at TED, more than 70,000 individual photos have been shot and pasted in almost 9,000 locations around the world, sharing a vision of individual identity for the world to see. To house this astonishing collection of portraits online from around the world, Inside Out recently revamped their website — insideoutproject.net — so you can explore and browse the gallery and sign up to take part in a portrait pasting of your own.
Visit insideoutproject.net >>
Plus! While staying in Southern California last spring to work on the TED Prize, JR also started up a beautiful mural project called “Wrinkles of the City” — celebrating the lives of older people in youth-obsessed LA. Now you can watch a short film about the project, with powerful stories and images:
Watch “Wrinkles of the City” >>
10 February 2012
POW! Agent Hero: Fellows Friday with Suleiman Bakhit
You started producing comics after you got attacked after 9/11. What happened?
I was a student at the University of Minnesota at the time, and president of the international student union. On campus, racial attacks immediately started happening against students who were thought to be Middle Eastern and Arab — whether or not they were — so I was thrust into a position where I had to do something about it.
I started an awareness campaign and started contacting newspapers, senators and so on. The state district attorney got wind of it, and we had a big event where he came to campus and apologized to all international students. This got a lot of media coverage. Shortly after this, four college kids attacked me on my way home late one night. They started with racial slurs, then attacked me with beer bottles. I suffered many scars and injuries that led to surgeries.
As I recovered, I thought, “Well, either I pack my bags and go home to Jordan, or I do something.” And I decided the best way to fight racism is to start with the young. So I began talking to schoolchildren ages 6 and 7 about Middle Eastern culture and what happened to me on 9/11, spreading a very simple message: Not all Middle Easterners are terrorists, and Al Qaeda is like the KKK.
How did they respond?
They loved it! Actually, I’m a scary-looking guy, because I have a lot of scars — so I did have to break the ice. As soon as I got into the classroom, I’d ask, “Do you kids remember Aladdin and Jasmine?” They’d say, “Yeah, yeah.” Because you know, all the kids have watched Aladdin. And I’d say, “Jasmine is my ex and Aladdin stole her from me, and it really pisses me off!” The kids would just burst out laughing.
I also used to bring with me a really nice small carpet from the Middle East. I’d say, “Guess what this is?” And the kids would go crazy. “Yes, yes! It’s magic carpet! Make it fly!” I’d say, “I’m sorry, but it only works in really hot weather. It’s only works in the desert.” In Minnesota, eight months of the year it’s snow, so it worked out perfectly. That’s when I first started realizing that mythology and stories have such great power to bridge cultural divides.
And they wanted to know whether there were any Arab superheroes?
Yes, they were really intrigued by what kids in the Middle East do, read, believe. They asked, “Is there an Arab Superman? Is there an Arab Batman?” I realized that actually, no, there aren’t any Arab equivalents to Western superheroes. Yes, there’s Aladdin and Sinbad, but no one has ever done an animation or comic book based on the actual mythology from within the culture.
I couldn’t get this question out of my head, and did a couple of years of hardcore research, reading ancient texts, doing six month’s archeological research in the Arab desert. I even learned Hebrew. I wanted to read Aramaic so I could read the Dead Sea Scrolls for inspiration. Meanwhile, I started to teach myself to draw, and came up with some characters based on my knowledge of Arab culture. It was a journey towards discovering my own culture more than anything else.
09 February 2012
The difficulties in opening science: Q&A with Michael Nielsen
In a timely and incisive talk at TEDxWaterloo, Michael Nielsen made the case for open science — the idea that research data and results should be freely available to the public, and that scientists should collaborate more freely with each other and with the public.
Since the talk, his book, Reinventing Discovery, has been released, and even more recently the US Congress has introduced controversial legislation to prohibit funding agencies from requiring open access. TED’s Ben Lillie called Nielsen to talk about the politics and difficulties of open science.
Your talk got a significant pick-up from the science community and other people starting to discuss the idea of open science. Have you seen people moving more toward this notion of doing open science, or at least that – I mean, your goal here is to spark a conversation and get that into the things that people are talking about. Is it happening?
Yeah, I think it’s definitely on the up-tick. The phrase “open science” was, I think, pretty uncommon even three or four years ago. It’s a very old phrase. Certainly, it’s been in use for many decades, possibly even centuries. But it’s not something that people talked about a lot until the last two years.
