Posts Tagged → ted conference

Your Mission is to Upset Someone

Another must-watch video from the TED conference, in which Seth Godin explains why everyone should be out leading a tribe of some kind, a talk based on his excellent book, Tribes.

During the presentation he asks three questions of the viewer as part of his challenge to make change.

The first one is: who exactly, are you upsetting? ‘Cause if you not upsetting someone then you’re not changing the status quo.

The second question is: who are you connecting? Because for a lot of people, that’s what they’re in it for, the connections that are being made, one to the other.

The third one is: who are you leading? Because focusing on that part of it, not the mechanics of what you’re building, but the who and the leading part is where change comes.

Since the American education system is the very definition of status quo, we really need to do more with that first question and work harder to upset more people.

Ok, let’s see who I haven’t bothered in a while. :-)

The TED Top 10

Celebrating the second year of sharing videos of talks from the annual TED conference (still waiting for my scholarship :-), the people running the site have posted a selection of the ten most popular.

I could quibble with a few of the choices but not with the fact that all are excellent, especially my favorites by Ken Robinson, Al Gore, Hans Rosling, and Tony Robbins.

While the highlight reel is fun, go watch all ten. It will be well worth your time.

BTW, you can also subscribe to the videos in iTunes and take them to go.

All Science is Either Physics or Stamp Collecting

Last month I ranted about a teacher raising the possibility of the world being swallowed by a black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe.

However, with my last physics class more than a few years back, I didn’t have a good grasp of what the project is supposed to do much less why someone might be afraid of it on a cosmic level.

After watching the TED talk by Brian Cox, a “rock star physicist”, I have a somewhat better understanding of the science behind the Collider.

Actually, I had to watch it three times to reach that point. :-)

But I find the concepts fascinating. And the scale of the theories being investigated at CERN certainly add some humbling context to the everyday routine of life.

BTW, you’ll have to watch the video to understand where the title of this post came from.

Looking At The Future

I have always had mixed feelings about Clifford Stoll.

While he’s an entertaining writer and speaker, I disagree with much of what he had to say in his two books excoriating computers in society and especially in the classroom.

However, in a recently posted talk from the 2006 TED Conference, Stoll makes some great observations about knowing the future.

In fact, I think if you really want to know what the future’s going to be, if you really want to know about the future, don’t ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No. Don’t ask someone who’s writing code.

No, if you want to know what society is going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.

They know. In fact, don’t just ask any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one. They’re the ones who know what society is going to be like in another generation, I don’t. Nor I suspect do many other people who are talking about what the future will bring.

Certainly all of us can imagine these cool new things that are going to be there. But to me things aren’t the future. What I ask myself is “what is society going to be like when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount on screen time but have never gone bowling together?”.

I also love the fact that he outlined his talk five minutes before he was to present it. On his hand.