Student Reflections on TED Talks
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With one of my new AS groups I asked them this week to watch a TED talk of their choice and then provide some brief written reflections on what they had seen and listened to. Here is a brief selection of their responses.
TED: Michael Pritchard, the Life saver bottle
I watched the TED video where Michael Pritchard reveals his Lifesaver Filter product which could solve all water problems throughout the world. This video is fascinating as it reveals that there is in fact a solution to water shortages in the world. Since water can be made sterile with just a bottle. The lifesaver filter product would make any form of water drinkable with its filter which has 15 nano metre holes through which no bacteria or viruses could fit. What I found more compelling about this product is the potential it would have to put bottled water businesses out of a large proportion of business and provide safe drinking water to the world for just $20 billion. With the British government spending $12 billion in foreign aid per year this project would be an extremely viable solution to the world’s water problems. Thus the 3 and a half billion people who suffer every year and the 2 million children who die every year would live.
Sir Ken Robinson: Do School’s Kill Creativity?
Sir Ken Robinson’s Ted speech on modern schooling and its impacts on human creativity really interested me. He explained that all kids are born naturally creative but squander this creativity as they begin to age. Creativity stems from the idea that young people are not afraid to be wrong and make mistakes. If one is afraid to be wrong, one will never be able to come up with something truly original in fear of receiving a negative reaction from people. The reason children are starting to think like this is because we run national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing one can make and as a result, we are “educating people out of there creative capacities”. All education systems around the world have the same hierarchy of subjects starting with math, languages and ending with the arts. If we want things to change we need to radically rethink our view of intelligence and start to understand that intelligence is diverse and comes in many different forms.
Sir Ken Robinson in his speech defined creativity as “the process of having original ideas of value”. The ability to do this is really important in the modern economic world, much more so than being adept at math or science. If an individual can come up with a truly original and unique product that people desire, he will be able to sell that product to a number of people and make a significant profit. A modern example of this is Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook.
Maz Jobrani: Did you hear the one about the Iranian-American?
The talk was given by a Iranian-American comedian, Maz Jobrani. He, with extreme wit, describes the challenges he faces as an American with a Middle-Eastern background.
The purpose of the talk, apart from mere entertainment, is to break the audience’s prejudices against Muslims or any Middle-Eastern societies through wit. He satirises the atypical view that modern Western individuals hold against Muslims. He takes personal experiences to illustrate the hardships that these people confront in everyday life. For instance, he recalls the experiences he had while travelling as an American. Although he became a holder of the American passport, he recalls, it is portrayed on the passport that his place of birth is Iran. He states that he has not had much trouble travelling across most Western countries, yet he did have some quarrel when he went to Arab nations. Perhaps exaggerated, he claims that he was not welcomed at the Arab airports. This indicates that the political tensions between countries could affect the everyone’s views significantly In addition, Jobrani recalls his experience during his tour in the Middle-East, in particular Dubai. In Dubai, he says rather shamefully, that he held some prejudices against Indians himself. He considered Indians to be typically all working class and mistakenly treated the owner of a hotel as his chauffeur. Through these jokes and entertaining experiences, he allows the audience to feel more friendly and comfortable with Middle-Eastern people including Maz himself. He concludes the talk by expressing his point. He states that through his talks he tries to “break stereotypes and present Middle-Easterns and Muslims in a positive way”. He also expresses his hopes for the future when everyone would accept and welcome the Middle-Easterns with open arms.
All in all, I think that he was extremely successful in breaking my prejudice against the Middle-Eastern people. He indicated that every individual could be approached with jovial heart and I also hope, after watching the video, that the day will come when every individual is treated as equal.
Woody Norris: Inventing the next amazing thing
Having watched Woody Norris’ TED talk on the subject of ‘inventing the next amazing thing’, I started to think of the great inventions of the past and future. Norris’ invention was a way of controlling where sound went, and limit who can and who can’t hear whatever is being emitted. For instance, at 2am in the morning, you can turn on your tv and hear the volume of the programme you have chosen to watch, however Norris’ machine makes the sound impossible for your spouse (or whoever else is lying on the other side of the bed) to hear. In commercial terms, this invention could cause the people at the back of a rock concert to hear the same as the people at the front, and he claims that he has much interest from car manufactures, technological companies (Sony is his biggest customer) and the like. It seems that there is a lot of interest in the answer to Norris’ question ‘what if I could aim sound the way I aim light?’
However, and this source is not world-renound for it’s reliability, it is interesting to note that his wikipedia pages states “whilst Norris has been able to greatly enrich himself, none of the several publicly traded companies he has founded has come anywhere close to profitability.
The wheel, the lightbulb, the telephone - these are all inventions that have had a huge effect on developed society for hundreds if not thousands of years. However I’m not going to focus on a slightly more modern invention - the iPod. In my microeconomics class this afternoon, the beak (teacher) asked for a show of hands for anyone who had an iPod of some sort. Having seen an immediate flurry, he quickly asked if there was anyone who didn’t have one of these apple toys. Not a hand went up. The ipod isn’t even ten years old, and yet I don’t know many people without a mini/shuffle/nano/insert as appropriate. The reason for this success? In the most simple terms: a gap in the market. Who would carry around a cD player with a 20-song CD when they can have anywhere between 200 80,000 songs. While credit must be given to apple’s marketing techniques, the simplicity of using these machines, and the breathtaking technology involved, millions of pounds have been made due to someone realising the ineptitude of the technology in place, creating a solution, and turning the idea into a reality.
By September 2010, 275 million iPods had been sold worldwide, but what will be the invention of the next 10 years? It’s anyone’s guess, but I wish all the best to Woody Norris.
The Ultimate TED Talk! Lies, damned lies and statistics
This brief but extremely interesting talk aims to configure the ultimate - in visual, topic and delivery - TED talk possible. Sebastian Wernicke’s 6 minute talk is a tongue-in-cheek bit of fun, in which he shows the results of his research into which keywords and topics are most popular with TED viewers. He garnered this information by finding both the most and the least popular talks to see if there were any trends. For example, topics which focus on ‘Men’ are extremely unpopular and rarely evoke any comments or questions. This is a light-hearted talk and using the results of his research Wernicke has devised a website (get-tedpad.com) which enables us, as viewers, to create our own TED-style talk which can be either ‘black’ or ‘white’ - the black edition is for bad and boring talks and the white edition is for entertaining, captivating and good talks. Give it a try.
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