It’s voting day in the United States. As Americans line up at the polls to vote for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, eyes around the world are fixed on the contest, which predictions say will come down to a few key issues. So what has mattered most to Americans in this election? The TED Blog read this Gallup poll, which reveals the issues citizens want the next president to prioritize. Since these topics are ones speakers often address on the TED stage, for the past two months, we’ve brought you a series of playlists focusing on the top-rated issues. Today, the final installment.

It’s no surprise that “making healthcare available and affordable” is an issue Americans examined closely this election. 74 percent of US citizens surveyed indicated that healthcare was either “extremely important” or “very important” to them as they decided who to vote for. While some believe that healthcare reform can benefit us all exponentially, others say it’s far too complex and costly an institution to change. While the breadth of this issue can only begin to be scratched, the following 9 TED Talks provide a range of big ideas on improving corners of our health systems. (Also, check out the essay “Who’s really serious about fixing healthcare?,” part of our first-ever TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post.)

Daniel Kraft: Medicine’s future? There’s an app for that
If the scientific method is all about theoretical deduction and experimentation, then according to this healthcare professional, we’re not effectively using health data to accelerate innovation. In this talk from TEDxMaastricht, Daniel Kraft shows that by linking advanced technologies, great young minds and social media together we can develop mobile apps that will recognize global health insufficiencies and create portable, personal solutions based on aggregated data.

Jamie Heywood: The big idea my brother inspired
After Jamie Heywood’s brother Steven — a 29-year-old father — was diagnosed with ALS, his family embarked on a long journey toward approaching healthcare in a positive way. At TEDMed 2009, Heywood shares how he created Patients Like Me, a website that provides tools for patients so that they can track their own health status. The idea is that, with better information, a patient can engage with their doctor and influence their treatment.

Jack Andraka: Detecting pancreatic cancer … at 15
Pancreatic cancer is extremely fatal because, once it is detected, it has generally spread throughout the body. During the TED Talent Search, 15-year-old Jack Andraka shared an early detection system that he is currently developing. By studying a protein that can be spotted at an early stage of pancreatic cancer, Andraka is creating a minimally invasive test that could raise the survival rate from 5.5% to over 50%.

Rebecca Onie: What if our healthcare system kept us healthy?
In 1995, Rebecca Onie was an energetic law school student looking to make a difference in the lives of her low-income clients, many of whom had medical issues. Soon, she noticed a distinct correlation between the limited time doctors spent getting to know their patients and the larger societal problems perpetuating their poor living conditions. Thus, Health Leads was born to promote a health care system, rather than a “sick care system.” At TEDMed 2012, Onie shows how prescribing basic resources can keep patients healthy.

Lucien Engelen: Crowdsource your health
Lucien Engelen did not like the fact that you could use your smart phone to find the best Chinese food in the vicinity, but couldn’t use it to locate a defibrillator. In this talk from TEDxMaastricht, Engelen shows how encouraging patients to share information can save lives. With the development of a crowdsourced worldwide AED tracking website, citizens can keep track of where they’re finding defibrillators, and companies can validate their existence in order to save lives in a flash.

Max Little: A test for Parkinson’s with a phone call
There 6.3 million people worldwide living with Parkinson’s disease. Max Little’s visionary idea takes diagnosing the disease from a high-cost neurological test to an intimate moment in the hands of the patient. At TEDGlobal 2012, Little showed how a 30-second phone call — coupled with precise voice analysis software — could be all that’s needed for a diagnosis through the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative.

William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer?
Have you heard about the angiogenesis revolution? Well, understanding angiogenesis — the process by which your body grows new blood vessels — can help us not only prevent cancer, but keep it in remission. In this talk from TED2010, William Li addresses a hypothetically life-changing approach to treating and preventing cancer.

Alexander Grey: My muscle-measuring machine
Alexander Grey paid tribute to his father’s medical legacy by founding Somaxis, a start-up challenging the medical field with kinesthetic innovations. Somaxis developed affordable sensors that measure muscle energy, allowing you to predict injuries and preserve energy for optimum performance. With this innovation, people might some day be able to see back pain coming from their chair at work, or embark on a foot race with athletes overseas.

Jay Bradner: Open-source cancer research
Jay Bradner moved to Boston 10 years ago to discover how chemistry could effectively treat and kill cancer. While doing research on a rare cancer and its untargetable protein, his lab found a way to trick cancer into developing into a normal cell. By employing the eagerness of citizens, Bradner and his team hope to open-source their chemical findings. As he revealed at TEDxBoston, they hope to take pharmaceutical companies by storm and find the effective solutions themselves.

