Spoken word artist Lemon Andersen begins today’s talk with the poem, “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” written by Reg E. Gaines in 1994.

My Air Jordans cost a hundred with tax.
My suede Starter jacket says Raiders on the back.
I’m stylin’, smilin’ looking real mean,
Cause it ain’t about bein’ heard.
Just about bein’ seen.

For Andersen, hearing this poem was a click moment. As he shares in today’s talk, given at TEDYouth 2011, this poem showed him the power of spoken word. After hearing it, he began following Gaines obsessively.

“I thought poetry was just self expression,” explains Andersen. “[Gaines] handed me a black-and-white printed out thesis on a poet named Etheridge Knight and ‘The Aural Nature of Poetry’ … What Etheridge Knight taught me was that I can make my words sound like music. Even my smalls ones, the monosyllables — the ifs, ands, buts, whats. The gangsta in my slang could fall right on the ear.”

To hear Andersen tell his story with beautiful lyrical flow, watch his talk. After the jump, some others who’ve performed spoken word on the TED stage.

Rives remixes TED2006
Rives’ poem “Mockingbird” is never the same twice. At TED2006, he freestyles a recap of the entire conference with his mockingbird’s lullaby.

Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter
This performance from Sarah Kay got two standing ovations at TED2011. Listen as she shares her poems “B” and “Hiroshima,” and explains how “tricking” teenagers into writing poetry can help them connect with their inner lives and with each other.

Franny Choi: Pop goes Korea!
At TEDxBoston, Franny Choi throws fast-flung words about Korean drinking games, Choco-Pies, karaoke, plastic surgery and Hello Kitty.

Rives: The 4 a.m. mystery
What is it about 4 o’clock in the morning? In this performance from TED2007, Rives combines words, video and music, spinning a lyrical look at this witching hour.

Sarah Kay: How many lives can you live
“The astronaut will not be at work today. He has called in sick. He has turned off his cell phone, his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock,” says Sarah Kay in this performance from TEDxEast, all about how storytelling can help us slow down and experience life.

Taylor Mali: What teachers make
The poem that Taylor Mali performs in this talk, given at the Bowery Poetry Club, has three titles. You can call it “What teachers make” or “Objection overruled” or “If things don’t work out you can always go to law school.”

Marion Carey: About Time
In this spoken word performance from TEDxBoston, Marion Carey ruminates on our clockwork-like existence. All this while solving a Rubik’s Cube.

Rives: If I controlled the Internet …
In one of the shortest talks of all time, Rives performs a three-minute poem about how he would change the internet. A sample: “If I controlled the internet, you could auction your broken heart on eBay…”

Adam A. Andersen: Me, in verse
Adam A. Anderson wanted to be an architect as a kid, but ended up in the performing arts. In this talk from TEDxSMU, he shares how verse satisfied his desire to express himself.

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 »

Young Guru, best known for producing Jay-Z’s albums, may be on tour in Europe. But he couldn’t resist the opportunity to remix the teenage singers, MCs and thinkers who contributed their vocals at TEDYouth. At the event on November 17, World Up — a non-profit dedicated to making the world smaller through hip hop, technology and education — set up their Living Remix Project and recorded dozens of teenagers sharing how TEDYouth inspired them through harmonies, rhymes and beats. Here, Young Guru’s remix of this amazing material, starting with his own talk from session 1 of the event.

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And here is a longer version of the track, spun together by World Up’s Interactive Music Director, Spazecraft, on the spot during session 2.

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” >>

“My dad was actually against me being a photographer. He was adamant that I not pursue photography. He thought it was a dead-end job, and that you took baby pictures and weddings. And now I actually do my friends’ babies and their weddings as my present to them … 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.” —Rick Smolan interviewed by Sadie Cruz

“I would tell [my teenage self] to wake up for class in the morning in college … I’m glad I learned [when I was young] that being different isn’t an impairment, that being smart and being black and female isn’t an oxymoron.” —Ayanna Howard interviewed by Nia Ashley

“I would never say to somebody, ‘Put on a façade, and go out and pretend to be someone else.’ The pretending is in private. It’s almost like you’re tricking yourself, not other people. And once you’ve tricked yourself for long enough, you can go out and authentically be this other person.” —Amy Cuddy interviewed by Sadie Cruz

