TEDBlog November, 2011 Archive
30 November 2011
Today: Watch TEDxWomen with your community
At Thursday’s TEDxWomen, a wide range of amazing women, and a few good men, will speak onstage in New York and Los Angeles. And you can take part wherever you are, by joining in a range of amazing events and happenings.
Attend a TEDxWomen watch party. All over the world, amazing TEDx organizers have been planning events around the livestream, and they are just waiting for smart, engaged people like you to join in the conversation. While the main focus of TEDxEwhaWomen, in Seoul, South Korea, will be watching the TEDxWomen livestream, the event will also highlight local voices. The program will also be made available in Korean.
In Amsterdam, TEDxAmsterdamWomen will convene at the Van Gogh Museum. The diverse program of speakers include Kelly Cutrone, founder of PR firm People’s Revolution, and terrorism expert Jessica Stern.
At TEDxDupontCircle in Washington, D.C., live performances will introduce and punctuate speakers from the TEDxWomen livestream.
You can watch the TEDxWomen livestream. It starts at 11am Eastern and runs through to 9:30pm. Here’s a TEDxWomen schedule >>
And follow our Twitter feed, #TEDxWomen, where bloggers, activists, media personalities, and others will be adding their voices to the chorus.
30 November 2011
How John Bohannon created “A Modest Proposal”
Once you’ve watched John Bohannon’s talk and dance performance from TEDxBrussels (watch it on TED.com), you may have the same question the TED Blog had: How in the world did you do that? So we asked, and here’s what he sent us in reply:
A Modest Proposal
For Preventing the Artists of the United States of America From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public
Early in the summer this year, I got a call from Walter de Brouwer, the curator of TEDxBrussels. He loved the Dance Your PhD contest and wanted me to come give a talk about it. I was traveling in Europe so we met in London. Over drinks, I told him that I didn’t want to actually screen the dance videos during my talk. I didn’t want to use any multimedia at all. Instead, I wanted to use live dancers on stage in lieu of powerpoint, demonstrating the essence of Dance Your PhD. He loved the idea.
Over the summer, I worked with Black Label Movement, a dance company based in Minneapolis led by Carl Flink. We had a shoestring budget, not even enough to get all the dancers to Brussels. So we had to create the dance and rehearse in Minneapolis in our spare time for free. Then we hired 6 Brussels-based dancers and arrived in Brussels 10 days early to rehearse with them. I’m amazed we pulled it off, but Carl wasn’t surprised. Professional dancers find this kind of pressure routine.
The piece changed drastically over the course of its creation. As I got to know the dancers and see how they struggled to make ends meet, especially when injuries occur without healthcare coverage, my mood darkened. What began as a small piece of optimistic theater about science turned into a satire about the status of artists in the US. As inspiration, I looked back to Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay, “A Modest Proposal,” It was a masterpiece of political satire that proposed a seemingly rational solution to the problem of the poor in Ireland: They should sell their babies as food, generating much-needed income and reducing their population in one stroke. It was a reply to some of the brutal utilitarian policies being discussed at the time by the aristocracy. Where you hear antique language in my presentation, I am quoting Swift verbatim.
So many people worked for free or nearly free to make this possible. Support from the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Minnesota was crucial. These are the full credits:
Choreographer: Carl Flink and Edward Oroyan
Dancers: Jessica Ehlert, Brian Godbout, Stephanie Laager, Edward Oroyan, Nelle Hens, Camille Prieux, Mariel Blaise, Gapson Nenaks, David Zagari & Marcio Canabarro
Music: Greg Brosofske
30 November 2011
Dance vs. powerpoint, a modest proposal: John Bohannon on TED.com
Use dancers instead of powerpoint. That’s science writer John Bohannon’s “modest proposal.” In this spellbinding choreographed talk from TEDxBrussels he makes his case by example, aided by dancers from Black Label Movement. (Recorded at TEDxBrussels 2011, November 2011, in Brussels, Belgium. Duration: 11:08.)
Watch John Bohannon’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
Learn how John Bohannon created this talk >>
29 November 2011
Inspiring youth with science: Q&A with Adam Savage
Photo by Ryan Lash
At the recent TEDYouth event, Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame, told three stories of groundbreaking discovery made with incredibly simple tools. TED’s Ben Lillie caught up with him just after his rehearsal to talk about what lead him to this type of inspiration.
This is an amazingly inspiring thing you’ve put together about what science is, and trying to get to kids. What are you hoping to get out of this, to inspire them?
You don’t have any control over what you collect in your head, the stories you collect. One of the commodities that I have is honesty. As a communicator, I have learned how to be honest about what I’m thinking and what I’m feeling, and that is what keeps me employed.
So, I think about the things that inspire me, and I make an assumption that those are going to be interesting to others. I mean, I’m going off Emerson, “To know that what is true in your secret heart is true for all men.” That is genius.
The stories that I’m telling here are stories that really make me excited. When I learned all three of these stories I got thrilled, and I got chills. And I want to communicate that, because whenever I’m having trouble understanding a concept I’ll often go back and read how the original thing was discovered, and that’s how I get it.