Why does the time we spend cramming for life’s most trying tests always escape us before our focus is shifted to battling a more complex problem? During the college years, an unforeseen dichotomy develops where rushing becomes a normal state, whether it be to register for classes or to get through your last semester. But, when it’s over we grieve, for learning how to learn is what we lamented all this time. In this playlist, a look at the best practices for how to improve this very human process.

Jonathan Drori on what we think we know You know the contemptuous look you flash to the smartypants in the corner of the classroom? You’ll be glad to know that they, in fact, do not have an answer for everything. In this talk, Jonathan Drori makes a great argument about why all of us don’t actually understand as much as we think we do.

What we learned from 5 million books
Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel set out to explore how language has been shaped and changed as societies evolve, but in the process found out that a picture isn’t worth a thousand words — but rather 500 billion words. You can search through 5 million books at once, with the Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer, to see if “UGH” was as popular a century ago as it is today.

Joshua Foer: Feats of memory anyone can do
This science writer set out to discover how people with average memories train themselves to develop an extraordinary skill set at the United States Memory Championship — and won. In this talk, he gives techniques on how to sharpen your mind’s eye.

Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education
Five years ago, former hedge fund analyst Salman Khan helped refresh his cousins’ academic memory by putting video lessons on YouTube. Now, with over one million viewers, the Khan Academy offers a global community the ability to learn effectively with self-paced online lessons through videos.

Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!
Contrary to popular belief doodling isn’t the act of doing nothing. In this talk, Sunni Brown tells us that it is the physical act of a person engaging several types of learning to flush out an idea. So, go on and add doodling to the brainstorm!

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Carvens Lissaint: Put the financial aid in the bag
For recent graduates, debating the legitimacy of investing further in your education is a daunting thought. Watch this powerful spoken word lesson on financial aid and the stress that comes with needing it.

As humans, we fail to think of ourselves as incorporated into the animal kingdom, But with these eight talks, you might see how we factor into the food chain. From extinct species, to warding off growing ones, these speakers from the 14-city TED Talent Search have seen it all, so listen to their stories of majesty and survival.

Andrea Marshall: An up-close look at the majestic manta Ray
TED@Johannesburg
Andrea Marshall, fascinated with the ocean at a young age, wrote her first doctoral thesis on the manta ray — the cartilaginous, friendly, brainy rays that constantly swim and never sleep for up to 40 or 50 years.

Allan Savory: How wildlife can resuscitate dying land
TED@Johannesburg
Allan Savory posits that agriculture is causing more damage than fossil fuels because of the eroding soil used to harvest crops. To counteract the prominence of global desertification, Allan founded the Holistic Management method that controls wildlife grazing patterns to mimic nature on this forgotten land.

Emma Stokes: Imagine a world without tigers
TED@Bangalore
This wildlife conservation scientist traveled across Asia for five years trying to document the dwindling 3,500 global tiger population. But in all that time, she has only seen one tiger. In this talk she crafts two stories — a world with this beautiful species, and a world without.

Dino Martins: Honeybees and humans — an ancient love affair
TED@Nairobi
Did you know honeybees and humans both originate from East Africa? In this talk, Dino Martins sheds light on the ancient love affair between honeybees, honey guide birds, honey badgers and humans.

Carin Bondar: Reproduction and survival in the Animal Kingdom
TED@Vancouver
This notable science writer shows us how we’re not the only species in the animal kingdom learning how to reproduce and use contraception. In this interesting talk, Carin Bondar gives us brief insights into how our primate and insect friends have similar wits about them.

Sarath Champati: Eye to eye with wild animals
TED@Bangalore
In this talk, Sarath Champati shares his love of being a naturalist through photos and enchanting tales of encounters with some of the world’s most endangered animals.

Munir Virani: Why I love vultures
TED@Nairobi
Did you know that 11 out of 16 species of vultures are at risk of becoming extinct? We didn’t either, but watch this talk to find out why they are so culturally, and ecologically, important.

Richard Turere: My invention that outsmarted lions
TED@Nairobi
This brilliant 13-year-old simultaneously saved his family and their livestock from getting mauled by lions in the middle of the night with an electronic contraption after fiddling with the insides of VCRs, lightbulbs, and bike reflectors. Watch this talk and become a tinkerer too.

Check out more wonderful playlists from the TED Talent Search. Rating of these 293 talks is open until August 31.

These TEDTalks explore the saying, “Good things come in small packages.” A world with lifesaving microchips, the perfectly engineered foot, and vast worlds constructed on pinheads seem fantastical, but the following speakers have turned their ingenious ideas into fascinating realities.

Frederick Balagadde: Bio-lab on a microchip
The sub-Saharan African region has suffered the most losses from the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Ugandan-born research scientist Frederick Balagadde says. As someone who has lost many loved ones to this disease, Balagadde was inspired to create an iPhone-sized microchip that will offer diagnoses to 100 patients, up to 50 times faster, and five to 500 times cheaper than the cost of Western medicine.

Willard Wigan: Hold your breath for micro-sculpture
Feeling defeated by traditional education at a young age, Willard Wigan discovered his inherent talent to make intricate, microscopic sculptures after observing ants in his backyard. After his mother saw the mini-apartments he made from splintered wood, she encouraged him to go even smaller in design. Thus was made a mini Statue of Liberty placed in the loop of a threading needle, intricate home architecture on pinheads, and rearing white stallions attached to golden chariots by spider web threading.

Kwabena Boahen on a computer that works like the brain
Did you know the amount of energy the brain and your laptop uses is essentially the same? Kwabena Boahen and his team collaborated with neurobiologists to “create a computer that works like a brain.” Together, they reverse engineered the way the optic nerve sends information to the brain, and have recreated this retina network in a silicon chip.

Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria “talk”
Molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler says there are 10 trillion times as many bacterial cells as any other cell in or around the human body. By studying a bacteria with a bioluminescent property, vibrio fischeri, her lab came to find that all bacteria has a system by which they “talk” to each other with chemical words, interpret those words, and turn on a group behavior only successful when all cells participate in unison.

Robert Full on animal movement
From humans to tiny invertebrates, biologist Robert Full observes the way animals travel in order to engineer the perfect foot. These observational experiments included cutting off a tiny leg segment on a cockroach to prove it moves with the same efficiency as with all its legs, and watching a shrimp-like creature called a stomatopod propel its entire body forward in a rolling motion –exemplifying what Full says is “the ultimate distributed foot.”

Jonathan Drori: Every pollen grain has a story
Jonathan Drori uses microscopes to explore pollen in all its invisible beauty. His images reveal that pollen comes in a variety of surprising colors and shapes, and that from all of this unique visual data we can extract information about how these miniscule flecks travel, reproduce and grow into flowers.

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Just how small is an atom?
The atom is really really really small — smaller than we can imagine or visualize. This lesson from TED-Ed plays with our conceptions of size and space, resizing everyday objects like blueberries and grapefruits, to help us truly understand how tiny atoms are. 

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Gary Greenberg: The extraordinary nature of ordinary things
Dr. Gary Greenberg takes us into the micro world of of ordinary things — bees, sand, and even atoms — using microscopes to capture high-definition images. In this talk from TEDxMaui, Greenberg shows us breathtaking photos to remind us of the extraordinariness of everything around us.

As unusual seasonal effects raze our global ideas on sustainable practices, TED set out on a tour of 14 cities on six continents to find fresh perspectives for the TED2013 conference. While the 293 speakers who participated in this global Talent Search came from wildly different backgrounds, we couldn’t help but notice sweeping themes emerge from their talks. Here, 9 great talks on energy efficiency.

Laurence Kemball-Cook: Energy capturing cement
TED@London
Laurence is an industrial design engineer who used to work for one of Europe’s largest energy companies, but now wants to put people on the power grid by harnessing their daily expendable energy. “Imagine if your walk home in the morning could power lights for your walk home in the evening,” Laurence says. His solution? Pavegen, a flooring tile that absorbs kinetic energy from footsteps and converts it into electricity. “It’s almost like the gamification of energy saving,” he explains.

Hassine Labaied: A more efficient wind energy — using sails
TED@Tunis
Challenging conventional wisdom is a must when starting and maintaining a revolution, and Hassine Labaeid — CEO of Energy Saphon — seeks to do that with the zero-blade system. As the world seeks to harness sustainable wind energy, Labaeid points out that 400-year-old technology of windmill turbines is expensive and only 30-35% efficient — not to mention the fact that the electricity it produces is unstorable. Inspired by sailboat design, the zero-blade system provides a clean, cheap and storable solution.

Raymond Wang: Harvesting energy from rain, hail and snow
TED@Vancouver
While lying in bed on a rainy evening, 14-year-old Raymond Wang had his ‘A-ha!’ moment. He is looking to harvest energy from the weather — be it rain, snow, hail or wind. Using pizoelectric materials, Wang shows us how the mechanical stress of precipitation can be easily converted into electricity.

