Here, the speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a recap:

Ben Affleck, straight off his Argo Oscar victory, introduced the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste.

Diana Reiss studies cognition in animals and the evolution of intelligence. She and her colleagues demonstrated that bottlenose dolphins (and Asian elephants) can recognize themselves in the mirror.

Musician Peter Gabriel is the co-founder of WITNESS, which distributes digital cameras to empower people to document human-rights abuses. A founder of the band Genesis, Gabriel is now a solo artist and record mogul, championing world music and innovation.

As Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Neil Gershenfeld explores the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds.

Computer scientist Vint Cerf helped lay the foundations for the internet as we know it.

Beijing-based artist Liu Bolin silently comments on modern sociopolitical conditions by dissolving into his art.

Lakshmi Pratury is the host of The INK Conference and was the co-host of TEDIndia in 2009. She talks about her new website, Billionaires of Moments.

Eleanor Longden overcame her misdiagnosis of schizophrenia to earn a master’s in psychology and demonstrate that the voices in her head were “a sane reaction to insane circumstances.”

Born in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee left for China in 1997. Now living in South Korea, she has become an activist for fellow refugees.

Shane Koyczan makes spoken-word poetry and music. His poem “To This Day” is a powerful story of bullying and survival, illustrated by animators from around the world.

The speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a recap of their talk:

Rose George “talks shit” to raise awareness about the lack of basic sanitation worldwide.

Mark Shaw develops technologies to contain hazardous waste, stormwater and radioactives.

Ornithologist Kees Moeliker writes and speaks about natural history, especially birds and remarkable animal behavior, as well as improbable research and science-communication-with-a-laugh.

The co-author of Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan explores the prehistoric roots of human sexuality.

Allison Hunt has worked in advertising and marketing for 20 years, developing human insight and persuasion into an art for her clients. Six years after getting an artificial hip, she decided to try something new.

Whether he’s taking on insecure hotspots, inept passwords or lax OS designers, James Lyne exposes technology’s vulnerabilities while elevating the security awareness of everyday users.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas is a Ghanaian undercover journalist and private eye who gathers hard evidence of crime and corruption, putting the perpetrators behind bars.

Here, the speakers who appeared in this session. Click on their name to read a recap of their talk:

Saki Mafundikwa wrote the book on Africa’s graphic design heritage — then opened a school of graphic arts in his native Zimbabwe.

Think texting spells the death of writing? Linguist John McWhorter suggests it’s actually a new form of speech.

Mohamed Jemni develops intuitive tools to make the web more accessible for people with disabilities.

Ajit Narayanan is the inventor of Avaz, an affordable, tablet-based communication device for people who are speech-impaired.

Raghava KK‘s paintings and drawings use cartoonish shapes and colors to examine the body, society and our world.

Biologist Denise Herzing has spent over 25 years researching and communicating with wild dolphins in their natural setting and on their own terms.

Radio host Adam Spencer fills Sydney’s drive-time mornings with smart math and science talk.

The speakers who appeared in this session. Click on the speaker’s name for a full recap of the talk:

Creative force Leyla Acaroglu uses innovative design and systems thinking to create positive change.

Renegade gardener Ron Finley grows a nourishing food culture in South Central Los Angeles’ food desert by planting the seeds and tools for healthy eating.

Mouth musician Wang Li mesmerizes audiences with his unique approach to two of the world’s most ancient (and surprising) instruments.

Teenaged science fair winners Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao have discovered a way to break down nasty compounds called phthalates, common to flexible plastics and linked to many health problems.

Energy software maker Alex Laskey helps power companies to help their customers cut down — using data analysis, marketing and a pinch of behavioral science.

Fueled by their deep Afro-Cuban roots, the Pedrito Martinez Group featuring Ariacne Trujillo, have rocketed to the top of New York’s Afro-Caribbean music scene.