• Olivier Guyon, Optical Physicist and Astronomer
  Olivier designs powerful telescopes that search for exoplanets — earth-like planets that exist outside of our solar system. The problem with search for them, he says, is that the numbers are astronomical. “If you count all the stars in our galaxy it would take more than a thousand years.” Fortunately, he and others are designing more powerful telescopes to search for such planets. For more see this TED-Ed lesson on how to find habitable planets.
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• Bobak Ferdowsi, Flight Director for the Mars Curiosity Rover mission
  Not only did Bobak help land the Curiosity Rover on Mars, he became an Internet meme for his mohawk haircut. He reviews the extraordinary technology and techniques they used to land an SUV sized rover — overcoming such obstacles as the chance that the thrusters used on landing would blow a hole in the planet that the rover could never climb out of. (Watch NASA’s video on the “7 minutes of terror,” the time it took the rover to land.)
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• Lily He, one of the students in the audience, is also a master speed stacker. She shows off her cup-stacking skills, and then explains how it’s done.
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• Gaurav Tekriwal, Vedic Mathematician
  Gauray teaches Vedic Mathematics, a super fast and fun way of solving large equations. He starts with a technique for multiplying by 11, eliciting wows over the simplicity. He moves on to something, harder: 98 x 97 = 9,506 almost instantly. A bit more advanced: leading the audience in a way to square large numbers in less than five seconds. “Woud you like maths to be dull and boring, or fun and interesting? The choice is yours.” (You can see him in action at TED@Bangalore as part of TED’s Talent Search.).
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• Dee Breger, Photomicrographer
  Dee takes photographs that provide an intimate glimpse of the surprising microscopic structures of both familiar objects and exotic research samples. The audience is treated to an extraordinary slide-show of images, from a human hair to heart muscle to a lung with pneumonia. A photo of asbestos shows a dazzling arrangement of long, fibrous minerals — not good to breath. You can see those and more at her website.
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• Clifford Johnson, Physicist
  Clifford is a theoretical physicist attempting to find the answers to questions like: Why are we here? Where did we and the world come from? And what is the world made of? Questions that get to how the universe works on the most fundamental level. Just like you can find out how a phone works by taking it apart, and finding smaller electronic components, physicists take matter apart, finding the smaller and smaller particles that make up the stuff around us. We’ve only scratched the surface though, and Clifford and other physicists are working on many open questions: There are patterns to particles, where do they come from? We’ve found there is a huge amount of dark matter — what is it? How does gravity work at the smallest level?

