TED TALKS IN ONE LINE

2011 Paul Zak on Trust, morality -- and oxytocin

2011-11-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

Within our biology, we have both the yin and the yang of morality, oxytocin that connects us to others and makes us feel what they feel, and testosterone, that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally.

2011 Dave deBronkart: Meet ePatient Dave

2011-07-10T22:36:00.000-07:00

The most underutilized resource in healthcare is the patient, and it is time the healthcare system broke down the barriers between patients and their data, which ought to be made available to web-based healthcare tools like Google Body and Acor with the motto 'Let patients help!'

2011 Alice Dreger: Is Anatomy Destiny?

2011-06-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

The concept of anatomical commonality ("All men are created equal") being more important than anatomical difference ("Kings have 'royal blood' in their veins"), an idea which the American Founding Fathers are credited with, is a movement towards a naturalistic worldview and laid the ground for universalizing entitlement to human rights despite anatomical differences and anomalies.

2011 Leonard Susskind : My friend Richard Feynman

2011-05-22T10:26:00.000-07:00

"We should honor Feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can!"

2011 David Brooks on The Social Animal

2011-03-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

Recent neuroscience is challenging the classical view of humans as 'rational animals' which led to a dehumanizing bias in societies, and instead offering a view of humans as social animals deeply inter-penetrated within one another, a view which can have a humanizing influence urging to society to value previously under-cultivated traits such as Mindsight (adopting another's viewpoint), Equipoise (recognizing our own biases ), Metis (knack of gist-extraction), Sympathy (facility for better group communication), Blending (of once disparate concepts) and 'Limerence' ('losing oneself' in a creation or relationship).

2011 Deb Roy on The Birth of a Word

2011-03-25T18:38:00.000-07:00

Datasets of 24x7 home-videos can be mined using novel analytics and visualization methods like 'space-time worms' and 'interaction threads' (activity traces of individuals/groups of interest) and 'word-scapes' (showing 'peaks' high usage of a given word in a context-space) can yield chronological records of language acquisition by infants, and can be applied to annotate TV content to reveal 'co-viewing cliques'.

2011 Courtney Martin on Reinventing Feminism

2011-03-11T17:00:00.000-08:00

The discourse of the feminist movement has undergone a generational shift and is no longer about 'patriarchy' but about 'intersectionality', and social action is defined no longer by 'protest marches' but by 'online organizing', notably feminist blogging which has been shown to drive real institutional shifts like pulling items of supermarket shelves and firing openly misogynistic clergypersons.

2011 Wael Ghonim Inside the Egyptian Revolution

2011-03-05T18:07:00.000-08:00

Because of the Internet, truth prevailed and anonymous administrators through unplanned events were able to demonstrate that 'the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power' and pull off Revolution 2.0 where 'no-one was hero because everyone was hero' .

2011 Martin Jacques on understanding the rise of China

2011-01-26T20:39:00.000-08:00

To understand the rise of China to superpowerdom, the West must recognize that China is (i) a 'civilization state' unlike a nation-state in the Western model (and thus able to sustain 'one country-many systems') (ii) largely ethnically homogenous (unlike any nation of comparable population) and (iii) a society revering the State as a family patriarch, without the Western notion of minimal government.

2011 Thomas Goetz: It's time to redesign medical data

2011-01-25T23:05:00.000-08:00

Healthcare delivery is not just about conveying information to people, but convincing them to make behavioral changes and aiding decision-making, for example by replacing illegible fine-print drug information sheets with a compact 'Drug Facts' box in ads; and making lab reports more readable and actionable with full-colour graphic summaries, inbuilt glossaries and suggested followups.

2011 Elizabeth Lesser 'Take the Other to lunch'

2011-01-21T23:09:00.000-08:00

All civil strife begins with negative 'other-izing' talk and one way to counter this is by taking the Other (eg. a Democrat if you are a Republican or vice versa) to lunch and asking 3 questions: Share some of your life experiences with me. What issues deeply concern you? What have you always wanted to ask someone from the other side?

2010 Barry Schwartz on using our practical wisdom

2011-01-21T23:05:00.000-08:00

Introducing more rules and rewards under the pretext of making organizations more reliable, ends up demoralizing professional activity by addicting people to incentives, and Practical Wisdom is the will and skill to know how and when to bend the rules, but only in the service of the right aims, harming neither others nor ourselves in the process.

2010 Tom Chatfield on 7 ways games reward the brain

2010-11-08T14:21:00.000-08:00

Games reward brains by 1) experience bars (real-time, not post-hoc measures of progress), 2) multiple short- and long-term aims (gets interest unsustainable by a single goal) 3) rewards for effort (even for trying) 4) feedback (to clearly link action with consequences) 5) an element of uncertainty (possibility of unknown rewards besides known ones) 6) windows of enhanced attention( that increase retention & risk appetite) and 7) collaboration opportunites.

2010 R A Mashelkar on breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products

2010-10-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

'Gandhian Engineering' combines innovation, compassion and passion to 'get more from less for more' to generate not just value for money, but value for many, and is exemplified by ultra-low-cost products like the $2000 Tata Nano (cheaper than the $19700 Model T) and $28 Jaipur foot (usable on rougher terrain than $20000 prosthetic limbs!).

2010 Tim Jackson's economic reality check

2010-10-17T22:46:00.000-07:00

To respond to the dilemma of 'trash-the-system-or-crash-the-planet', we must replace the current economy's obsession with consumption-driven growth (forcing us to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about), with a system that harnesses our altruism and innovation through enterprises with ecological and social goals like Ecosia.

2010 Steven Johnson on where good ideas come from

2010-10-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

More breakthroughs happen at conference tables and weekly lab meetings than while poring over a microscope, and don't always arrive in a flash but are the result of slow hunches with people patiently allowing ideas to 'fade into view' unhindered by deadlines and hence it is advisable for organizations to adopt 'hunch cultivating mechanisms' like Google's 20% innovation time.

2010 Nicholas Christakis on how social networks predict epidemics

2010-09-22T16:29:00.000-07:00

Instead of blanket vaccination, targeted vaccination of people in the central nodes of a social network (found by a survey asking members to nominate other members with more friends than them) is more effective in achieving herd immunity and besides control of epidemics, availability of such data from social networks heralds the beginning of Computational Social Science as a valid discipline.

2010 Chris Anderson on how web video powers global innovation

2010-09-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

Astonishingly rapid cycles of improvement in fields as diverse as experimental microbiology and unicycling are now being driven by people watching web videos, which provide unprecedented visibility, a means to quickly spot-light top-performers and overcome the limitations of the written word by instead harnessing humankind's evolutionarily fine-tuned specialty of face-to-face conversation .

2010 Ben Cameron on the true power of the performing arts

2010-09-12T22:37:00.000-07:00

The Internet has democratized the means of artistic production and distribution in an unprecedented way, causing the emergence of new species of artists like 'pro-ams' (amateurs performing at a professional level) and 'professional hybrid artists' (voluntary performers for charitable causes) whose work is redefining the role of traditional cultural institutions as profoundly as the Reformation did the Church.

2010 Sugata Mitra on the child-driven education

2010-09-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

Drawing on the successes of the Hole-in-the-Wall experiments, an illustration of which is the astonishing performance of a group of 26 twelve-year old Tamil-speaking students in a biotechnology class in English, Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs) offer a promising solution to our need of educating 1 billion children, with an investment of 180 billion dollars over 10 years.

2010 Johan Rockstrom: Let the environment guide our development

2010-09-02T00:41:00.000-07:00

The looming Latin American food crisis which served as an impetus for large-scale adoption of zero-till mulch-farming (which both quadruples yield and sequesters carbon), is an example of a planetary risk driving transformative change of a kind that is necessary to keep unchecked human activity from tipping the biosphere off its stable Holocene state which made civilization possible.

2010 Nic Marks on the Happy Planet Index

2010-08-31T00:26:00.000-07:00

Instead of minute-by-minute Dow Jones updates that supposedly monitor the heath of the economy, society may benefit more from daily updates of, say, America's energy usage, in a manner that is not alarmist but actionable, serving as a progress ticker for the collective goal of getting the most 'happy life years' (happiness-adjusted life expectancy) with the least 'ecological footprint' (resource use).

2010 Jim Toomey on learning from Sherman the Shark

2010-08-25T08:52:00.000-07:00

If we went by geography books alone, then the oceans are just a big puddle of blue paint, while in reality they teem with wondrous life-forms putting comic-book superheroes to shame, like the sea-cucumber (a web-spinning underwater Spiderman) and blowfish(the Incredible Hulk), and comic strips featuring them are a potent means to aid conservation efforts against marine-dumping and shark-finning.

2010 David McCandless on the beauty of data visualization

2010-08-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

Elegant solutions to today's information problems of overload and lack of transparency, lie in visualization, which affords both compression and contextual awareness, like the 'Billion Dollar-o-gram' which shows that if budgets were squares on your monitor, then the combined African debt would be a tiny postage stamp, while the global cost of the recent financial crisis would cover the whole monitor!

2010 Jason Clay on how big brands can help save biodiversity

2010-08-18T19:29:00.000-07:00

Considering that just 100 companies control as much as 25% of the trade of the top 15 commodities with the maximum environmental footprint, sustainability has become a 'pre-competitive issue' on which these companies must co-operate to evolve and enforce best-practices and standards, thereby pushing producers to adopt more sustainable practices faster than consumers and NGOs alone can.

2010 Sheryl WuDunn on our century's greatest injustice

2010-08-17T22:42:00.000-07:00

The stark statistic of today's cross-border sex-slavery being tenfold that of the slavery of the 1780s, highlights gender inequity as our century's greatest moral challenge and recent success stories show that investment in girls' education in the developing world can lead to smaller families with wiser spending habits, offering donors return-on-investment in the form of a world less prone to violence.

2010 Laurie Santos on a monkey economy as irrational as ours

2010-08-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

Human decision-making in market settings is beset by psychological biases of relativity and loss-aversion, which are also demonstrated in experiments with capuchin monkeys, suggesting that the error-proneness of humans is evolutionarily inherited rather than an unintended consequence of complex technological design.

2010 Sheena Iyengar on the art of choosing

2010-08-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

Being able to exercise independent choice from a multitude of options, which is considered non-negotiable in America is not accorded such priority in other cultures,and having to contend unaided with choices is not always desirable, especially in conditions where choice induces guilt or when differences between options are imperceptible.

2010 Rob Cook on the Singularity Delusion

2010-06-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

The basic flaw in (long time TEDster Ray Kurzweil's) singularity is that it does not account for what we don't know about how we do what we do

Nikhil Bhojwani Carbon Footprint Offsets for Consumers

2010-04-12T07:42:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to drum up support for this idea that's a finalist at a competition organized by Lexus at TED 2010. The basic idea is to let consumers pay for their carbon offsets if they choose to do so and to allow them to gain points/ status that they can use on their social networks. If you like the idea, please leave a comment on the youtube site. Thanks!

2010 Jamie Oliver

2010-02-10T23:37:00.001-08:00

You fat slobs!

2010 Daniel Kahneman on experiencing happiness and remembering it

2010-02-10T23:35:00.001-08:00

Happy in your life is different from happy about your life and memories are often based on how stories end and are remembered rather than the actual sum total experience

2010 William Li on angiogenesis balance as the cure-all

2010-02-10T23:31:00.000-08:00

The act of eating is like chemotherapy 3 times a day and anti-angiogenic foods (Earl Grey tea, combinations of teas even better, berries, parsley, soy, dark chocolate, red grapes, red wine, tomatoes...) can help prevent cancer.

2010 David Cameron on enlightened government

2010-02-10T23:29:00.001-08:00

The goal of society should be wellbeing and getting there requires the right political will enabled by technology /transparency as we move from the bureaucratic age (centralized power) into the post-bureacuratic age (people power).

2010 Esther Duflo on evidence based policy

2010-02-10T23:28:00.001-08:00

You can take the guesswork out of policy decisions by applying randomized controlled experiments

2010 Omar Ahmad on how to influence your elected representative

2010-02-10T23:26:00.001-08:00

Handwrite a letter, para 1 - appreciate something, para 2 - bluntly state the issue, para 3 - offer a way out, para 4 - offer help and send the original to the local office and a copy to DC.

2010 Margaret Stewart on progressive rights controls

2010-02-10T23:24:00.001-08:00

Empowering sharing of digital information through rights clarification can be a win-win - basically an appeal to rights' holders to set permissive rules on their content in You Tube's content matching database

2010 Tom Wujec on the marshmallow challenge

2010-02-10T23:19:00.001-08:00

Given a simple collaborative challenge, performance of different groups as follows:
new b-school students < average person < CEOs < kindergartners < CEOs+admins
(order of CEO vs. kindergartners may have been switched, but the point made is the same)

2010 Keith Ferrazzi on being your own glass ceiling

2010-02-10T23:17:00.000-08:00

Understand your dreams, then identify the 5 people who matter the most to that dream and enlist them as partners

2010 Katie Stanton on technology and the government

2010-02-10T23:15:00.000-08:00

Technology creates a new nervous system of information and monetary flows that empowers and enables government e.g. Haiti donations and help needed information via texting

2010 Doug Randall on crowdsourcing intelligence insights

2010-02-10T23:14:00.001-08:00

Insight that comes from crowdsourcing is better than a data dump.

2010 Derek Sivers on the "first follower"

2010-02-10T23:11:00.000-08:00

Leadership is over glorified - It's the first follower who turns the lone nut into a leader by the act of following and that's a heroic role to play.

2010 Jennifer McCrea on exponential fund raising

2010-02-10T23:10:00.000-08:00

People do not give to the needs of your organization, they give to join you in achieving your vision.

2010 Kevin Surace

2010-02-10T23:09:00.000-08:00

I saved a window manufacturing plant

2010 Suzie Katz on photography

2010-02-10T23:08:00.000-08:00

Always look for the light...AND the shadow

2010 Robert Gupta on the powers of music

2010-02-10T22:57:00.001-08:00

Music is transformative in a healing way and I've seen it in Nathaniel Anthony Ayers' eyes

2010 Janet Baker on the engineering inside our brains

2010-02-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

Variety is the spice of life because novelty "excites" us as shown by brain responses over time to semantic stimuli

2010 Neil Izenberg on why babies are cute

2010-02-10T10:48:00.000-08:00

Babies are cute because of the law of the survival of the cutest - true for design, true for animal right's groups

2010 Cindy Gallop on microactions to change the world

2010-02-09T17:33:00.000-08:00

Turn good intentions into actions by changing the world microaction at a time (enabled by a social web tool)

2010 Phil Zimbardo on "heroes are us"

2010-02-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

Villains and heroes are the exceptions, the vast majority of people do nothing of imagination: a new conception of heroism needs to be democratized (anyone), demystified (ordinary people, extraordinary acts), diffused (hero networks) and declared (public commitment to be a hero)

2010 Juliana Machado Ferreira on what happens after the good guys arrive

2010-02-09T17:13:00.000-08:00

Saving trafficked animals does not end at the rescue - there needs to be a way to responsibly release the animals back into the wild rather than euthanize them.

2010 Jonathan Drori on pollen

2010-02-09T17:05:00.000-08:00

Pollen is tiny, biologically active, engages in promiscuous sex, sticks onto things (leaves a forensic trail) and is generally really cool ;)

2010 Jessica Green on micro ecosystems

2010-02-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

The crease between your arms is a tropical rain forest

2010 Jonathan Klein on images that change the world

2010-02-09T16:53:00.000-08:00

When you are faced with a photograph that is difficult to look at you can make a choice to turn away or do something; we bring to each image our own values

2010 Frederik Balagadde on microdiagnostics

2010-02-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

Similar technologies to those that allowed miniaturization of electronics are now allowing miniaturization of diagnostics - think of a micro fluid system analogous to a microchip.

2010 David Bolinsky says, "see your dermatologist"

2010-02-09T16:42:00.000-08:00

Tanning kills

2010 Kevin R. Stone on bioware

2010-02-09T16:33:00.000-08:00

Use biologic tissue to regrow damaged human tissue or replace it with human or animal donor tissue (primed with your stem cells) instead of doing artificial joint replacement and harness the benefits of 400 million years of evolution.

2010 Daniel Kraft races through a swathe of medic technologies

2010-02-09T16:22:00.000-08:00

Exponentially more powerful and cheaper technology and data will transform the health care paradigm through targeted personalized interventions that will move us towards stage 0 medicine.

2010 Felix Kramer on throwing away his running shoes

2010-02-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

Shoes do nothing to protect runners, in fact it's safer to run bare foot because you land better

2010 Catherine Mohr on sustainability choices

2010-02-09T16:13:00.000-08:00

Often it's not where you expect that the sustainability benefit (or cost) lies

Michael Martin on reaction to recession same as to a Tornado

2010-02-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

Stay positive, provide leadership, control your senses, stay safe, it will ultimately pass

2009 Hans Rosling (short talk)

2009-02-09T14:04:00.001-08:00

Always de-average

2009 Arthur Benjamin (short talk)

2009-02-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

School math curriculum requires a dramatic shift -- place probability and statistics at the pinnacle, rather than calculus.

2009 Nina Jablonski

2009-02-09T13:59:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama is the first moderately pigmented president of the United States.

2009 Yann Arthus-Bertrand

2009-02-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

It's too late to be pessimistic.

2009 Jake Eberts

2009-02-09T13:52:00.000-08:00

Declarations by politicians accumulate and get lost but the work of storytellers persist ("Oceans" documentary on the state of our oceans to be released in 2009).