Josiah Omotto: Harvesting biogas from human waste
TED@Nairobi
Sixty percent of Nairobi’s population — estimated at 4 million people — lives in informal settlements. But Josiah Omotto says that by putting a ban on open defecation, citizens could be waiting in the queue to poo for up to two days. He and his team at the Umande Trust have been working with communities to build biocenters that are capable of converting human waste into usable electricity.

Leyla Acaroglu: Paper or plastic? Debunking an environmental myth
TED@Sydney
Leyla Acaroglu, a life-cycle assessment proponent, believes people currently make decisions based on “environmental folklore” they’ve recycled from memories, articles and science teachers. To battle this ignorance, she says we’ve got to think of the entire life-cycle of products, systems and services as a scientific methodology to measure the actual impact choosing paper and plastic has on our earth.

Otto Ng: Canopying the desert for solar energy
TED@Seoul
Otto Ng is a technologist and architect currently researching the future of the power plant at MIT, which he calls “The Powerscape.” This structure, which is 100 times smaller in scale than a solar energy infrastructure, suspends a mesh of mirrors and sensors over sand, moving to reflect and capture the energy from the sun. The idea is to generate and store electricity for future use.

Alana Kakoyiannis: How to turn bootleg videotapes into fuel
TED@Doha
In 2008, filmmaker Alana Kakoyiannis stumbled upon a ruin of Greek bootlegged videos in an abandoned room. After she had her artistic way with the reels, her uncle ignited an incendiary idea with a whisper — don’t discard those tapes, turn them into fuel. Here, she shares her story of reclaiming overproduction in the film industry.

Check out more wonderful playlists from the TED Talent Search. Rating of these 293 talks is open until August 31.

What can you learn from your muscles? A lot, according to Alexander Grey, the chief technology officer of Somaxis, who has created sensors that measure muscle workload. In a talk given at TED@New York – one of 14 events that was part of the 2013 Talent Search — Grey demonstrates how people can use these sensors to stave off the onset of fatigue while running, recognize stress injuries before they happen, and even play the guitar — without ever picking one up.

In your bio, it says that you’ve created these muscle sensors to be used “personally and interpersonally.” What are some future uses for the muscle sensors?

One of the things I’m looking at is this idea of live, non-local racing. With athletes, you could stream your fatigue data and heart rate data and go for a run with someone in Tokyo for example. So, then that [data] would go to your iPhone, and they’ve got one too, so you’re all in the network. You can literally connect people globally to have them share their own biometrics with each other.

So that would be one application, but there’s a lot of others. One of the features is the midi controller. You can actually make it so that by moving your body, the sensor creates music or controls lights. So, you could have a new type of performance art that integrates body movement with sounds.

One of the things I’m trying to coordinate right now is making a platform for group experimentation. So, the idea would be that anyone could create an experiment like: what works better for me before a run — bananas or pasta? People could sign up for that, and they could go on a pre-set distance run with whatever it is they’re eating beforehand, and then all the data aggregates. Then someone could say: how about barefoot running versus regular running with shoes, what’s going to make a bigger difference in my calf fatigue over time? Someone creates an experiment, a bunch of people join, so all of a sudden with all these kinds of sensors in different places, people can discover other things on their own — it’s like a platform for discovery.

Do you have background in medicine — either Eastern or Western?

I studied electrical engineering and computer science for two years, and then I changed majors and got my degree in molecular biology. Then I started working and abandoned biology, and went back to tech. I was doing failure analysis for microchips, and then I started this thing up, which is a mixture of bio and tech. I also have a degree in acupressure, and actually it was very useful to understand the body, the different types of bodies, and the different types of muscles. It’s a lot of hands on stuff, a lot of massage is integrated there, so you just get a sense of the different kinds of tissues, the way that people work, and the dimensions that people have.

We heard you say something about robots earlier. Tell us more!

If you perhaps have a prosthetic limb right now, they have a lot of systems for translating the data. They have muscle-driven prosthetics, but there are tons of wires and they’ve got to go inside and all this stuff — it’s pretty invasive. So, if you have some kind of thing you could just put on, and it allows you to control your prosthetic, I think that would be a great improvement to what we’ve already seen.

How can these sensors help the everyday person feel better — let’s say, someone who is not particularly active, but feels body pain and fatigue often?