Michael Green wants to solve architecture’s biggest challenge — meeting worldwide housing demand without increasing carbon emissions — by building with carbon-sequestering wood instead of concrete and steel.

Allan Savory works to promote holistic management in the grasslands of the world.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Lesley Perkes walks onto the TED stage to tell us about her birth in 1961 in inner city Johannesburg. Her mother said she looked like a toilet brush, her hair standing on end. “I think I saw the future,” she says.

Her story centers around Hillbrow Tower, the iconic, 268-meter-tall building built in 1968 in the heart of a Jo’burg neighborhood that was closed by the Apartheid ruling class in 1981. Trying to persuade the South African government to convert the still-closed building into a “canvas for imagination” has preoccupied Perkes for the past 20 years. For her, the building’s continued closure is no less than “a crisis of imagination. Unless we do something about it, we are doomed to repeat ourselves.”

She gives the audience some context. Where once Hillbrow was 80% white and filled with continental restaurants and cafés, now it is “seriously continental,” filled with poor residents from all over Africa. This is not the grand colonial city featured on postcards. This is the city of people “wondering where wonder has gone.” It is filled with unemployed people, considered “a no-go zone for anyone with anything to lose.” Perkes quotes mutual fund builder John Templeton. “He said to look for the points of maximum pessimism and invest there. Well I am, and me and my friends are. Ain’t no dustbin too scary for us.”

She shows images from an exhibition constructed with World Cup funds, Long Live the Dead Queen, which converted 10,000 square meters of space in the neighborhood that is normally reserved for alcohol advertising into public art. She shows a pile of rubble next to her house she says she didn’t notice for over a year. She turned it into a concrete bed, the Troyeville Bedtime Story, and now people make trips there specifically to have their pictures taken. She shows images of a Hillbrow entrepreneur who makes shirts, and another of a man who teaches boxing to black and white women.

Perkes may have been campaigning for twenty years, but she’s had mixed luck in getting through the layers of bureaucracy and getting traction for her ideas. But this is not a down-on-your-luck story. Instead, she concludes by describing a meeting with one Sharon Lewis of the Johannesburg Development Agency, who didn’t tell her she’s a romantic and an idealist and it’d never work, but in fact agreed that “we have to do this.” Now might just be the time to do something about updating the neighborhood. “Two weeks ago we did the budget for the inner city upgrade, and a week later she told me she has the budget ring-fenced,” Perkes announces. This is a story still to watch.

Sanjay Dastoor is co-founder of Boosted Boards, a startup that aims to build the world’s lightest electric vehicles.

Alastair Parvin is one of a team behind WikiHouse, an experiment he describes as being the seed of design’s great project in the 21st century: the democratization of production.

Inventor, scientist, author, engineer — over his broad career, Danny Hillis has turned his ever-searching brain on an array of subjects, with surprising results.

Twice the world yo-yo champion, BLACK mixes dance, sport and performance to create unforgettable yo-yo moments.

Collaborating with brilliant public and performance artists and people in neighborhoods, Lesley Perkes instigates with imagination and public space — to transform entire atmospheres. Just like that. Ha!

In a special surprise in the session, Sergey Brin of Google appeared to talk all about Google Glass — sharing why it was created and what it can do.

Alt-rock icon Amanda Palmer believes digital content should be free, and that artists can and should be directly supported by fans via a “patronage” model.

The U.S. Congress is broken, and law professor and legal activist Larry Lessig wants you to help him fix it. In “Republic, Lost,” he tells you how.

TED’s own Lisa Bu takes the TED2013 stage now to tell a very personal tale of a journey through literature that began, well, with a shattered dream. Growing up in Hunan, China, in the 1970s, Bu’s parents (yes, she had a Tiger Mother) believed there was only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job; no matter whether she actually liked it or not. She, in contrast, dreamed of making a career as a Chinese opera singer. But no adults would take her seriously, and when she reached the age of 15, she knew that she was too old to be trained. Her dream was not to be. “I was afraid that for the rest of my life, second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for,” she says. “But that was so unfair! I was determined to find another calling.”