• Kelly Benoit-Bird, Marine Biologist
  Kelly uses sophisticated sound technology to explore how animals in the ocean find their food while trying to avoid being someone else’s dinner. It turns out that there is very little food in the ocean — in the 400 seat TEDYouth auditorium there would be the equivalent of one tub of movie popcorn. But it’s even more complicated than that — animals do best when food is clumped, so regions with large amounts of food for seals, say, might not support large populations if the food is spread out instead of clumping. Using advanced sonar, she’s found remarkable patterns in the way animals find their food. (Watch also: This TED-Ed lesson on the secret life of plankton.)
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• Deborah Blum, Science writer
  Deborah is a Pulitzer-winning science writer and professor who’s fascinated by the intersection of science and society. We now live in a “CSI age,” where police departments work with scientists to solve crimes. But she wants to know, “What was it like before scientitsts knew how to tease a poison out of a corpse?” In the early 20th century poisoners could operate with impunity in the city of New York. It wasn’t until 1930 that someone figured out how to tell the time of death — a task that took 6,000 brains from the morgue. She tells the story of how blood chemistry solved a murder in New York’s Lower East Side. From that and more, science was regarded as a powerful way to solve crimes. (Her book The Poisoner’s Handbook tells the tales of the perfect early-20th-century crime.)
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• Maurice Ashley, Chess Grandmaster
  Maurice is an International Grandmaster of Chess — in fact, in 1999, he was the first African-American to win that title. There is a myth that grandmasters can see 15 moves ahead. The truth is that in the first four moves there are 318,000,000 ways to play. So he and other grandmasters use a variety of techniques to look ahead. One is called “Retrograde Analysis,” a way of looking at what had happened before to figure out what will happen in the future. For example, a good way to proofread is to read an essay backward, to avoid the fact that our brain will fill in errors when we know what to expect. He uses this techniques in many other areas to solve problems, with great effect. Finally, is youth wasted on the young? Well, “If you can see the endgame, your youth will not be wasted on you.”
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• David Fasanya and Gabriel Barralaga, Slam Poets
  David and Gabriel are members of the 2012 Urban Word Slam Team. Their work has been seen in various shows and performances throughout New York City. Here at TEDYouth, they perform their award winning piece, “Beach Bodies,” a piece about insecurities. Watch the full piece here.
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• Mark Changizi, Cognitive Scientist
  Mark aims to grasp the foundations underlying why we think, feel and see as we do. He has written extensively on why we see in color, have forward-facing eyes, and get fooled by illusions. At TEDYouth he shows us how a simple illusion works. Why do comic book artists include lines to indicate motion? “All the objects flow outward activiating mini neurons all in a row.” The brain is also slow. By the time you see something in motion, it’s moved. The brain is compensating for both of these, leading to the illusion.
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• Nina Tandon, Tissue Engineer
  Nina is a TED Fellow who studies ways to use electrical signals to grow artificial hearts and bones. (Watch her TED Talk.) She tells us about Luigi Galvani, who took two frog legs, attached them to an antenna, and went on a roof in a thunderstorm — and they moved. With that, he discovered that our bodies use electricity. A couple centuries later we’ve learned how to use these electrical signals to do all kinds of things, such as listening in on our brains or hearts. Nina uses that to study hearts as they grow, and then to grow her own. Really, she grew a part of a heart in her lab!

TEDYouth attendee (and 8th grader) August Trollbäck created this cool motion graphic for the opening of TEDYouth, on Saturday, Nov. 17, 2012.

Music by Michael Montes — whose other work you might recognize.

“I have this sticker on one of my books that says, ‘Who’s gonna rock the spot?’ And it’s there for a reason. It’s like, okay, no matter what you did, no matter how many hits I have, no matter how many number one albums I have, what am I doing today?” —Young Guru interviewed by Nia Ashley

“Growing up in Hawaii and speaking the two languages tuned me into English. For starters, we do weird things with verbs in pidgin. We conjugate verbs strangely. If in English we would say, ‘I went to the store yesterday,’ in pidgin you would say, ‘Yesterday, I went go store.’ You say, ‘I went go.’ So I think you become aware of verbs, because you do them differently. But mostly I focus on verbs because after years and years of teaching and writing and editing myself, I realized that’s the one thing you can do to most change your writing.” —Connie Hale interviewed by Sadie Cruz

“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? And we can look out there and see the other planets and they’re visible. And you can see they’re not so different from us, and you think, ‘Why isn’t there life there?’ If you look further, you see other stars and other solar systems, and what if there’s life there? What if it’s like us? What might be different? I think it’s just a human desire to explore and to understand.” —Bobak Ferdowsi as interviewed by Nia Ashley

• Rick Smolan, photographer and data evangelist
  Rick Smolan’s larger-than-life photographs capture deeper meaning in everyday moments. (Watch his TED Talk.) Right now, he’s exploring how Big Data is reshaping our lives. Everything we do generates data — who we call, what we buy, what we tweet. In his talk, Smolan gives a brief tour of the ways this vast data allows us to get new views of our world — from a crowdsourcing app that allows for better earthquake prediction, to stunning imagery of pizza delivery in New York City on a Friday night, to Smolan’s own Data Detectives project which gives a way for teens to compare themselves to others around the world.
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• Jer Thorp, data artist
  A data artist in residence at The New York Times, Jer Thorp takes big data and makes it understandable in beautiful visualizations. (Watch his TED Talk.) He’s created a visualization of people saying “Good morning” on Twitter, and of others tweeting “just landed” as they travel. In this talk, he introduces us to Cascade, The New York Times‘ initiative to visually chart the way people talk about their articles. “We are data-making machines,” said Thorp. “Big data can solve big problems.”
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• Sofia Degtyar, student
  The founder of FreeEnglish4Kids.com, this Brooklyn Tech student shared several Russian tongue-twisters and also beat-boxed in her native language.