Repetitive strain is something that’s a big problem in the workplace. I came up with a way to do predictive screening, so that if you run people through a 2-minute test, typing and mousing, there’s an algorithm which crunches their numbers and looks at how you’re using those muscles while you do it. Therefore, it determines the risk factor for developing a repetitive strain injury in the future even if you have no symptoms right now. That was actually my original business plan, but I was told the market wasn’t big enough, so I had to start in sports and fitness first.

What’s next?

It’s a hardware platform, there are some great ideas that people have run by me that I’m really excited about, but our eventual role will be to provide the platform. We’ll release an API, and let people do whatever they want: make that workplace monitor, make the yoga monitor, make the meditation aid.

This is why the big trend is self-monitoring, you know, what can I do on my own? Even if you have healthcare, the irony is that the doctor sees you for such a short period of time, that if you could bring them all this other data and say, “Hey, look at all the stuff I’ve collected — look at the trends,” it’d be a way to expand the doctor’s insight. It may not be the same grade as medical equipment, but the information it gives is very good, and I think that at that price point the value to people is pretty solid.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Daniel Ogilvie was shocked when his 4-year-old daughter ran out of her bedroom screaming, “I don’t want to be a thing that dies.” But every child goes through this moment of recognizing their mortality. A Rutgers University professor who has studied philosophy for the past 25 years, Ogilvie has become fascinated with our beliefs about death and afterlife. In a thought-provoking talk at TED@New York — one of the 293 talks given as part of the 2013 Talent Search — Ogilvie explains his impetus for teaching a course about “soul beliefs,” whether or not we think something of ourselves carries on after our physical body dies.

What is your drive to separate religion from the beliefs of the afterlife? Why do you feel that is important to do in your research and work?

Truth is, I don’t make the separation between religion and afterlife beliefs. Religions make use of afterlife beliefs. Now, each religion has a different message about what to do, and how you have to behave and who to believe in, in order to make it into this gated community called heaven. But each religion has a view on that — a message and the point that I make is that each religion has different prescriptions.

Now, I’m ambivalent again, but that’s what got me into this issue. I mean, what we’re concerned about now is competition between religions about how to get to heaven, and there have been lots of wars fought over this — well, part of the motivation for wars fought is this, and each of the warring tribes are about to have access to nuclear weapons — we’re going to blow ourselves up. I started reading about this, writing about it and doing research on it, but if I cut this out, I will end up with something about how my goal is to have people talk about their beliefs about the soul, about afterlife, and to question the assumptions that we have without really thinking about them. [These thoughts] have been ingrained in us, but my point is to bring them from a level of absolute certainty to “I’m not sure,” and that’s where I make my break. If we’re operating with “I’m not sure,” that may reduce the kind of tension that exists in the world.

Are you particularly a religious man yourself?

No. I give a whole course on this, and at the end of the course [students] still don’t know if I’m an atheist or something like that, and I’m fine with that. I just want them to think about their own beliefs, talk about it, argue about them — well not necessarily argue about them, but read about the history.

I’ve written this long thing about the history of afterlife beliefs, and I’ve written another thing on how we come to believe anything — it’s called, “Anatomy of Internalized Beliefs.” So I keep on, you know, pushing this thing, but I should probably be either retired or dead.

Actually I was to retire next year, but the university loves this course, so it’s the last year I’m teaching it. I co-teach it with somebody who’s really retiring. But, they’re going to videotape it in the fall with really good, professional videotaping to make it available. Maybe for free courses or maybe they’d sell it to universities, with Rutgers making the profit, as a hybrid course where you’d go through the lectures, have recitation, and I would work up a manual on what to do. The university said instead of retiring, let’s put you on a research professor line, so that’s what we’re working on now. It’s a very engaging topic that people are very interested in talking about, and before now this was sacred territory.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Tania Luna, the CEO of SurpriseIndustries.com and a psychology instructor at Hunter College in New York, came to the United States as a 6-year-old immigrant from Ukraine. While she and her family thought that they were staying at a hotel when they first arrived in New York, upon returning years later, they discovered that it was actually a homeless shelter. In a moving talk at TED@New York — one of the 293 given as part of the TED2013 Talent Search — Luna describes her life as an immigrant and how thinking about how poor she was as a child makes her feel so exceptionally rich now.

Did your personal story directly, or indirectly, inspire your business?

I think it inspired my business indirectly, in several ways. The first is, because I grew up with a lot of things changing and very little stability — I mean, we never knew where we were going to live next — I became very surprise-averse and sort of a control freak. I wanted to control everything around me. But, on the other hand, through my upbringing, I really got a chance to explore and focus on the little, wonderful, magical surprises in life, like finding toys in the trash; like finding pennies.