I guess I’ve done 30 talks in seven countries in the last couple months, and particularly in the United Kingdom it really seemed like there was a huge amount of awareness. Organizations like the Royal Society are doing investigations of open science. The Wellcome Trust, a very large funding agency, has certainly done a huge amount for it over many years. In the United States, there also seems to be increasing interest. There’s more articles in the mainstream media than there were – well, there were very few articles even a few years ago. But now it seems like there’s quite a bit of coverage, and in more specialist outlets – Wired, and places like that.
You have this notion that we need to share our data, we need to share our ideas, and that will help to accelerate progress. And one of the main barriers to this, of course, is that we simply don’t have a culture of rewards for doing those activities. In the book, you give the example of scientists editing Wikipedia, which has no upside and takes a lot of their time. Where do you start with implementing a reward system where this is actually something that professional scientists would be driven to do?
There are two great places to start. One is, if grant agencies start to say, “Look, please tell us about your non-traditional contributions. If you’ve uploaded materials to YouTube, we want to know about it,” that kind of thing can certainly have an impact. The other direction you can come at this from is when people build tools which measure non-traditional contributions. Scientists have a tendency to look at those numbers and they start to report them. A classic case is in high-energy physics, part of the reason why there’s been this rise of a preprint culture in high-energy physics is that it’s possible to measure the impact of those preprints. There are tools available to measure the impact, and so you can demonstrate to your tenure committee, or whatever it is, that “Oh, it’s just in preprint at the moment, but Ed Witten and whomever have cited it already, so it must be good work.”
So the directives from the grant agencies are important of course, but it strikes me that they’re more of a reflection of the culture of the scientists and what they desire. It seems like the hard work is really on the ground.
A bit of both. I mean, the great thing, of course, about the grant agencies is, even though there’s a lot of scientists in senior positions there, to some extent they’re removed from the everyday concerns of a working scientist. And so they can afford to have a broader view and not just say, “What’s in my immediate short-term best interest?” But they can also say, “Well, what’s in the best interest of society as a whole?” And so if you look at things like open data mandates in the past, often the grant agencies have played a real leadership role in causing communities to come together and decide, “Oh yes, we should start to systematically share our data.” And so it’s not good for them to be too far out in front, but often they do seem to be a little ways in front.
If they put forward these ideas, are they going to be accepted by the scientific community, or will there just be revolution and pushback?
That’s the reason why you want the grant agencies to be working in concert with the scientists in this leadership role, but also not coming in and just mandating, “Thou shalt share all your data!” or “Thou shalt share all your code!” That kind of mandate is asking for people to be passively non-compliant, to share data that hasn’t been cleaned up or that is actually just useless to other people for various reasons. And so there needs to be a conversation that goes on first about what’s actually useful to share, what’s feasible to share, and what an appropriate reward or incentives would be. You can’t get too far in front of the community.
That brings us to the second major force of pushback, which is the entrenched financial interests and the current publishing system and that sort of thing. I’m not sure what I want to ask about that other than – I’ve seen movement on their end, but this does seem like one of the major roadblocks.
Yeah, the publishers, the traditional publishers, are all over the map. Some of them strongly oppose any kind of open access. Others have been pioneering open access models. And some are transitioning from one place to the other. A really interesting, maybe encouraging, thing is that one of the biggest publishers, Springer, bought BioMed Central, arguably the world’s largest open access publisher. Springer has also moved to a hybrid open access model on all its other journals, whereby you as an author can opt to pay a fee to make your article open access. That indicates that Springer sees that as the viable commercial model. And if they can transition from their old business model to a new business model that makes open access at least possible for all papers, then actually maybe this isn’t such a big obstruction after all.
In recent weeks the issue of access to data has exploded with the Research Works Act, a bill that would prohibit agencies from requiring open access. A large number of scientists have responded by boycotting Elsevier, a major journal publisher that supports the bill. Are we seeing the moment when open science becomes a major issue for most scientists?
The Elsevier boycott has generated a great deal of interest and discussion about open science, and I think that’s great. Of course, a boycott can only ever be a part of what needs to happen: we need positive actions as well, not just an agreement about what not to do! But what’s good about the boycott is that it has engaged lots of new people in serious discussion about better ways of doing and communicating science, and some of those people are taking action. That’s exactly what’s needed for open science to thrive.
With that said, there’s still a long way to go. Open science is still at most a minor blip (or invisible) on the radar of most scientists. But I think we’ll see more and more actions like the Elsevier boycott, building awareness of open science, and encouraging many more scientists to do more of their work in the open.
08 February 2012
Sign up to audition for TED2013 in Doha
From April to June 2012, TED will be holding 14 auditions, around the world, to search for unheard voices to put onstage at TED2013. Learn more about TED2013 Worldwide Auditions >>
Just announced: The very first audition will be held in Doha, Qatar, in April, as part of the TEDxSummit conference. If Doha is the closest audition spot to you geographically, sign up to audition! Signups are open from now until February 28; to audition, you’ll need to send a one-minute video.
Learn more about the Doha auditions for TED2013 at on.ted.com/auditionsdoha >>
08 February 2012
New TED Book envisions the ‘living’ cities of the future
What will the urban areas of tomorrow look like? More like an ever-changing and vibrant garden than a static set of buildings and blocks. In our new ebook Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives, British designer and architect Rachel Armstrong re-imagines the world’s cities and argues that in order to achieve sustainable development of the built environment — and help countries like Japan recover from natural disasters — we need to rethink how we approach architecture. By genetically modifying biological systems and studying such things as protocells — nongenetic self-organizing molecules that exhibit movement and sensitivity to their surroundings — we could create more responsive and dynamic structures. The result is a new kind of architectural practice where cities behave more like an evolving ecosystem than a lifeless machine. We recently spoke with Armstrong.
What do you mean by ‘living architecture’?
It’s a way of using ecological solutions to urban problems. Living architecture works by applying new materials and engineered systems that harness some of the unique properties of ‘life.’ Living technology is more robust and environmentally responsive than traditional materials, and can deal with unpredictability in a way that current technologies cannot.
How?
Our future cities will be designed more like gardens than machines. Buildings will perform functions that we currently attribute to the plant world, such as carbon capture. They will also contribute to the health of residents by removing pollution or providing food and energy. Living architecture is not a panacea to urban problems, but propose an alternative approach to making buildings that may help alleviate these problem. Our cities, as they currently exist, as seen as inert barriers to the natural world. But these barriers are inevitably breached in the event of a natural disaster. What might happen if everyday buildings were designed with the seeds of regeneration?
What developments in biotech will make a difference?
Protocells, for one thing. Protocells are a very interesting technology in this new portfolio as they are not strictly speaking ‘alive’ – since they do not possess a biological set of instructions, such as DNA – but they do behave in a life-like manner. They can sense and move around their environment through chemical means. They can function together in groups and can be chemically programmed to lay down solid materials. They are one kind of living technology that will be part of a whole new portfolio of materials that architects will have at their disposal as they develop of our cities. These materials will literally transform inert, non-living building surfaces into dynamic, life-like ones that carry out a set of functions normally associated with ‘life,’ such as, growth, self-repair or recycling resources, like oil and water.
How far out are these concepts? When will we start to see them in play?
These technologies already exist in the laboratory and in prototype model form, although they still need research and development to turn them into widely available products. The ideas may seem outlandish but they are based on real technology that exists today. All applications of scientific research in the laboratory remain speculative until they are transformed into products. But we are heading that way.
Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives is part of the TED Books series, which is available for the Kindle and Nook as well as on Apple’s iBookstore.
08 February 2012
New: Find “courses” from TEDTalks on iTunes U
New on iTunes U: Find TEDTalks organized by subject area into courses, curated for students, educators and lifelong learners. In our initial course offering, explore such topics as “Creative Problem-Solving” … “Understanding Happiness” … “Climate Change” … where you’ll find great thinkers from TED exploring multiple aspects of a fascinating topic.
Explore these curated collections of TEDTalks on iTunes U … and watch for new courses over upcoming months!
04 February 2012
Remembering Mike deGruy
We are saddened by the news that ocean photographer, filmmaker and storyteller Mike deGruy died yesterday in a helicopter crash in Australia. Mike was truly one of the great teachers and advocates for the oceans, as you can see in his TEDTalk, filmed aboard Mission Blue in 2010:
In this talk, as in his photography and his many films, you can sense Mike’s infectious humor, his passion for the oceans — and his example of a life well and richly lived.
Photo top: Mike deGruy at Baltra Airport in the Galapagos Islands, April 2010. Photo below: deGruy holds a pair of shoes decorated by Jim Toomey, aboard the Mission Blue Voyage. Courtesy James Duncan Davidson.
04 February 2012
State of the X: Stats on TEDx and TEDxTalks in January
The new feature “State of the X,” on the TEDx Tumblr, runs the numbers on TEDx and the great video coming from these worldwide independently produced events.
To start — how many TEDx events happened in the past month?