With no one around to teach her, she turned to books, and what follows is her fresh take on some old favorites, including what she took from titles such as Jane Eyre, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, a book banned in China she was only able to read after she moved to the US in 1995. “The Bible,” she comments, “is interesting, but strange.” A big laugh here — “that’s a topic for a different day,” she adds wryly.

Moving to a new culture, Bu developed a new habit: Comparative reading, a standard practice in academia that she took to with alacrity. She read books in pairs, to understand the same tale from different perspectives. She read books written by friends such as Katharine Graham and Warren Buffett to compare shared experiences. She read books on different religions. She read books in different languages–finding herself not lost but found in translation.

“Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present,” says Bu. “I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. Having your dream shattered is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you.”

It is because of books, she concludes, that she is on the TED stage today. “I live happy, with purpose and clarity (most of the time). May books be always with you,” she says, to applause from many more than just her TED colleagues.

Here are the books only available in Mandarin:

Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei 傅雷家书

Complete Works of Sanmao 三毛全集

Lessons from History 历史的经验，by Nan Huaijin 南怀瑾

Lisa Bu’s TED Talk has been posted. Watch it here»

TED2013 will commence in just nine days, and the TED Blog is gearing up for our live, minute-by-minute, coverage. One thing we can’t wait to see: which speaker will bring an animal onstage with them? (Our money is on ornithologist Kees Moeliker.) Sometimes, speakers arrive with a live animal, other times they have a very convincing imitation. Either way, it’s always a fun moment when a member of the animal kingdom makes an appearance in the auditorium, as this playlist reveals.

Handspring Puppet Co.: The genius puppetry behind War Horse Handspring Puppet Co.: The genius puppetry behind War Horse TED2011 Puppeteers Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones, who created the horses featured in War Horse, explain the mechanics and artistry of making and manipulating their puppets. “An actor struggles to die on stage, but a puppet has to struggle to live,” Kohler says. When they bring a horse, three puppeteers, and a rider on stage, it’s almost impossible to remember that it’s not an animal breathing, strutting, prancing and whinnying right before our eyes.

Einstein the Parrot talks and squawks Einstein the Parrot talks and squawks TED2006 On stage, Einstein, an African grey parrot, oinks like a pig, makes laser noises, yells “OH MY GOD!,” dances, and even sings “Happy Birthday” to Al Gore. Hilarious, charming and truly uncanny.

Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide? Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide? TED2008 In a talk about how she creates whole people and worlds from her imagination, Amy Tan credits not only her beliefs and thought processes, but also her “muse”—her sweet, tiny dog, who emerges from her handbag to strut across the stage.

Robert Full: Learning from the gecko's tail Robert Full: Learning from the gecko’s tail TED2009 Biologist Robert Full brings to the stage a gecko robot that mimics the animal’s incredible foot structure and movement, which allows it to climb—only, though, with the added (and quite surprising) functionality of its tail.

Bill Gates: Mosquitos, malaria and education Bill Gates: Mosquitos, malaria and education TED2009 In a talk in part about malaria, Bill Gates releases live mosquitoes into the audience. “There’s no reason only poor people should have the experience,” he says, to laughter. (These mosquitoes are not, of course, infected.)

Nellie McKay sings "The Dog Song" Nellie McKay sings “The Dog Song” TED2008 Is that a dog pitter-pattering and panting? In a tribute to her own dog, singer and pianist Nellie McKay does a fairly convincing (and pretty adorable) impression.

Tune in to the TED Blog for live coverage of TED2013 beginning on February 25. And read much more about “The Young. The Wise. The Undiscovered” »

Don’t let the invitation myth deter you from applying for TEDGlobal 2013 in Edinburgh, TED2014 in Vancouver or TEDActive 2014 in Whistler. We want new voices in the audiences of each of these incredible events.

