TED Talk Tuesday: Anna Deavere Smith

Anna Deavere Smith performs Four American Characters at TED 2005.  I recognized her from The West Wing where she played Nancy McNally, but she has also been in many, many other shows and movies.  This solo performance searches for the human touch through these American characters.  Her acting shows how we are all connected.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Gregory Stock

In this fascinating TED Talk, Gregory Stock dives into the future of bioethics.  As biotechnology accelerates, we will be faced with new ethical dilemmas and challenges.  This goes way beyond the fight over cloning and stem cell research.  One day soon we may be able to insert customizeable chromosomes into the first cell and engineer our offspring.  Stock wonders what we will do when we have this capability and how it will affect our evolution.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Eli Pariser

Our online content isn't as free as we think it is.  Search engines, like Google, tailor our results based on past searches, location, and other criteria.  Bing now publicly announces that your searches can show your what your Facebook friends have searched.  These filter bubbles are designed to help you get the results you are looking for faster, but Eli Pariser explains an unforeseen problems.  Not every internet surfer experiences the same internet as our searches are limited to our current worldview.  This could have dangerous implications in the future and for democracy.

TED Talk Tuesday: Elliot Krane

Elliot Krane tells us that pain is not just a symptom, but a disease itself.  Treating children has helped him understand pain and how we may be closer to a better treatment.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Aaron Koblin

As an artist, Aaron Koblin transforms basic data sets into beautiful realizations of human interactions.  Information about airplane flights, Facebook connections, and crowd-sourced music videos can make art that reflects who we are as people.  This is really a fascinating talk!

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf

Last year, controversy surrounded this speaker, a community center and Ground Zero.  Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf lead a congregation of Muslims who wanted to build a Mosque and Community Center in Manhattan in a building that one of them owned.  As right-wing hysteria broke out about the project, Imam Rauf became the target of their rage as his character was assassinated in public.  In this TED talk, the mild-mannered man tells us to get out of our own way and find compassion for others - an important lesson for us all to learn.

Enjoy

TED Talk Tuesday: Ron Gutman

In this TED, Ron Gutman relates to us the science of smiling.  Smiling affects our mental, physically and social health.  I mean you will feel better and be better the more you smile and that will get the people around you smiling as well.

Enjoy this talk!  I promise that you will laugh and you will smile!

TED Talk Tuesday: Christopher McDougall

Christopher McDougall spoke at a TEDx event about our natural ability to run.  He suggests that we were born for running long distances.  Over a short distance, we will lose to any other species but we would dominate all others over a marathon course.  Our evolution shaped us into long distance runners- our feet, knees, hips, and sweat glands all propel us forward for a long time.  In this talk, he tells several interesting stories about running across different cultures.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Harvey Fineberg

Harvey Fineberg takes the stage at TED 2011 to discuss neo-evolution.  Unlike any other species in the history of Earth, humans sit in a unique position to control our own evolution.  Through medical advances we can minimize the impacts of natural selection and with genetic engineering we can highjack the evolutionary process by altering ourselves.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Kathryn Schulz

In this interesting TED Talk, Kathyrn Schulz discusses our wrong ideas about being wrong.  First, think about what it feels like to be wrong.  It sucks and we avoid those feelings.  Except, that's what it feels like to find out that you were wrong.  While you were wrong, you remained confident in your correctness.  Being wrong feels like being right and we never know the difference.

I am sure that I have a lot of ideas that COULD BE wrong, but I can't pinpoint which ones are.  We all can do this.  The about your beliefs on religion, politics, economics, education, sports, science and more.  Only one of these possess a feedback system to let us determine our wrongness.  In science, we conduct research experiments designed to protect the truth from our own biases.  The large collaborative efforts of science trudge along towards the truth about some aspect of reality.  Today's ideas may be wrong, but evidence and logic will guide us in the correct direction.

As I begin the unit on evolution, I think over common creationist propaganda.  Creationists assert that their ideas are science and should be taught in schools.  Creationism lacks the helpful feedback systems to weed out bad ideas and nothing can ever show them to be wrong.  They just won't accept any evidence contrary to their beliefs.  Why?  Because no one likes to be wrong.

Enjoy the talk.  I hope it gets you thinking!

TED Talk Tuesday: Nate Silver

After the 2008 election, Nate Silver looked at the statistics of how people voted for president.  He had one question, "How does race affect votes?".  He found some interesting, but not too surprising, conclusions.  People from areas of less diversity and less education tended to say that race was a factor in their choice of president.  While you can't say that everyone who voted for or against Obama did so due to his race, at least some people did.  Throughout his presidency, some people are still uncomfortable with a black president.

One person suggested that it might not be his blackness, but his mixed ancestry which has caused this racial animosity.  A recent poll from Mississippi found that a large percentage of people thought interracial marriages should be banned.  Overall it is a sad sad indictment of our culture that we still get this worked up over race.  And that it can affect our voting.

TED Talk Tuesday: Morgan Spurlock

Morgan Spurlock has made some of the best documentaries of the last decade.  His breakout movie, Supersize Me, had him eating fast food for every meal for every day for one month.  His other documentaries feature himself in some type of experiment.  In this case, he decided to have a look at the role of marketing in a movie called, "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold".  He came to TED talk about his movie and to make some jokes.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: JR

JR's wish to save the world has shown up on several websites since February.  This French artist hopes to use art to change the world by changing our perceptions of each other.  It is quite awesome.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Mark Bezos

Mark Bezos runs an NYC nonprofit organization and volunteers as a firefighter.  Standing before the TED crowd in his uniform, he shares a take of heroism of the smallest kind.  And he offers some simple advice about being a hero to the people around you.

TED Talk Tuesday: Deb Roy

Deb Roy studies how children study language.  So when he had his own kid, you had to think he would do something interesting.  And he did.  He and his wife wired up the entire house with constant video surveillance to record every action and sound.  By studying the words of his son, he could map the progression from "gaaa" to "water" as he learned how to speak.  This is a pretty fascinating talk.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Robert Gupta

Robert Gupta, violinist for the LA Philiharmonic, tells the story of his friendship with a schizophrenic musician named Nathaniel Ayers.  Nathaniel's story became the plot for the movie, The Soloist (2009).  From these interactions, Gupta learned that music is a form of medicine, and that music is sanity.

After the talk, Gupta returns to the stage with his violin and treats the audience to Bach's Cello Suite No. 1.

This one is beautiful.  Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Peter Reinhart

Peter Reinhart shares his passion for bread making, and a few philosophical twists as well.  He begins by explaining the actual process for preparing a loaf of bread and then dives into the deeper meanings and what it can tell us about life.  Food science seems like an interesting field to get into.

Fair warning: You may be hungry after this talk.  Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Brian Greene

Warning: This talk may cause you to think and consequently it may give you a headache.  Brian Greene talks about Super String Theory and has you visualize the possibility of extra dimensions in the universe.  Not only does he describe the elegance of the universe, but also points to hopeful experiments that may confirm the existence of extra dimensions.  Pretty cool stuff.

Enjoy!

TED Talk Tuesday: Mark Sandel

TED Talk from Michael Sandel on The Lost Art of Democratic Debate.  Very few people could get a group of 1000 people to debate topics from flutes to golf carts to gay marriage.  Dr. Sandel does an amazing job. I think that I would love his class.

Our nation has shamed the art of debate.  We just yell at each other.  The toughest decisions and complex problems will never be solved through talking points and punditry.  We need honest debate and honest dialogue.

Here's the Talk

TED Talk Tuesday: Thomas Thwaites

I understand that I am fairly removed from the natural world, but Thomas Thwaites shows us that we are even further than we thought.  He decided to build a toaster from scratch.  The long enduring process can teach us several important lessons- including our dependency on other people.

Enjoy!