TEDx events by the numbers: January
- 77 TEDx events happened around the world
- 67 cities hosted one or more TEDx events
- 29 countries hosted one or more TEDx events
TEDx by the numbers: All time
- 3190 TEDx events have happened around the world
- 800 cities around the world have hosted one or more TEDx event
- 126 countries have hosted one or more TEDx events
One of the things we love about TEDx, here at the TED Blog, is how much astonishing video comes in from around the world. Brené Brown, Simon Sinek, some of our favorite TEDTalks were recorded at independent TEDx events, and we’re always scanning for more. Check out these stats:
TEDxTalks by the numbers: January
- 785 new talks added to the TEDxTalks library
- 3.5 million views of the TEDxTalks YouTube channel and the TEDxTalks website
- 22 talks were featured on TED.com (twice as many as in December, our previous record month)
- 4.2 million views of the TEDxTalks on TED.com
TEDxTalks by the numbers: All Time
- 12,900 TEDxTalks
- 27.6 million views of the TEDxTalks on the YouTube channel and the TEDxTalks website
- 122 talks featured on TED.com
- 45.8 million views of the TEDxTalks on TED.com
The huge number of talks in our library can be overwhelming but if you focus on just a few, you can uncover surprising connections. Here are two that were featured on TED.com in January:
Philosophy is extremely difficult to illuminate, but Julian Baggini nails it. In this absorbing talk from TEDxYouth@Manchester, Baggini tackles one of the oldest questions: What makes you, you?
Drew Berry asks many of same questions as Baggini, but his approach to finding the answers is different. At TEDxSydney, Berry animates some of the astonishing processes that happen inside everyone at every moment of every day — revealing that what makes you, you, is more elaborate and much more beautiful than what the naked eye can see.
Explore TEDxTalks on TED.com and our Weekly Editor’s Picks from January and discover connections on your own.
03 February 2012
Robin Ince: “I’ve just realised what I should have done my TED talk on”
Late in January, Robin Ince tweeted:
balls, 7 months too late I’ve just realised what i should have done my TED talk on
So the TED Blog asked: What?
And here is what he wrote:
Every year I attempt to say yes to things that are out of my comfort zone. These are never physical things such as parachute jumps or mountain climbs — I am not so keen on actual death, I am happy to make do with the death of my own self-regard. A TED talk was one of those leaps into abject terror I made in 2011. I had admired these talks for some time and frequently fallen into bouts of voluntary insomnia playing TED talk tag until dawn.
My mistake was that I had never watched the funny ones. I didn’t even know that they existed. So I spent my first month of preparation for TED mulling over how I could create the illusion of being smart. This has been made even more difficult now you are no longer allowed to smoke a pipe onstage, a surefire device to create the illusion of thoughtfulness as successive British Prime Ministers demonstrated.
About a week beforehand I suddenly realized I had gone in totally the wrong direction. I had been asked for to provide levity, not compete with people who were clearly qualified to talk of astrophysics and the evolution of empathy. The wastepaper basket was rapidly filled and a new notebook opened. I gathered together some words on whether it was possible to be happy if approaching the world scientifically. In 8 minutes I hoped to cover love, death and the strong anthropic principle. As it was, I had to drop the strong anthropic principle due to time constraints. It appears that love and death take up more of your allotted eight minutes than you might imagine.
The night before my morning session (“morning session” is a term that strikes terror into the hearts of the predominantly nocturnal comedian), I sat alone in the hotel bar, scribbling and re-scribbling until I had nervously chewed all the ink from the pen.
The blessed relief of not overrunning, and saying most of what I had planned, meant I didn’t start mulling over the talk until I was on the train home. But by the time I walked through the door I had demolished all I had said and, as so often on these occasions, the clear picture I had wanted to see in the buildup only became transparent in the aftermath. To attempt eight minutes summing up happiness through science was preposterous. I now knew the TED talk I should have done, which was about the daily problems I face of attempting to write comedy routines about contemporary physics which both I and a reasonably broad comedy club audience can understand. A world of quark-based conundrums and neutrino dilemmas flooded my mind with a revelation at 7 minutes 34 seconds, which would have been like opening a box and a cat leaping onto your lap.
There is not time for regret — actually that’s not true; if you read French literature you’ll find it can occupy your life. Nevertheless I can’t look back too much and wish I had done something else. The process of terror was in itself fascinating, and I got the chance to enjoy coffees from around the world while listening to speakers who hotwired my mind (coffee and hotwired minds is a stimulating mix). And thanks to Hugh Everett and the many-worlds interpretation, I can be safe in the knowledge that in another world I did deliver the speech I wished I had, and also safe in the knowledge that in that other world I walked off and wished I had attempted something about happiness through science.
– Robin Ince
Watch his TEDTalk, which is really very funny >>
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