In the spirit of radical openness, here are some frequently asked questions about our conference application process.

Q: Why do you have to apply? Can’t you just let people register on a first come, first served basis?

We have a limited number of spaces, and people across the globe interested in attending — so we don’t just want to favor the first people to hear that registration is open. So we think of it like a dinner party. It’s about curating a well-balanced group — people who work in different disciplines, who live in different parts of the world and who are of different ages. TED events are all about the audience. If the audience is amazing, the experience becomes so much richer and more interactive — a loop of digging deeper into ideas, inspiring each other in new directions and teaming up for unexpected collaborations. As TED speaker Matt Ridley put it, every TED conference should be a place where ideas have sex.

Q: How long does it take to apply?

The application is six short essay questions that touch on your goals, accomplishments and how you’d like to be a part of the TED community, plus some basics like your address, email and references. How long the questions take to complete is up to you. We recommend taking around two hours to polish your application and make it really reflect who you are — both as a professional and as a person.

Q: Can you give me tips on how to apply to come to TED?

Find lots on this tips page. But here are some easy dos and don’t:

• Do take the application seriously. Give thoughtful, meaningful answers to the six questions that are, in general, longer than Tweets.
• Don’t simply paste your bio from your website.
• Do list websites that relate to your work, your side projects, your hobbies and your life. Your links should reflect the spaces where you are actively involved.
• Don’t just send us to Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Plus. Show us more about who you are.
• Do choose references who know you well. Bonus points if they’re a member of the TED community already or work in your field. However, if you don’t know a TEDster, don’t let that stop you.
• Don’t list your spouse or family members as references either. We know they’ll have glowing things to say about you.
• Do tell us a great anecdote about yourself. It helps to bring you alive. Surprising or funny are good, but not required.
• Don’t ask an assistant or intern to write these short questions for you. We want the real, awesome and authentic you.

Q: How do you evaluate applications and select attendees?

We read each and every application with an eye toward creating a great, diverse and balanced audience so that inspiration becomes a two-way street. The focus is on finding remarkable individuals who combine combine significant achievement and great character. Sound like you? Apply and tell us about yourself. Not sure if you’d qualify? Apply anyway. You might be surprised.

Q: $7500 is expensive! What about the people who can’t afford it?

TED has lots of options, from free to those who can donate $15,000.

1. Free. A large number of the talks from any TED conference will appear later in the year on TED.com. All videos on the site are absolutely free.
2. $1,000. A membership to TED Live gives you remote access to the live webstream of both TED and TEDGlobal. You also get an iPad mini — which becomes the centerpiece of your viewing experience — and become a member of the TED Live global community.
3. $3,750. TEDActive 2014 in Whistler, B.C., is the younger, hipper version of the TED conference with original speakers, a live simulcast of TED2014 and a fun social program which, of course, includes skiing. For Americans, $1,250 of the cost is tax-deductible.
4. $7,500. A regular pass at TED2014 in Vancouver. For Americans, $5,000 is tax-deductible.
5. $15,000. A VIP pass at TED2014 with early seating access and other benefits. For Americans, $12,500 is tax-deductible.

The tax-deductible portion of conference attendance goes towards supporting TED’s incredible philanthropic programs including the TED Prize, TED Fellows and TEDx.

Q: Are there any options for reduced price tickets?

Yes, we offer a reduced rate program for leaders of innovative small NGOs. And for young innovators, apply to the TED Fellows program, which funds 40 trailblazers in a wide range of disciplines from across the globe to attend one TED or TEDGlobal conference, all expenses paid.

Now that you know applying is the key, we hope you’ll join us for the upcoming conferences. Here are easy links to get you started on your application.

• Apply for TEDGlobal 2013, “Think Again” »
• Apply for TED2014, “The Next Chapter” »
• Apply for TEDActive 2014, “The Next Chapter” »
• Register for TED Live »
• Apply for TED Fellows class of 2014, opening late May 2013 »