Jullien Gordon, a founding partner of New Higher, says on the TEDxYouth@Midwest stage , “Our generation has two choices, we can hope or we can hustle.”

Earlier this month, 450 Chicago public school sophomores and juniors, plus 120 of their teachers, crowded into the city’s Harris Theater for TEDxYouth@Midwest, an event all about inspiring, motivating and empowering the young people of a city known for youth gun violence, but full of so much more — culture, history, educators and students dedicated to helping their city thrive.

Chicago’s public schools have been a fixture in the news lately. 54 schools in the city are slated to close in 2013, and according to reports in The Chicago Tribune, the 2011-12 school year brought the highest number of public school students affected by gunfire since 2008. Twenty-four students were killed; 319 students shot.

At TEDxYouth@Midwest, organizers strove to turn the focus from problems, and keep it focused on the potential. 17 speakers addressed the audience, including people like guerrilla gardener Ron Finley, who is planting gardens in South Central LA; Dr. Benjamin Harrison, a researcher working on growing replacement tissue for patients who have lost their own; and Chicago native Zoe Damacela, who started her own apparel line as a high school student in the city.

This year, TEDxYouth@Midwest launched their TEDxMidwest Youth Connections Program, a project pairing TEDxYouth@Midwest students with career experiences designed to open the doors to potential careers — from job shadowing to summer internships to discussions with local entrepreneurs. Through the program, 35 TEDxYouth@Midwest student attendees found summer internships and, next year, the team at TEDxYouth@Midwest hopes to raise that number to 100.

“The event was levels better because of the students’ infectious energy, and its potential to really have a life-changing effect on hundreds of kids and teachers,” said Mike Hettwer, who co-organized the event with

Linda Stone.

“The speakers were so motivated to speak there.”

The immediate effects of the event shone in students’ responses to comment cards asking how their thinking changed throughout the event. Some of their responses are truly incredible. A sampling:

I used to think… “That once you made a bad decision, that was it for you. People say you write your life’s story in ink — if you make a mistake there is no way to erase it. You are done!”
Now I think… “That I should no longer aim for perfection, but rather strive for success. Success is not measured by how many times you fall, but actually choosing to get up once more then you fall.” 

I used to think…”That you have to use violence in order to make peace.”
Now I think… “But I realize that I can use peace to make peace.”

I used to think… “That because I am considered a minority, I would not be able to do amazing things I really want to do.”
Now I think… “That I can do anything I set my mind to if I do not let anything hold me back. Only I can prevent myself from achieving my goals and my passion.”

I used to think… “I couldn’t get out of Hell.”
Now I think… “I can with Mellody Hobson’s speech.”

I used to think… “I was one of the few teenagers passionate about science.”
Now I think… “TED is all about diversity of ideas and other people are as passionate about science as I am.”

I used to think… “If you come from a broken home, would live in a broken future.”
Now I think… “You can shape your own future and get away from the brokeness.”

I used to think… “This was going to be a long boring program with weird snacks.”
Now I think… “This experience has been the best experience in my whole entire life.”

The audience at TEDxYouth@Midwest was made up of sophomores and juniors.

Dave Gallo, Director of Special Projects at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) talks about the deep sea and its deep secrets.

One of the amazing comment carders from TEDxYouth@Midwest.

Read much more about TEDx and its extraordinary constellation of events on the TEDx Blog »

Teen reporters Sadie Cruz and Nia Ashley conducted lots of interviews with speakers at the TEDYouth conference on November 17. Their Q&As will run on the TED Blog over the next few weeks. Here, a interview conducted by Sadie. 

Photographer Rick Smolan brought the flavor of homes across the United States to life, helped 25,000 photographers capture the spirit of American life minute-by-minute and cofounded A Day in the Life books, an ‘80s cultural touchstone. Smolan’s new project, The Human Face of Big Data, is about information in our world today. It’s just the latest in his long career, which began at age 16.

At TEDYouth, Rick spoke with me about his road to success, as well as what it’s like to be an amateur, a professional and the big, bad editor all in one.

Sadie Cruz: What drew you to be a photographer?