2009 Seth Godin

2009-02-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

You don't need charisma to be a leader, leading gives you charisma.

2009 Ray Anderson

2009-02-09T13:43:00.001-08:00

Take from the earth only what it can remake naturally and quickly because it's good business.

2009 Tim Berners-Lee

2009-02-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

Everyone should take up the chant, "Linked data NOW!" -- raw data is better than processed, now is better than later.

2009 Bill Gates

2009-02-09T13:37:00.001-08:00

More research money is spent on baldness than on malaria!

2009 Peter Singer

2009-02-09T13:34:00.000-08:00

The ability to run robotic wars ends mankind's monopoly on war and will inure us to its horrors.

2009 Juan Enriquez

2009-02-09T13:26:00.000-08:00

Trends show that artifical body parts will not just overcome handicap and illness but will soon provide superior ability -- opening up a slew of new issues.

2008 Josh Klein

2008-04-13T09:23:00.000-07:00

"Don't hate the crows -- just let them save you..." -- certain species intertwine in human environments: roaches, crows and rats become parasitic relationships that continuously adapt for their betterment in survival with immunity, breeding, tactical change; instead, use the intelligence of some (like corvids) to create interspecies harmony (trash pickup, electronics sorting, search and rescue!)

2008 Paul Stamets

2008-04-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

Exploring the mycelial world, where networks are hyphae of fungal, earth restorative recyclers -- some of the largest living entities on the planet -- Stamets leads the hunt in rethinking the mushroom as the fungi perfecti, a new universe of healing, remediation, human and ecological enhancement -- and a network of all networks -- "a neurological landscape that looks like mycelium...brain neurons and astrocytes... the Internet is similarly arranged -- the earth's natural Internet is mycelia."

2008 Wade Davis

2008-04-13T08:11:00.000-07:00

There is a profound, if evanescent, richness in the "ethnosphere" of the planet -- our ancient speaking cultures, "an old-growth forest of the mind"; explore, slip into, the archetypes of human experience, language and story --"the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination."

2008 Jill Bolte Taylor

2008-03-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

The more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right brains, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be.

2008 Peter Schwartz

2008-03-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

The future isn't what it used to be -- The three drivers of conflict (honor, fear, interest) are different in the new geopolitical reality

2008 Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2008-03-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

Two worlds: mediocristan (average rules) and extremistan (outliers rule - never take advice from anyone in a tie). In extremistan the whole idea is to not be the turkey.

2008 Yves Behar

2008-03-17T13:05:00.000-07:00

Advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal

2008 Doug Wilson

2008-03-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

Beware the downside of technology -- internet enabled opportunity to communicate out of repressive regimes is not as anonymous as you might think.

2008 Philip Zimbardo

2008-03-17T13:02:00.001-07:00

Evil starts at 15 volts

2008 A. Garett Lisi

2008-03-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

E8 explains everything....either spectacularly right or spectacularly wrong. Download his paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770

2008 Isaac Mizrahi

2008-03-17T12:48:00.000-07:00

Design ideas come from mistakes and tricks of the eye

2008 David Hoffman

2008-03-17T12:47:00.000-07:00

"Am I my things?"

2008 Christopher

2008-03-17T12:46:00.000-07:00

In a few years you will be able to look into your brain in real time and change it

2008 Susan Blackmore

2008-03-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

Evolution (Variation+Selection+Heredity) is a natural explanation for design out of chaos and the consequent "life" of memes

2008 Dean Ornish

2008-03-17T12:40:00.000-07:00

Exercise turns on disease preventing genes

2008 Bob Geldof

2008-03-17T12:39:00.000-07:00

All human progress depends on "unreasonable" people. Ted is the Olympics of unreasonable people.

2008 Paul Rothemund

2008-03-06T16:58:00.001-08:00

Life is about computation.

2008 Craig Venter

2008-03-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

High concentrations in CO2 sequestration can be used for algae type conversions of CO2 into carbohydrates and with further bioprocessing into fuel

Introduction

2008-03-06T15:18:00.000-08:00

Welcome to "TED talks in one line".

TED talks are amazing....and they can be overwhelming, especially when you listen to 50 of them in 4 days. I figured that it would be great if I could just remember the single most important learning from each talk.

So this blog is my collection of one liners. I'll add to them over time as I get a chance to revisit and reflect on each talk but more interesting than my takeaways will be your perspectives on the same talks.

All TEDsters are welcome to add their own thoughts as comments or if a talk is not yet covered with a new post. For consistency, I suggest naming each post with the year followed by the speaker name.