Bill Gates speaks on teachers’ need to get better feedback. Watch his talk during our first television special, TED Talks Education, airing Tuesday, May 7 at 10/9c on PBS. Photo: Ryan Lash

By Bill Gates

I spend a lot of my time working to help improve America’s schools. I’m also a big fan of TED Talks. So when TED’s Chris Anderson asked me to give a talk as part of a special TED session on education, I jumped at the chance. The show premieres on PBS this Tuesday, May 7, at 10 p.m. Eastern/9 p.m. Central. (Here’s a preview. And you can find your local broadcast time.)

John Legend hosted the show and did a fantastic job. John cares a lot about improving education and is investing a lot of his own time on the issue. I first met him when we were both involved with the documentary Waiting for Superman, and I could tell right away that he was an impressive and well-informed guy, in addition to being a super-talented musician. It’s great that he’s using his fame to draw attention to the need to improve our schools.

We taped the TED show last month in a beautiful hall at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City. I was very impressed with the lineup of speakers. One of the great things about the TED format is that it can accommodate lots of different kinds of speakers, from energetic storytellers to more analytical people like me who are hardcore about numbers and systems. That helps the audience look at the topic from lots of different angles.

In this case, they had education experts like Geoffrey Canada, who runs a terrific program called the Harlem Children’s Zone, and Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth, whom I’ve met with a few times as part of my own learning about education. They also had several passionate teachers from around the country. One of them, a chemistry teacher named Ramsey Musallam, startled everyone with video of himself blowing stuff up in class. John brought the house down with a beautiful performance.

For my part, I talked about what I think is the most powerful idea in education today: getting teachers the feedback they deserve so they can improve their practice.

It’s amazing to think about how much coaching is given to, say, professional athletes. I have a coach who gives me feedback too. (You’ll have to watch the show if you want to know why.) But most teachers get almost no feedback at all. And the vast majority of countries that outperform us in education have some formal way to give their teachers feedback. So this is an area where innovation and investment can make a big difference for teachers and students in this country.

As always, the TED team put together a great show, and I’m happy to have been a part of it. I hope you get a chance to watch it.

Find out more about TED Talks Education, airing on Tuesday at 10/9c on PBS »

And stayed tuned to TED.com on Wednesday, May 8, when we will post a full-length version of Bill Gates’ inspiring talk. Curious about his favorite talks in the meantime? Watch his TED playlist »

On May 7 at 10pm, PBS will air the very first televised TED event, TED Talks Education. The event, filmed in New York on April 4, brings together an hour of speakers and performers with a deep-rooted passion for education, and a focus on one of the major crises affecting US education right now: kids who don’t finish high school. Students drop out for thousands of reasons. How can we think about the problem?

The first three speakers booked: Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, plus TED favorites Bill Gates and Sir Ken Robinson — and watch for more announcements in coming weeks of dynamic teachers, speakers and performers to take the stage. The show is set to appear on PBS’ website after the air date, and we’ll let you know more soon.

TED Talks Education will be broadcast nationally in the U.S. and will be produced by WNET in conjunction with TED.  The program is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American Graduate Program. It promises to be an exciting, thought-provoking hour of television.

Want a preview? After the jump, watch Bill Gates’ fiery, data-packed talk on the US state budgeting system — which, he says, uses accounting tricks to siphon money away from schools and give it to entrenched interests.

Watch Bill Gates’ talk from TED2010 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 600+ TEDTalks.

We’ve transcribed Bill Gates’ talk on mosquitoes, malaria and education and posted the full text below the fold. Here’s a snippet:

But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.

Read the full transcript of Bill Gates’ 2009 TEDTalk on mosquitoes, malaria and education >>

+ Watch Bill Gates’ talk on TED.com
+ Read Bill Gates’ bio on TED.com

Bill Gates unplugged (02/04/09) transcript:

I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn’t, and making it kind of an annual thing. A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to.

So this morning I’m going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. So that’s a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. It’s a phenomenal thing. Each one of those lives matters a lot.

And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: Vaccines that were used more widely. For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. So we really can make changes. The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. And I think that’s doable in well under 20 years. Why? Well there’s only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria.

So that brings us to the first problem that I’ll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that’s spread by mosquitoes?

Well, what’s the history of this disease? It’s been a severe disease for thousands of years. In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it’s the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. So it was absolutely gigantic. And the disease was all over the world. A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. People didn’t know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitoes. So it was everywhere. And two tools helped bring the death rate down. One was killing the mosquitoes with DDT. The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. And so that’s why the death rate did come down.