The other idea is that I love that they call scientific disciplines “fields of study.” Culturally, we think of science as a black box, and it’s in fact a field, and it’s a field in which we’re all explorers. That feeling that everyone has, that everything’s been discovered, has been felt by everyone throughout all of time. No one hasn’t felt like that, except for the people doing the discoveries.
You came to science through a convoluted path.
I was always a science geek. All of my key, important teachers, my earth science teacher in freshman year of high school, and my senior chemistry teacher. Sciency things, and doing math, and figuring out how things work has always been something that I’ve been doing.
Mythbusters has turned me into a scientist. It’s turned me into someone who thinks like a scientist. Show me proof; show me a second proof; show me the elegance of a simple equation, and I’ll feel like I understand something.
One of the things that strikes me is that shows like yours are an alternative, out of school, way of getting exposed to science and getting excited by science, that seems to be even more important than schools at this point.
Among the things that get slashed in every budget are all the things that get our hands dirty. Gym, theater, music, wood-shop—all the shops, I mean, auto-shop, forget about it—and all the hands-on demos that science teachers do. They just start cutting that.
I’m an honorary lifetime member of both the California and National Science Teachers Associations. They’re some of the most enthusiastic crowds, and there’s no one who knows more than they do how much I screw up at my job, but they appreciate the level of honest inquiry that we bring to it.
I also get e-mails all the time from home-schooled kids that say that among home-schoolers, our show is the science class—I hope those parents are checking with science teachers to know when we’re wrong. We never expected to do that, that’s not something we ever set out to do. It was completely a surprise that it came to be like that.
It’s the same thing you were saying, you’re doing what you’re passionate about and that carries through and people get the excitement of it.
Yes. And I learned that from comedy. I realized that all my favorite actors have either been stand-up comics, or did a stint of stand-up comedy. I’ve tried enough to know that I’m not a stand-up comic, but I understand the format. And the difficulty in riffing in a hostile environment forces you to look at yourself, and the best comedy comes from people being the most honest, and the least afraid of being humiliated.
That’s really what it comes to: being unafraid of being humiliated, and secure that this is going to be cool. So I’ve been humiliated on national television hundreds of times. I’ve vomited, I’ve been naked, I’ve been beaten up, I’ve been insulted. But it’s all for a better cause, because I know that because I’m being honest about it, it’s going to resonate.
29 November 2011
What’s new with TED’s iPhone app? Q&A with our developer and project leader
TED iPhone developer Matt Drance at TED2011. Photo: Robert Leslie
At the launch of the TED iPhone app, the TED Blog sat down with project leader Thaniya Keereepart and engineer Matt Drance to talk about working together, building new features and what’s coming next from our mobile team.
Thaniya Keereepart: I work for TED, I do product development here. My role on this project has been spearheading the mobile initiative, trying to get TED on mobile devices, and making sure that the experience on the mobile device is as good as the one we have on the web. Pretty much just being the advocate for the user.
Matt Drance: I’m from Bookhouse Software, which is my company, and I led the engineering effort for the iPhone, coming off of the iPad project that we did together.
From the iPad app — how much of that ported over to the iPhone?
MD: Well, a lot of the experience ported over. What we learned building the iPad app had a great effect on what we built for the iPhone, but they really are two separate projects. You really have to think different for a smaller device when people are on the go, between train stops, versus something like the iPad, where someone is more likely to be sitting on their couch for 20 or 30 minutes at a time. How we expect people to use the app is much different between the two cases. So actually very little of it translated directly.
What’s something you had to really rethink for the iPhone?
TK: Screen real estate (laughs).
MD: Definitely. Good one.
TK: Yeah, it’s, what, four times smaller than the iPad? So we can’t really have this larger screen, big beautiful pictures, all that stuff goes out the door. And with the limited screen real estate that we have, it’s important to make sure our entire talk collection is available and accessible within a few taps. We can’t overwhelm the user with a list of 1,000 things. We want to make sure that the things that are new are prominent, and make the list very easy to use.
29 November 2011
TED App comes to the iPhone
We’re thrilled to announce that TED’s official app is now available for iPhone, optimized for a small screen and introducing several much-requested features!
Adapted from our award-winning iPad app, the new TED iPhone app allows users to browse and watch TEDTalks, videos ranging from 3 minutes to 18 minutes in length. TEDTalks feature great ideas from speakers on everything from genetics and geopolitics to sculpture and creativity.
The TED iPhone app experience is tailored to mobile phone users who use their devices when on the move. For instance, users at the gym or out walking the dog now have the option to simply listen to TEDTalks audio. With the iPhone app, TED introduces TED Radio, which streams curated audio TEDTalks 24/7 – click the button and start listening immediately. The app plays audio in the background, allowing listeners to multitask, using other apps like Safari or Mail simultaneously.
Also new to the iPhone app is Bookmarks, a user-requested feature, which allows users to flag and save talks they don’t have time to watch at the moment. They simply tap the Bookmark button, then access talks later from the My Talks tab – with no obligation to wait for a video download.
