Is the Earth maxed out, or should we be optimistic abut being able to solve our future? At TED2012 last week, Paul Gilding made the case for the former, and Peter Diamandis argued for the latter. And then: they debated onstage. Watch the video above to find out what happened. Want to talk about it […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Brené Brown is an expert on vulnerability who starts off her talk by describing the extraordinary impact of giving a talk in 2010 at TEDxHouston: The Power of Vulnerability. For starters, she says, the day after giving the talk, she woke up in a state of depression that she’d shared details […]
Photos: James Duncan Davidson Sebastian Wernicke thinks there’s something missing from the Full Spectrum of TED2012: The audience has had no influence over the talks. This is in the vein of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, invented by accident by Edward Packard. Wernicke is going to tell us that story, but he needs some […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Leymah Gbowee is a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Today, she speaks around the world, and people ask about her drive, challenges, moments, and regrets. In 1998 she was a single mother of 4. Three months after her fourth child’s birth, she went to do work as a research assistant in a […]
John Boswell is the musician and producer behind the Symphony of Science. The goal of the project is to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the public through music. So far in the series, he’s mixed together insights on topics such as the earth’s place on the cosmos, the quantum world and, as shown below […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson On his 30th birthday, Cesar Kuriyama quit his job in advertising. At the same time, he started a project: “One Second Every Day” for which he cuts together one second of footage from every day of his life into an ever-expanding project. We’ve seen these daily-picture kind of projects before, but […]
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 […]