Now, ironically, what happened was, it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. So we can see: 1900, it’s everywhere. 1945, it’s still most places. 1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 1990, you’ve gotten most of the northern areas. And more recently you can see it’s just around the equator.

And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn’t get much investment. For example, there’s more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it’s a terrible thing. (Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. And so that’s why that priority has been set.

But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. It means that you can’t get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitoes. I brought some here, just so you could experience this. We’ll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. (Laughter) There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience. (Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitoes are not infected.

So we’ve come up with a few new things. We’ve got bed nets. And bed nets are a great tool. What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitoes that bite late at night can’t get at them. And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. And that’s happened now in a number of countries. It’s great to see.

But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. So every tool that we’ve ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. And so you end up with two choices. If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. And that’s where we saw the malaria map shrinking. Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you’ll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn’t pay attention.

Now we’re on the upswing. Bed net funding is up. There’s new drug discovery going on. Our foundation has backed a vaccine that’s going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it’s effective. So we’re going to have these new tools.

But that alone doesn’t give us the road map. Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. And so as these elements come together, I’m quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria.

Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I’d say equally important. And this is: How do you make a teacher great? It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we’d understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don’t. Let’s start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I’ll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That’s part of the reason we’re here today, part of the reason we’re successful. I can say that, even though I’m a college drop-out. I had great teachers.

In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they’ve gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.

Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak; it’s getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.

When I first learned the statistics I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren’t tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. For minority kids, it’s over 50 percent. And even if you graduate from high school, if you’re low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

So, how do you make education better?

Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There’s many people working on it. We’ve worked on small schools, we’ve funded scholarships, we’ve done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.

So, it’s simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you’d say, “Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they’re doing and transfer that skill to other people.” But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.

What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small. You might think these are people with master’s degrees. They’ve gone back and they’ve gotten their Master’s of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there’s no effect at all, is a master’s degree.

Now, the way the pay system works is there’s two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master’s degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. Teach for America: slight effect. For math teachers majoring in math there’s a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it’s your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we’ve done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.

You might say, “Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher’s leave?” The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it’s a system with very high turnover.

Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It’s an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They’re team teaching. They’re constantly improving their teachers. They’re taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, “Hey, you caused this amount of increase.” They’re deeply engaged in making teaching better.

When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it’s very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, “What is going on?” The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, “I’m in the sports rally or something. What’s going on?” And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren’t paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn’t want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.

How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren’t told how good they are. The data isn’t gathered. In the teacher’s contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that. So imagine running a factory where you’ve got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, “Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment.”

Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn’t have the tools to do it. They don’t have the test scores, and there’s a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that’s sort of working in the opposite direction. But I’m optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.

First of all, there’s a lot more testing going on, and that’s given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who’s doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, “OK, here’s a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here’s a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?” And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.

You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who’s behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better.

Now there’s a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, “Work Hard, Be Nice.” And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I’m going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. (Applause)

Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it’s interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things.

But I — I’m optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems. There’s a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you’re getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. You know, the system doesn’t naturally make it happen. Governments don’t naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn’t naturally put its resources into these things.

So it’s going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you’re helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there’s some great things that will come out of it.

Thank you. (Applause)

Credit: TED.com
Watch Bill Gates’ talk at the 2009 TED Conference

We had two great editorial photographers at TED2009 in Long Beach — the brilliant Asa Mathat and James Duncan Davidson. As luck would have it, Duncan was the shooter who happened to be in the right place to catch Bill Gates’ now-famous mosquito release. Read how Duncan got the shot. In the enlargement above, it’s clear that, yes, they were real.

Photo (enlargement): James Duncan Davidson

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Download the Q&A here:

Bill Gates + Chris Anderson Q&A (Standard MP4)

Bill Gates + Chris Anderson Q&A (Hi-Res MP4)

Bill Gates + Chris Anderson Q&A (Zipped MP4)

Read the transcript of this Q&A >>

Chris Anderson: So you were at Davos last week, and the mood was reported as being pretty bleak. Do you have any fixes for the crisis?

Bill Gates: Well, I think it’s good that the mood was bleak. You know, we’re going through a period of years here where a 50-year credit expansion has moved to contraction. And there’s no doubt the U.S. consumer was overspending and to get the consumer balance sheet back, to get the savings rate up you’re going to have a number of years where aggregate demand is very low. And people expecting that the government is magically going to change that — if you actually went back to that heavy spending, you’d just be extending the problem and making it worse when you have to come and deal with it. So, it was a great meeting where people really had to say: “How’s your economy falling apart?” “Oh, that’s slightly different than the way mine is.” (Laughter) “What’s your solution?” And here are different ideas.

But there’s no doubt we’ve got three, four years here that are going to be very tough. I know we’re going to get past it. The kind of invention being talked about here is the reason why the economy will go onto a very positive path. But it was a great checkpoint, and for me it was a chance to say: I hope that the aid for the poorest doesn’t get cut because in past economic problems that’s the first thing that’s been eliminated. But now I think we have a broader constituency. I don’t think that has to happen this time.

CA: You have conversations all the time with the foundation about these big issues, but your foundation is often the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Is there any danger that you almost inadvertently gain a monopoly of ideas and that other people in the room are afraid to tell you what they really think because you’re so powerful?

BG: Well, I’m here, anybody can tell me what they think. Our foundation is, relative to other foundations, large. We will spend 3.8 billion this year — about half of that on global health. If you divide that down and say: okay, tuberculosis gets a couple hundred million, malaria gets a few hundred million — I don’t think of it as that much, I think geez, I’d like to have more because they’re interesting problems. And we do measure — are we getting others involved? In fact, the baseline on infectious diseases or teacher effectiveness — the amount of money that was going into those things before was minuscule. And I do feel good that we’ve drawn many other people into these things by working with them, by packaging things, just by sharing the success stories. We do need a diversity of ideas and we need people to disagree, try different things out and so …

(Laughter)

BG: It’s fine.

CA: I’m not distracted, I’m reading a question.

(Laughter)

There’s an associate member here, Tyler Donald, who’s writing from Chester Springs, saying: “It’s obvious you’re doing wonderful things to prevent deaths, you’re a self-proclaimed optimist. Another view is that your charity is adding enormously to the problem of overpopulation in the world.” Do you have an optimistic solution to that problem?

BG: Okay, this is a very important question to get right because it was absolutely key for me. When our foundation first started up, it was focused on reproductive health. That was the main thing we did because I thought population growth in poor countries is the biggest problem they face. You’ve got to help mothers who want to limit family size, have the tools and education to do that. That’s the only thing that really counts. Well then, I came across articles that showed that the key thing you can do to reduce population growth is actually improve health.

And that sounds paradoxical. You think: Okay, better health means more kids not less kids. Well in fact, what parents are doing is they’re trying to have two kids survive to adulthood to take care of them. And so, the more disease burden there is, the more kids they have to have to have that high probability. So there’s a perfect correlation, that as you improve health, within a half generation, the population growth rate goes down. In fact, Hans Rosling, here at this conference in two of my favorite speeches actually showed that unbelievable correlation that population growth has gone down. Today, where is there high population growth? It’s in the places with the worst health conditions — Northern Nigeria, Northern India … And so the two problems go exactly hand in hand and if we improve health rapidly we will get the peak population to be as much as a billion below the current expected peak — that is about 8.3 billion versus 9.3.

(Applause)

CA: Another of our associate members, D. Howard, who’s writing from New York he says — I like this — “Yeah, all the great teachers in my life have been eccentrics with a passion, how can we get a school system to tolerate dotty, humorous people with a lot of opinions, fascinating the pants off the children, without following a strict curriculum but opening minds and challenging kids to think for themselves?” Are those the kind of teachers that your charter school support?

BG: Well, we need to bring in all the people who can teach well and objectively look if they are teaching well then they should get better rewards. If they don’t stay for their pension, they should still have a very good salary. You know, if they don’t get a master’s degree, they should still have a very good salary. So it shouldn’t be a system that tries to look at lack of eccentricities as some positive thing. In fact, if you go into a teacher’s personnel file today you won’t find some deep analysis of their skills. You’ll find checklists like: keeps classroom clean. And I’ll bet those eccentric guys didn’t get that nice check mark next to keeps classroom clean. So today’s system is driving out those kinds of teachers.

CA: So Malcolm Gladwell just published a book, “Outliers,” where he has a whole chapter devoted to you. And he says the traditional view of your huge success as this sort of a brilliant, genius, software coder, determined young man, changing the world through those personal skills is basically wrong and that the way to think of you is as someone who was born in the right place at the right time. You had these incredible advantages of going to the right school at the right time, getting to computers early and so forth. What do you make of that?

(Laughter)

BG: Malcolm interviewed me for that book and it was because he and I agreed about these things that he put that in there. I mean, he didn’t want to write a book where the person he wrote about said: Oh, what a bunch of garbage. It’s not quite as simple as what you’ve described. What the book says is that if you get opportunities, which are partly a matter of luck and partly a matter of skill, those compound. So, when I was young I got to use computers that was very lucky. I got to work at a computer company because I was pretty good — these senior people looked at my code and told me: Nah, that’s not as good as it can be. And so I got better. And then I had another experience where a great developer looked at my code and told me how to do it better. So it’s a cycle, where luck and skill come and mess with each other and that’s what leads to a great — from my point of view — a great outcome.

CA: Bill, you’ve led this incredible life, where you’ve changed the lives of so many people around the world, you’ve been feared by many, you’ve been regarded as bad Bill, good Bill, I mean — in ten or fifteen years, what words, what would you want written on your tombstone?

(Laughter)

BG: Well, I hope I’m alive a lot longer than that.

(Laughter)

Warren Buffet always likes to say that the tombstone should say: check my pulse.

(Laughter)

I don’t think anyone optimizes for having a good funeral or a nice epitaph.

CA: No, but –

(Applause)

CA: But I’m serious though, your legacy, you must think about your legacy a bit. You’ve already got an incredible legacy in software. Is that how you want most to be remembered? Are you really excited by this philanthropic stuff to the same level or is it kind of a hobby?

BG: I’m as engaged in the new work as I’ve ever been in anything so the same as I was in software but it’s because of the day-to-day activity and the ambitious goals. It’s not about legacy. It’s working with smart people, you know, some of the drugs fail. I was in Nigeria the last three days and polio — we’ve had a huge setback in polio eradication there. The cases doubled in the last year and in the North, they don’t have very good coverage. It was thrilling to go meet the Sultan of Sokoto and have him say that he’d get his religious people out to educate the parents that the vaccine really is a good thing. These are amazing issues, and it’s fun to work on them. It’s also fun when you achieve the ambitious goal. So, in that sense, it’s magic in the same way that software was.

CA: Well it certainly feels like the moment where you turned — you decided to turn your incredible success into giving a huge portion of your wealth back to the world — that was actually a big moment for the world and there a lot of people in the room who are also incredibly successful, building businesses and I believe many of them, including me, have been inspired by what you’ve done. So thank you so much for coming here today.

BG: Thank you, great.

CA: It was fantastic.

(Applause)

(If you’ve seen the balloon, write to chris.lost.balloon@ted.com.)

… and the Bill Gates Flash game — find it at feverbeater.com, and then take the site’s advice to visit gatesfoundation.org to find out how you can help beat malaria. Read Bill Gates’ annual letter for more background. Below, Yesenia from the TED staff plays the game:

Watch Bill Gates’ talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 370+ TEDTalks — including more talks on the new philanthropy.

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“It’s hard to introduce Bill Gates, I suspect. Chris Anderson, our host, explains that Gates hasn’t been at TED since 1992, when he wasn’t very warmly received by the Silicon Valley community. He’s not talking technology today, despite the fact that he’s in a session titled “Reboot”. Gates worries that he might be invited in this section because we’re all rebooting our PCs so often – instead, he wants to talk about ways in which his philanthropic work can help reboot society around some critical problems.”

Read even more from Zuckerman for the complete picture. He’s blogging — as usual — in vibrant detail.

Photo: TED / Asa Mathat

There were two main impressions of the talk, both not typical of the technological giant’s image. People came away deeply inspired and amused. Take a look:

Gates is such an inspiring change agent. I wish that more people in the world took action 2 make change. What a world it would b! #TED — leighleighsf

Bill Gates a comedian! Talking about malaria. Pretended to loose mosquitoes from jar. “Not only poor people shd have the experience” — helenwalters

Bill Gates: “I am an optimist. Every problem can be solved. And there some important ones out there.” — heartnsoul

Anderson opened an Apple computer in front of Gates as Gates was saying “there needs to be a diversity of ideas.” Everyone laughs. — laureltouby

Gates: I’m as engaged in the new job as I ever was in software; these are amazing issues … it’s magic in the same way software was. — samwise

Gates seems to have found a winning combination — hope and humor.

Photo: TED / James Duncan Davidson