Many popular features of the TED iPad app can be found in the new iPhone version:
Browse + share: Users can see the latest TEDTalks videos as soon as they’re published. Browse the TED library by theme, tag or rating. Search for a talk or speaker by name, topic or popularity. Share a talk over Facebook, Twitter or email. And download videos directly to the device for offline viewing.
Discover new ideas: Using the “Inspire Me” feature, users can tell the app what kind of talks they want to see (Inspiring? Funny? Jaw-dropping?), dial in how much time they have, and let the TED app build a custom playlist to fit their schedule — for viewing immediately or watching later.
AirPlay: Built-in AirPlay support on the iPhone app allows users to play TEDTalks on any Apple TV-enabled television.
TED’s official app requires an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 4.3 or later. The iPad app requires an iPad with iOS 4.3 or later. Audio works great over 3G and WiFi. Video streaming works over 3G, and still better over WiFi. Downloads require WiFi. The apps are available today for free in the App Store. Like the iPad version, the iPhone app was created with support from Rolex.
28 November 2011
Deadline extended to Monday, Dec. 5: Do you have a lesson to teach? Submit to TED2012: The Classroom
Deadline extended to submit your short video: Dec. 5! For our next conference — TED2012: Full Spectrum — we’re looking for 10 of the world’s best teachers to take the TED stage during a special session we’re calling The Classroom. We’re accepting video nominations to help track these people down. You can nominate yourself or a remarkable educator we should know about — who doesn’t have to be a teacher in the traditional sense.
How to nominate: Make a video or point us to an existing video, read the details below, and then nominate yourself or another person >>
After TED, talks from The Classroom will have a life online as part of TED-Ed, a new initiative we’re launching in 2012. With TED-Ed, we are creating a library of videos just for educators and students. The videos will be arranged using teacher-centric/learner-centric categories and tags, designed to help teachers quickly discover the perfect video for the lesson at hand. The videos will also be arranged into playlists to give students a multidisciplinary, immersive insight into a learning concept.
The talks we’re looking for will each:
+ be shorter than 10 minutes
+ contain informative material, not just inspiring messages
+ be delivered with a huge amount of passion for the topic
+ engage an audience from age 14 to adult
+ be something you might imagine a teacher using in the classroom as video to supplement a lesson.
We’re especially keen to include brilliant EXPLANATIONS, meaningful A-HA moments, powerful STORIES, indelible IMAGES.
Here are a few links to talks that fit the bill:
Vilayanur Ramachandran on mirror neurons
David Gallo shares underwater astonishments
This explanation of special relativity
Derek Sivers: Weird, or just different?
Now, a couple of notes about what we’re not looking for. For this session, we do not want talks about teaching methods, education reform or education in general. We are not looking for an inspiring, “go forth,” commencement-style talk. We do love those sometimes, but they’re not a fit for this session.
You must submit a short video to enter.
The deadline for nominations is December 5, 2011, at midnight Eastern. We’ll contact the speakers we’ve chosen with invitations (or more questions) by December 12, 2011.
TED2012 takes place February 27-March 2, 2012, in Long Beach, California. The Classroom session will take place on March 2. We’ll cover coach travel, good accommodations, and a pass to TED for those 10 amazing teachers who take the stage.
We hope you’ll share your best lessons (or teachers) with us. Good luck!
Nominate yourself or another person >>
Photo of David Gallo by Ryan Lash
28 November 2011
Damon Horowitz: Philosophy in prison
Damon Horowitz teaches philosophy through the Prison University Project, bringing college-level classes to inmates of San Quentin State Prison. In this powerful short talk, he tells the story of an encounter with right and wrong that quickly gets personal. (Recorded at TED2011, March 2011, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 3:51.)
Watch Damon Horowitz’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
27 November 2011
Living beyond limits: Amy Purdy on TED.com
When she was 19, Amy Purdy lost both her legs below the knee. And now … she’s a pro snowboarder. In this powerful talk, she shows us how to draw inspiration from life’s obstacles. (Recorded at TEDxOrangeCoast 2011, September 2011, in Boulder, Colorado. Duration: 9:37.)
Watch Amy Purdy’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.
23 November 2011
TEDxWomen: A truly global conversation
On December 1st, TEDxWomen will take place at the Paley Centers in both New York and LA.
Simultaneously, over 110 TEDxWomen events will be hosted by TEDx event Organizers in communities all around the world, including China, The Netherlands, Israel, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, Lebanon and the United States. Besides watching the webcast of TEDxWomen, some of these events will incorporate local speakers, bringing local flavor to the global conversation:
TEDxBFUWomen — an event in Beijing, China — will host outstanding female speakers that include professors of biology and business, as well as student leaders.
In its second year after hosting an event around TEDWomen, TEDxAmsterdamWomen — held at the Van Gogh Museum — will highlight Dutch thinkers and doers.
At TEDxCrestmoorParkWomen in Denver, Colorado, will feature local women and their amazing stories.
TEDxDirahWomen in Saudi Arabia will feature women speakers from the region including a biologist and a library director.
Find more events on the TEDxWomen website »
Learn more about organizers of these TEDxWomen events »
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