I used to do this silly thing when I was a kid where I’d like bury treasure — little wrappers that I’d pick up — in the dirt and then I’d go looking for treasure. Growing up with so little allowed me the luxury of really letting my imagination run wild and I really was privileged in being able to appreciate these little things and surprises. Because I had such low expectations, pretty much anything nice that happened was a wonderful surprise.

And so, on the one hand, I think my upbringing inspired the business because I had an appreciation for experiences and surprises and, on the other hand, so many things had gone wrong in my life that I wanted to be in control of everything. I wanted to surprise others — I didn’t want things to surprise me.

Also, since we grew up with no money, I always wanted to own my own business so that I could be in charge of my finances, thinking that entrepreneurs make a lot of money, though this isn’t necessarily the case. I lost more money than I’ve made, I’m sure, on my business ventures.

My business and my clients have taught me a lot about life because I watch them go through these surprises, and it helps me reconnect with the real important reason I started the business with my sister, which was that it creates these little magical moments of surprise in your life.

Tell me about surprises you about your TED experience so far.

What surprised me is that I thought I was going to do a talk about surprise and not being attached to outcomes, and it was very ironic, but I found out yesterday morning that I wouldn’t be doing a talk about a surprise, but that I should tell my life story instead. So, the first surprise was that I would be giving a talk that I didn’t expect to give, but my old talk was about allowing surprise into your life and how to not be attached to outcomes — so I said, “Okay, the whole moral of my story was to let yourself be surprised, so I’ll do this and let myself be surprised.”

The other thing that’s surprising is that I’m talking about this here, in front of all these people, but my closest friend probably don’t even know a lot of these things about me. There are a lot of these stories that I haven’t thought about, so just when Kelly and Nick were like, “tell your story,” I started thinking, but there was so much that I didn’t remember — like the pizza thing I hadn’t thought about for 20 years! In a lot of ways I feel like it’s a story about things around me, not my story, and I think that’s one of my hesitations to share it, because I feel like I didn’t do anything to deserve the opportunity to share it.

There were times that I was really ashamed of us not having money. You know? Like I remember this one time, we found a bike in the trash and it was my first bike and it was obviously a used bike, and I started to learn to ride a bicycle. The girl who threw it out, her mother had thrown it out and had gotten her a new bike, but the girl lived in our neighborhood and she saw me riding her bike and she like chased me down and threatened me, saying that we had stolen her bike, and I do remember that feeling of shame — of realizing how something that I had become attached to was not my own. I had somebody else’s garbage. And also, being an immigrant — this is more for my sister — but when we moved here people weren’t so accepting of immigrants. In Ukraine, she was the popular girl. Here, people shoved her into the street and people tormented her, so there are those scars still in a lot of ways. So, I get the desire to not bring that up again.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Katie Zeppieri at her first TED event

As the TED team travels around the world hosting salons in 14 cities, we’re collecting great local stories. Here’s a quick report from TED@Vancouver, held June 1, 2012 at the Roundhouse Community Centre, and locally hosted by TED staff Janet and Katherine McCartney.

Above, check out the excited Katie Zeppieri at her first TED event, with a tweet of hers to follow:

Honoured to be selected as a finalist for the TED 2013 Worldwide Talent Search! Vancouver, I'll be heading your way May 31 @TEDNews #Excited

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Katie Zeppieri (@KatieZeppieri) May 16, 2012

Then, for a peek at what attendees saw in Vancouver, view more tweets and Twitpics:

An unexpected hip hop show at #TEDTalentSearch instagr.am/p/LT3-SYOQHb/

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Jordan Eshpeter (@JordanEshpeter) June 01, 2012

Majede Najar, an articulate 16 YO, tells the #tedtalentsearch crowd why she is proud to wear a hijab yfrog.com/ntkt6gfj

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suzanne siemens (@Luna_gal) June 01, 2012

Wow, I can't even spell the energy (piezoelectric?) this 8th grader is harvesting! #tedtalentsearch yfrog.com/odhqymij

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suzanne siemens (@Luna_gal) June 01, 2012

"When you leave here, just plant some shit" Ron Finley #TED #vancouver @ Roundhouse Community Centre instagr.am/p/LUNvvtC2ho/

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  (@nandapellegrini) June 01, 2012

And to wrap it all up, read an English-translated (by Google Translate) German blogger’s post about the event.

Photo: Katie Zeppieri‘s Twitter Stream