Rick Smolan: I was painfully shy when I was a kid. I always thought when most people were born, part of the toolkit was teaching you how to relate to other people — and it was just left out of my toolkit. So I sort of thought if I kept watching other people enough, and hung out close enough to them, I could figure out how they did it. Having a camera was a great excuse to kind of be there but not be there.

SC: Which project is your favorite, and why?

RS: The Human Face of Big Data has been by far the most challenging, and now the most satisfying, of any project I’ve ever done, because I think that we’re trying to start a global conversation about big data.

SC: So, how did that book start out?

RS: A friend of mine, Marissa Mayer, is the CEO of Yahoo, and I’ve known her for a long time. She said, “You should look at the world of big data.” And I said, “What’s that?” She started explaining it to me, and she said, “It’s like watching the planet develop a nervous system. All of us have become human sensors, with our phones and we’re all helping give this feedback loop that the human race has never had before.” So we started looking at it, thinking, how do you photograph that?

SC: If you weren’t a photographer, what would you be?

RS: Wow. You stumped me. This has been my whole life since I was 16, so it’s even hard to imagine. I’m not very good at science or math, even though I pretend. And I’m not very good at teaching. I’m not very patient. I don’t know the answer.

SC: Did you ever think you were going to be as successful as you are today?

RS: No, never. My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He thought it was a dead-end job and that you end up doing baby pictures and weddings. He told me I was being totally unrealistic because I wanted to work for Time magazine and National Geographic, and he said, “You never complete anything. You never finish any job. How could you ever work for these great magazines?” And I don’t know, somehow it happened.

SC: So when was that moment that you turned from amateur to professional?

RS: I don’t think it ever happened, because amateur means something you love, and I still really love what I do. Now I mostly photograph my kids, and I hire the best photographers in the world to work on my projects, so I sort of have the best of both worlds. But all of my friends who were really great professional photographers, they always had one camera which was their job camera and one camera which was their personal camera. So while they were shooting their assignment, they were also shooting personal pictures the whole time.

SC: How have cameras evolved from when you started to now?

RS: Oh, it’s so different now. I mean, the idea that we used to carry rolls of film around, and that when you got to 36, you had to stop for two minutes to change the roll of film — or that maybe the film you were using had been baked in the truck and you didn’t know it — there were so many things that could go wrong.

Now the fact that you can look down at the camera and see the results instantly, it’s called “chimping.” What they say is, while you’re chimping, you’re missing shots. Because instead of shooting, you keep reviewing what you’ve just done while the stuff keeps happening out there.

SC: Have you ever found any bizarre pictures that make you say, “oh no, we cannot put that in the book?”

RS: Oh, sure. You see a lot of things like that. I mean, what amazes me is that you can have 10 different photographers in the same room and you see 10 different rooms. You realize how much of it is the person’s perspective, rather than the situation itself. So I love hiring photographers who can be in a pack of a thousand photographers and they always come back with something very distinctive.

The hard part for me when I do my project is that I can’t be fair to every photographer, so even though we hire people, there’s no guarantee they’ll get a picture in the book. I feel like I’ve become the bad editor that I used to hate when I was the photographer, but we have to do what’s best for telling the story of the book. So sometimes there’ll be a kid on our staff who’s an intern, and he or she will get a better picture than one of our Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers. That’s just how it works.

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Check out more of the TED Blog’s coverage of TEDYouth »

Teen reporters Sadie Cruz and Nia Ashley conducted lots of interviews with speakers at the TEDYouth conference on November 17. Their Q&As will run on the TED Blog over the next few weeks. Below, an interview conducted by Nia.

The Flight Director of the Mars Curiosity Mission, Bobak Ferdowsi, is best known for landing a two-ton rover on Mars. But “Mohawk Guy,” as he’s called by his thousands of Internet followers, is also famed for representing the uniqueness of NASA.

He sat down with me the night before his TEDYouth talk to discuss Mars, his unexpected celebrity and how soon I can hope to report to the USS Enterprise.

Nia Ashley: So, you led a mission on Mars. That’s kind of awesome. Can you talk about that for a second?

Bobak Ferdowsi: I worked on the Mars Science Lab Curiosity Mission. It’s been about nine years for me. I ended up as Flight Director for crews and landing operations. I don’t know, it’s kind of the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

NA: What does a flight director do?