• Kelly and Michael, interpreters
  Meet the pair who are translating the TEDYouth livestream in Spanish and Arabic. For fun, Rives had them spot-translate “Call Me, Maybe” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
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• Ayanna Howard, roboticist
  How can we have robots on Mars and in war zones, but not yet have robots in our homes? The answer: because they aren’t smart enough yet. In this talk, Howard explains that she was surprised to find that her work involved learning about child development and watching monkeys — all in service of making robots that can mirror motions, learn muscle memory and, most importantly, interact with humans. Making a special appearance in her talk: Pleo, the robot dinosaur, who has her own TED Talk.
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• Katherine Kuchenbecker, mechanical engineer
  Katherine Kuchenbecker studies haptics, the technology of touch. Her work answers the question: How can the human ability to understand the world through touch and sensation be translated into virtual objects? In this talk, she can describe tools that help dentists learn which teeth need work based on their feel, and video games that involve the sense of touch and feel.
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• Tom Chi, technologist
  Tom Chi runs Google X, which he calls the “department of science fiction” of the Internet giant. In this talk, he describes Google Glass, a head-mounted display — sort of like a pair of glasses — that can overlay digital experiences while a person interacts in the real world. While this technology sounds highly complex, he shares that making the first prototype took just a single day and that the hardest challenge was making them light and wearable.

• William Gurstelle, DIY expert
  William Gurstelle lives dangerously — he has built potato cannons, projectile shooters, fire tornados, flame throwers and trebuchets. “There has never been a time as good to make things as right now,” he says in this talk. “But not everything you make has to be dangerous to be cool.” In this talk, he shows the audience how to make a functioning audio speaker out of a yogurt cup, sandpaper, notebook paper, magnets and hot glue. And he also plays classical music out of a potato chip.
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• Young Guru, music producer
  Young Guru has worked with Jay-Z on 10 albums, not to mention other well-known artists. On the TEDYouth stage, Young Guru turned his eye to piracy. “What does piracy have to do with hip hop music?” he asks. “Hip hop is based off using other people’s music to make new music.” In this talk, he makes a case that what’s now considered piracy is actually the pushing forward of culture. He says: “All pirates are doing is remixing something else, so let’s not attack the pirate — let’s figure out how to make a better remix.”
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• Anna Post, etiquette expert
  The great-granddaughter of Emily Post, Anna Post explores how etiquette applies to modern phenomena like texting, dating and Facebooking. In this talk, she addresses an issue important for those heading into college and the job market  – interviewing. Her six rules: 1) Prepare more than you think you need to do and prepare outloud. 2) Dress up a notch. 3) Be on time and do a dry run of the commute. 4) Nail the handshake. 5) Put away the cell phone. 6) And send a handwritten thank-you note in addition to an email thank-you.
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• Connie Hale, writer
  In this talk, Connie Hale teaches an easy way anyone can jazz up their sentences: Use better verbs. She describes two types of verbs — static verbs, which she calls “wimp verbs,”  like “seems” and “becomes,” and dynamic verbs, the ones which “pull you by the collar.” She demonstrates the difference by having audience members act out different verbs.
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• Amy Cuddy, body language expert
  High school is full of hurt, says Amy Cuddy, and she knows that the advice most parents give isn’t helpful: “Don’t worry so much about what people think.” (Watch her TED Talk.) Cuddy, a mom of a 10-year-old, shares studies which show that even adults feel pain from rejection. So how can people feel more powerful and able to weather rejection? Power posing. Just two minutes of posing with your arms up and out can bring on true internal change.
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• Carl Zimmer, science writer
  Carl Zimmer is a parasite lover, and his absolute favorite is the jewel wasp — which lives inside a cockroach. In this talk — with imagery not for the meek — Zimmer shares how these wasps turn roaches into zombies so that they become willing hosts.

Stay tuned for session 2.

Photos: top, Ryan Lash, and center, Mike Femia