TED Blog
01 August 2012
In Short: Tavi Gevinson goes on media blitz, how your sushi habit affects the ocean
Check out these fascinating finds from across the internet:
- Tavi Gevinson gave an inspired talk at TEDxTeen, “Just trying to figure it out.” This week, Gevinson — the founder of the online magazine Rookie– has been on a media blitz. First, Gevinson was heralded as the “Oracle of Girl World” in the Sunday New York Times. She also “dishes on Anna Wintour, feminism, and her plans for world domination” in the latest issue of Bust magazine. [NY Times, Bust]
. - Can a wireless router be used to see through walls? A new device makes it so. [Popular Science]
. - Vertigo has officially eclipsed Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time, according to the list created by the British Film Institute. Do you agree with this upset? [Atlantic Wire]
. - How has the dramatic rise in the popularity of sushi affected the ocean? A documentary looks at how the food went from being mocked as elitist to being served at football games, and what this means for the eco-balance. [Salon]
. - Thing you need to play now: The Great Gatsby game.
01 August 2012
TED Prize baton pass: How one man’s passion created a musical ripple effect
In 1975, economist and musician José Abreu founded El Sistema (“The System”), a classical music education plan for kids in Venezuela. Over the years, El Sistema has grown into a powerhouse in Venezuela, and today comprises more than 150 youth and 70 children’s orchestras. It’s estimated that more than 310,000 children currently play an instrument through the program. (LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel was once one of them.) Just as important to Abreu — his kids learn the citizenship skills that come with orchestra membership: to listen, to lead, to be responsible.
In 2009, Abreu was awarded the TED Prize and issued this wish for the world: to create a training program for 50 gifted musicians dedicated to bringing El Sistema to the United States.
“Mother Teresa of Calcutta insisted on something that always impressed me: The most miserable and tragic thing about poverty is not the lack of bread or roof, but the feeling of being no-one — the feeling of not being anyone, the lack of identification, the lack of public esteem,” Abreu said in his moving talk from TED2009 about the wish. “That’s why the child’s development in the orchestra and the choir provides him with a noble identity.”
Trumpet player Stanford Thompson was one of the 50 young musicians tapped to be an Abreu Fellow, training at the New England Conservatory as well as with El Sistema in Venezuela. And two years ago, after completing the program, Thompson brought his bold musical style to a new group of kids when he founded Play On, Philly! — a youth orchestra in West Philadelphia. (Watch Thompson give an inspiring talk about the program at TEDxPhilly.)
Play On, Philly! is the subject of a new documentary. Well, at least of a new documentary that could be.
01 August 2012
12 great free online courses
Much ado has been made in recent years over the quickly rising cost of healthcare in the United States. But the cost of college tuition and fees has skyrocketed at nearly twice that rate. Going to college today will cost a student 559% more than it did in 1985, on average.
In an exciting talk given at TEDGlobal 2012, Stanford professor Daphne Koller explains why she was inspired — alongside fellow professor Andrew Ng — to create Coursera, which brings great classes from top universities online for free. Coursera classes have specific start dates, require students to take quizzes and turn in assignments, as well as allowing professors to customize their course into online chunks rather than simply recording their lectures.
When she spoke at TED Global, Coursera offered classes from four top colleges — Princeton University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania — but in July, Coursera announced that they had increased to 16 participating colleges, including five of the schools considered the top 10 in the country by the U.S. News & World Report. The site now offers 116 classes.
Even outside of Coursera, the number of college classes available on a computer screen rather than in a brick-and-mortar lecture hall is staggering. At TEDxEastside Prep, Scott Young gave the intriguing talk — “Can you get an MIT education for $2,000?” — in which he shared his effort to get an MIT education in computer science by taking the school’s Open Courseware free online courses. The result? He’s currently taken — as well as passed exams and completed programming assignments for – 20 of the 33 courses in schools’ curriculum.
Inspired by Young, after the jump, find 12 courses you could take for a completely free TED degree in Big Ideas.
31 July 2012
In Short: An eco-friendly cooking fuel made in Uganda, self-service kiosks for healthcare
Enjoy these fascinating reads from across the internet:
- A great profile on TED Fellow Sanga Moses, who quit his job as an accountant in Uganda and set out to develop an eco-friendly cooking fuel. Why? So that girls in his country — for example, his young sister — wouldn’t have to spend all their time collecting wood and could attend school. [NY Times]
. - The theory that hosting the Olympics boosts a country’s economy and creates an extended tourism boom … shot down. [The Daily Beast]
. - Self-service kiosks, like the ones that print your boarding pass at the airport and that let you check yourself out at the grocery store, may soon be coming to the realm of healthcare. [NPR]
. - Check out the newly released Sandbox Playbook, a publication that captures the big ideas and spirit of the 200 under-30 attendees of the Sandbox Global Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. [Sandbox]
. - Last week, “Avatar” fans got a peek at James Cameron’s personal Pandora, a 2500-acre homestead on Lake Pounoi in New Zealand, where the director is working on the highly-anticipated sequels to his hit movie. [NY Times] But since the next installment won’t be out until 2015, why not watch Cameron’s talk from TED2010 on his childhood fascination with the fantastic.
. - Could human beings have a ‘sister species?’ By studying the DNA of hunter-gatherers in Cameroon and Tanzania, scientists believe they have found an unexpectedly forked branch in the human family tree. [Science News] Learn more about early humans by watching Louise Leakey’s TEDTalk, “Digging for humanity’s origins.”
31 July 2012
From homeschooling to ancient architecture: Highlights from TED@Tunis
This spring, TED headed on the road, visiting 14 cities across six continents on the hunt for untapped talent. The idea behind the sweeping search: to let you, the TED community, weigh in and vote on which speakers you’d like to see ascend the stage at TED2013. After holding one-night salons in Amsterdam, Bangalore, Doha, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo, Tunis and Vancouver, we couldn’t help but notice that every city’s event had its own unique flavor. And so we’ve asked one audience member from each stop along on the tour to share their memories.