BF: Basically, we have this responsibility to make sure that the activities that we’re executing are safe for the spacecraft, to make sure we understand the consequences if something goes wrong. What are our outs? What are we going to do? And then I work with the team, both when they design the activity and when they execute the activity, to make sure that we have all those bases covered.

NA: What if you had dropped [the rover] and it had just bounced and flipped over on its back like a turtle?

BF: That would have been the end of the game, I guess. There’s no way to turn it back right side up once it’s on Mars.

NA: So, what is your typical day, now that the flight happened?

BF: Basically, activities fall into two categories. We have activities based on what happened the day before — like, we discovered a rock and we want to go investigate the rock. But we also have activities that we know we want to do in a month or so — like, we want to try drilling on Mars. So we want to understand: what are all the interactions that have to happen there? Part of what I’m working on right now is making sure those activities are all ready to go when the time comes.

NA: Why do you think that we on Earth are so obsessed with finding life on other planets?

BF: I think it’s such a natural human endeavor to understand: what is our place in the universe? We have this amazing planet, and all this amazing stuff going on around us, but where does that fit into the scheme of things? Other planets, they’re not so different from us, and you think, “What if there’s life? What if it’s like us? What might be different?”

It’s hard because we have one data point: I live on the Earth. Arguably, we have a lot of data about that one point, but then you’re trying to understand: Would life [on other planets] be more intelligent than us? Does it ever really get past bacteria? What is it going to look like? It’s a slow process of scientific understanding.

NA: You are an Internet sensation. Do you appreciate the fact that you’ve made science cool? Or is it, “I have a job to do?”

BF: I love my job, so I focus on that, but I am excited about bringing attention to what I think is a really cool job. I love that people see me as looking different — which I actually don’t! This is what most engineers and scientists look like nowadays. The perception is dated, so it’s cool for kids to see that and to realize, you can be your own person. It takes all sorts of types and looks and everything else to get these missions to happen. We had 3,000 people on this project — a variety of backgrounds, both educationally and culturally and everything. And it’s cool that that’s been shown in a new light.

NA: What do you think is more likely: Martians or life on one of the Galilean moons, like Europa or Titan?

BF: Tough question. I’m a big fan of Europa. I love Mars, I think it’s really amazing, but we’ve been there and it doesn’t look like there’s life there.  Europa is kind of shrouded in mystery, like Mars was in the early days. Ice moon, very likely ocean in the center, it’s warmer, volcanic – and we know that life exists on the Earth at the very bottom of the ocean near these volcanic vents. So it seems like the possibility is there for life to exist.

NA: How close are we to Star Trek? Because that’s what I want.

BF: I think we’re a ways away from Star Trek. But one of the cool things about Star Trek that I loved, and I think it’s still true, is that we are increasingly moving towards international cooperation in all that we do. We’re not going to have warp drive, probably, or transporters anytime soon, but the idea that all these countries are coming together, it’s a planetary endeavor to explore space, I think we’re getting there pretty fast.

NA: If you could meet your teenage self today, what’s something that you would tell them?

BF: It gets better? No, you know, it’s so funny, but as a sort of nerdy person, you feel a little ostracized as a kid, and yet we’re living in this era now where it’s okay to be nerdy. In fact, it’s kind of more relevant and cool. It gives me hope. I would have told my teenage self that. Like, “Listen, in 10 years you’re going to love that you read all this sci-fi. In your room. Without any friends.”

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Curious about Bobak Ferdowsi’s favorite TED Talks? Check out his playlist, “On our home in the universe” >>

If you are over the age of 18, feel free to tune out now — this message is for curious minds who are currently in the 9th through 12th grades. Applications are now open for TEDYouth 2012, a day-long event held in New York City, where more than 20 scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, artists and performers will share short lessons on what they do best. They’ll dazzle us with mind-shifting stories, inspire us with creativity and make us want to dive even deeper into a broad array of topics.

At last year’s event, YouTube’s trend manager Kevin Allocca shared the four reasons videos go viral. Performance artist Carvens Lissaint asked the audience to put the financial aid in the bag. And Adam Savage of the show Mythbusters shared the three scientific stories that keep him inspired.

