2010 Tom Chatfield on 7 ways games reward the brain

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

'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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You fat slobs!

2010 Daniel Kahneman on experiencing happiness and remembering it

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