Photos: James Duncan Davidson “So I have this android copy of myself,” says Henrik Schärfe drily. You know. As you do. But first, Schärfe wants to share a personal story, of waking up one dark November night to the police at his door, informing him of an accident in which his parents had both been killed. “I knew […]
So this is it, our final hurrah of TED2012. Well, you didn’t think we’d go out with a whimper, did you? In this session: Sebastian Wernicke, who motivates and manages multidimensional projects, and is also known for his entertaining summaries of TEDTalks. Cesar Kuriyama has been selecting one second of video from every day of his […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Rafe Esquith has spent 30 years teaching public school at Hobart School. It’s a difficult school, he says. The children do not speak English as a first language, and many come from poverty. Less than 40% finish high school. But in one room, the story is different. The Hobart Shakespeareans graduate […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson TED Curator Chris Anderson talks about the TED-Ed project — a major initiative to bring TED to school and education outside of the classroom. As part of that, he tries his own talk. With a pre-recorded animation (by Andrew Park) playing behind him, he asks a question that has bugged him ever […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Awele Makeba is here not simply to tell us a story. She’s here to act one. Her story takes place in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 2, 1955, and her hero is the courageous teenager Claudette Colvin, who stayed seated on a segregated bus even when instructed by the driver to make […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Angie Miller was the New Hampshire Teacher of the Year in 2011. She has three children, and she shares a box in which she keeps all her teaching paraphernalia. It’s filled with the thank-you notes you might expect, but it also includes some of her less savored moments, including letters of reprimand […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Kate Messner begins by asking us, “How many of you have ever played with Legos?” Those of us who have (which is most) already know about world building, and the power of What If? Messner is a writer, and all of her books grow out of What If. “What If there […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Al Vernacchio is here to talk about sex. In particular, he wants to talk about reframing the ways we talk about sex. In short, he says, “we need to stop talking baseball.” “Baseball is the dominant cultural metaphor that Americans use to think about and talk about sexual activity,” he continues. […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson John Bohannon and Black Label Movement are not ones for the ordinary. “Remember that conversation you had as a kid, with your parents, about sex or drugs. It’s a myth. We don’t talk to kids about that stuff. It’s embarrassing.” They emerge on stage, dancing to string music. But this is not […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Ainissa Ramirez comes on stage armed with a blowtorch. Well, that sure got everyone’s attention. She promptly uses said blowtorch to straighten a piece of bent piece of wire. Her point: atoms often rearrange usefully to create entirely different types of structures. The Yale associate professor goes on to explain why this […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Bill Nye, The Science Guy, would like to discuss with us our place in space. Not with black holes, or multiverses, but here on Earth, where his dad was born. In World War II, Bill Nye’s dad was building an airstrip on Wake Island, in the middle of the Pacific, when it […]
We all know how important education is for our future. For this very special session at TED2012, we invited a host of current educators to share their latest thinking. For this session, we’re joined by 400 students from Long Beach area high schools. In this session: Bill Nye is a man with a mission: to […]
Photo: Duncan Davidson Aaron Reedy starts by taking us on a quick tour of evolution, natural selection and Darwin. But what’s more interesting than what we know, he adds, and the question all curious students ask him: How do we know all this? The best way to answer this question is to give examples: Fossils: […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Journalist and writer Jon Ronson is now on stage to share some of the insights from his recent book on, well, psychopaths. Now, here’s the thing about Ronson. On first sight, he looks something like a sleepy, shuffly mole, slightly surprised at where he seems to have woken up. Yet his tousled […]
Photo: Ryan Lash Philippe Petit is most famous for walking between the towers of the World Trade Center, but he’s done much, much more. At TED2012, he tells a story of the campfires of his childhood. “There was a time when fire and story would fall asleep in unison. It was dream time.” And that […]
Marco Tempest wowed the TED crowd yesterday, and now he’s back with an experiment, a demonstration of live augmented reality using the Kinect. This one is “technological magic” and we are advised to keep our eyes on the big screen. Photos: Ryan Lash Magic is deception we enjoy, he says. The audience must suspend its […]