This year’s TEDYouth conference will be held on Saturday, November 17th, 2012, at the Times Center in Manhattan, from 1pm-6pm. Attendance will be free for 400 high school students from within the tri-state area. Apply to attend TEDYouth >>

But don’t feel deflated if you live somewhere else. While you are still welcome to apply, you can participate without having to pack a suitcase. TEDYouth coincides with more than 100 self-organized TEDxYouthDay events happening worldwide over a 48-hour period. Check out the event website to see if there’s an event taking place near you.

Make sure you get your TEDYouth applications in by October 15. And get ready to be inspired by outlandish creativity and fascinated by a range of topics you never even thought about before. Don’t pretend you weren’t amazed by neuroscientist Greg Gage’s presentation from last year, “The cockroach beatbox.”

Photos by: Ryan Lash

Two more selections below.

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Logan answers the question, “Are gremlins real?”

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And Rhiannon wonders, “Do animals have a secret language?

Check out more talks from this excellent event.

We’ve picked five of our January favorites below — see all 10 on the TEDx Innovations page, where you can also sign up for February’s newsletter.

(And if you have a TEDx innovation to share, email tedxstories@ted.com.)

During TEDxValencia, attendees wrote out ideas and thoughts on Post-it notes, which were displayed on a wall during the event. Afterward, the notes were scanned and compiled on an interactive microsite. Learn more from TEDxValencia >

Dez Propaganda commissioned an 18-minute composition for TEDxValedosVinhedos, written by Valmor Pedretti Jr., with vocal contribution from Luiza Caspary. Attendees got a copy of the song on a CD in their gift bags, and you can hear it here >>><

At TEDxDelft, sponsor Senz let attendees test their storm umbrellas — designed with one side longer than the other — against a giant wind machine just outside the venue. Result? Hilarious pics >>

The TEDxAmericanRiviera stage was covered with rectangles of Mylar stretched across iron tubing. During rehearsal, speakers were given white pens and asked to write their “idea worth spreading” on the mylar. The makeshift boards were covered by the end of the day, and gave an amazing close-up when captured on video >>

On TEDxYouthDay, TEDxYouth@Chisinau held a viewing party for 47 young people at the juvenile prison in Lipcani, Moldova. At the end, the group was asked to write what “youth” means to them on a piece of paper, and then to fold a paper plane and fly it through the air. As youth reporter Alexandru Lebedev writes: “Some of them drew prison symbols, others wrote the names of social networks that they have heard about, and some wrote that they want to fall in love, or to love, or to have a family, or to have a house and a place that could give them warmth.” Read the full story on the TEDx blog >>>

See all 10 innovations on the TEDx Innovations page, where you can also sign up for February’s newsletter.

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

Dive into this giant photoset from yesterday’s TEDYouth — from setup to sessions to the crazy action on the breaks. Most images come from TEDYouth photographer Ryan Lash; a few from TED’s photo editor, Mike Femia.

All photos: Ryan Lash

After an amazing break (filled with beatboxing and Interesting Things) we reconvene for Session 2 of TEDYouth.

“I’m not going to blow anything up,” says Adam Savage. :( He’s best known for his role as co-host of the TV show MythBusters on the Discovery Channel. (Watch his talk on TED.com) His work on TV is about testing, clear thinking, and applying the scientific method to the questions we want answered. Onstage at TEDYouth, he thinks deeply about science, and shares a classic experiment by Fizeau, who used a notched wheel to discover, elegantly, that light had a speed. “Today’s discoveries are possible by technology developed in the last few decades, but most of human history has relied on senses.” He says: “Most people think of science as a closed black box, but in fact it is an open field … and there is no such thing as a fact that cannot be independently corroborated.”

Steve Stoute talked about how hip-hop has transformed a new generation. If you grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, he says, you were one or the other: rock-and-roll or hip-hop. But as he looks out onto this young audience he says: “Cultural diversity is something that your generation has full access to.” Think of skateboarding. “Is skateboarding only for skinny white kids anymore?” he asks? “No. It’s for everybody. Everybody can partake in anything.” Call it the Tanning Effect: that all culture is melding and everyone’s free to take from where they wish: “Different skin colors can come from different places, yet still have similar beliefs.” Stoute screened for us a defining cultural moment of the Tanning Effect: “Walk This Way,” starring Run-DMC with Aerosmith. (Dear people of the ’70s and ’80s, please know that the young audience was cracking up laughing at this ancient document.) But it’s true now: “With the Internet, you can see culture and be inspired anywhere at any time. That is why you can be anything you want to be.”

Jason Munshi-South is a researcher at Baruch College who studies the behavioral, ecological and evolutionary impacts of humans on the inhabitants of New York City parks. By which he means: mice, rats, salamanders — even coyotes (though he can’t tell you where yet). He says “I’m here to encourage you to think about New York City in a new way — as an evolutionary force.” What does that mean? It means that salamanders who live under the bridge at 169th Street have slightly different DNA than salamanders who live at 180th Street, on the opposite side of the same bridge. Mice in one park are developing different traits and habits than mice in a nearby park, as if they were urban Galapagos islands. And it turns out: City mice really are different from country mice.

Can you imagine a kid from South Central LA changing his/her mind from becoming a gang member to a National Geographic Explorer? That’s exactly what happened to Juan D. Martinez. Given the ultimatum of staying in dentention or joining the eco-club, Juan took a chance on the eco-club. And though he originally suffered from a “nature deficit disorder”, he found an easy fix by just getting outside! Juan’s story is a testament to youth to “never ever doubt what you can do.”

Daniela Schiller is an assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Her research studies “the process in which experience turns to memory.” The question shes’ interested in: Why does a bad memory stay with us for so long — and in what part of the brain does it live? It turns out that memory is active; it changes. “Every time we retrieve a memory, we have to consolidate it again,” she says. “The act of remembering is a new experience in itself. Each time we retrieve a memory and re-store it, it’s a little bit different — what we remember is not the original event, it’s our latest version of it.” So, she suggests, sometime in a future, we might be able tofind the place where a bad memory is stored, and physically interfere with the act of remembering it again. In fact, we can even do something like that now: “When you have a fear-memory: think of it, then think of something nice. Maybe a part of that will be re-remembered with the fear memory.”

Ish Islam and Justin Long-Moton come to us from New York City’s Urban Word program, and are two of its finest young poets. Working in tight harmony they spun a poem for the very young — that age when “Mario taught us self worth every time he said ‘it’s a-me!’” and “We knew Crayola on a first-name basis, but were blind to the color of our best friends.”

Kevin Allocca is the trends manager of YouTube, where he tracks popular video phenomena. Yes: His job is to watch YouTube videos all day. To give you a sense of that: 40 hours of video are uploaded every minute onto YouTube. What makes one video go viral? Like, why did 31 million of us watch this? (It’s “Double Rainbow,” in case you don’t want to click and be part of the 32nd million.) Why have 4 million people watched a 3-hour version of Nyan Cat? “What does it meeeeean?” Kevin shows us how this world of silliness is driven by community — both in sharing a great link and in making a video reply of your own. As he says: “An entire remix community brought the rainbow video from just a stupid joke to being something we can all be a part of.”

Brad Meltzer writes political thrillers and ferrets out inspiring history. He’s the co-host of the History Channel’s Decoded. He asks: “How do you change history? Bream big, work hard, stay humble.” And it’s never too soon to start. “Who has the best dreams of all? You. Young people.” So: start. How old was Dr. Martin Luther King when he led the Mongomery bus boycott? 26. Two 17-year-olds created Superman. Eight-year-old Alex raised $1 for cancer research. “If you dream big, I don’t care how old you are, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, you will change history. So get your pens ready and write us something spectacular.”

Lemon Andersen is a Tony-winning performer and spoken-word artist, the subject of the documentary Lemon. He takes the TEDYouth stage with an impressive performance of how “it ain’t about being heard, just being seen.” Lemon’s goal? To transcend poetry into the world. Or: “How do I get people who hate poetry to love me?” However, before he could do that, Lemon shares a few lessons he learned that goes beyond self-expression and into creative control. Some lessons he learned in the world he grew up in: “While you went to a privileged school to learn the sonnets of Shakespeare, I was getting my beats kicked into me.” And some he learned when he tried to make his living as a performer and was judged “too black to be white, too white to be doing it right.”

How can you possibly end this? With a Rube Goldberg machine, of course. The team from Wantagh High School spent all day yesterday assembling this crazy complicated machine onstage. And they let it rip!

– Writing and research by Corvida Raven