Today, we asked audience member Fatene Ben-Hamza of Marseille, France, to tell us about her experience at TED@Tunis, which took place on May 8.
Fatene, what three adjectives would you use to describe the event?
Surprising. Also “mind refreshing,” in the Tunisian context, compared to the stuff we hear every day!
Who were the must-see speakers of the night, who you hope TED fans will watch on the TED Talent Search website?
Ihsan Fethi: Iraq’s destroyed cultural heritage
His talk was extremely passionate; he shared the importance of saving what’s left from his country’s culture, a topic that is highly important to my opinion in countries where culture tends to disappear into obscurity.
Mocke J Van Veuren: Art and science interact
He showed an experimental audio and time-lapse video. I like the way he made art and science work together.
Riadh Guerfali (Astrubal): Beware the loss of Internet freedom
Riadh stressed that internet freedom might disappear someday, and that we should not take the freedom we have for granted. This topic appealed strongly to people in Tunisia, who lived under censorship for years.
31 July 2012
A song and dance pick-me-up
Young musicians Yaruu Egshiglen get an A+ for their singing, dancing and costuming during this performance at TEDxUlaanbaatarChange 2012, held in Mongolia in April.
31 July 2012
10 talks from inspiring teachers
Professor John Keating of “The Dead Poets Society.” Calculus teacher Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver.” Marine-turned-teacher Louanne Johnson of “Dangerous Minds.” Hollywood might want to take note of a new award-winning teacher on the block, Stephen Ritz, who gave this fast-paced, highly inspiring talk at TEDxManhattan.
A parent and teacher in the South Bronx, Ritz has noticed his students getting larger and more sickly over the years, not to mention the fact that they’re parsing fewer options for earning a living. So Ritz began working with his students to grow “indoor edible walls,” beautiful living murals, full of greenery. Not only does food from the walls get served in the school cafeteria as well as in local shelters — creating the walls has become a full-scale business for Ritz’s students. The project has snowballed into designing an office wall in Boston, building green roofs in South Hampton, making gardens for 100 other New York City schools and even installing a large wall in Rockefeller Center.
“Kids from the poorest Congressional district in America can build a 30 x 15 foot wall — design it, plant it, and install it in the middle of New York City,” says Ritz. “This is the new green graffiti.”
Since starting the edible wall project, Ritz has seen his kids’ attendance jump from 43 to 90 percent. Through the project, one of his students became the first in his family to open a bank account. His students have developed relationships with local contractors through the project, and have gone on to lucrative jobs in their area.
“I’m putting the bake sale to shame,” says Ritz, explaining that more projects are in the works for his students, including growing pumpkin patches in New York City subways and planting mini farms along major city roads.
In honor of Ritz’s work watch nine more talks from truly inspiring teachers after the jump.
30 July 2012
In Short: Journalist ‘duped’ by Asma al-Assad, a library opens a ‘maker center’
Some great reads from around the internet today:
- Journalist Joan Juliet Buck tells the story behind her infamous Vogue puff piece on Asma al-Assad (above), saying that the First Lady of Syria “duped” her. Buck now writes of al-Assad’s husband, “I didn’t know I was going to meet a murderer. There was no way of knowing that Assad, the meek ophthalmologist and computer-loving nerd, would kill more of his own people than his father had and torture tens of thousands more, many of them children.” [The Daily Beast]
. - The New Yorker has published a lost story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which was rejected by the magazine in 1936 before the writer became a literary star. [New Yorker]
. - Anyone interested in a road trip to Westport, Connecticut? The library there has christened a “maker space” in its center, complete with a 3-D printer — a technology Lisa Harouni explains in the TEDTalk, “A primer on 3D printing.” [Shareable]
. - Peter Thiel, the creator of Paypal and an early investor in Facebook, gives the following advice to creative people in his class at Stanford: “Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it.” [NY Times]
. - Ever wondered what it would cost to own a baby panda? The breakdown here. [Mental Floss]
30 July 2012
A movie trailer for awe
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“Performance philosopher” Jason Silva creates brightly colored, fast-moving films about ideas. At TEDGlobal 2012, Silva delved into the concept of radical openness. In this new short film, Silva explores another big question: Is feeling awestruck good for us? In the movie trailer-esque video, Silva quotes recent research by three Stanford professors, which found that having regular incidences of awe has residual benefits for an individual, including a greater sense of empathy and general well-being, not to mention a more expansive experience of time. Silva also brings up the work of psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, who suggests that awe has been advantageous in an evolutionary sense. Says Silva, “Our ability to awe has been biologically selected for by evolution because it imbues our lives with sense of cosmic significance that makes us work harder to persist and thrive.”
And with that, let’s take a moment to awe at Silva’s latest video.
30 July 2012
An Olympic phenom gives out gold, silver and bronze medals to his favorite TEDTalks
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Track and fielder Steve Mesler never imagined himself at the Winter Olympics, standing atop a freezing mountain preparing to compete. But after repeated injuries in his original sport, he realized that his Olympic dream wasn’t going to happen on the track he’d planned. Mesler opted to channel his drive and ambition into becoming a bobsledder, regardless of knowing nothing next to nothing about the sport. The end result: a 95mph bobsled ride in the 2010 Olympics and a gold medal.
In this TED-Ed video narrated by Mesler and animated by Katie Wendt, Mesler reveals his inspiring story about how everyday decisions yield big results.
After the jump, Mesler counts down his favorite TEDTalks of all time.
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Watch the 4-minute video A Taste of TED2012:
