From hero to zero - when leaders turn bad: Manfred Kets de Vries at TEDxAmsterdam. PanelPicker® The business case against overtime. “The number of Japanese people who work overtime, more than 60 hours, is higher than any other country,” says Yoshie Komuro, “but the contributing value of each individual is the lowest among the industrialized countries.”
Komuro (TEDxTokyo Talk: Life Balance) is the CEO of Work Life Balance Co. Ltd. in Tokyo, a consulting firm that argues the best way to improve productivity is to give workers a break. She admits it’s often a tough sell. “People worry that if we limit the working hours, it may lower productivity and diminish our will to compete,” she says. But she insists that overwork doesn’t just exhaust employees, it can also sap a company’s profits and saddle taxpayers with hidden costs — and she has the numbers to prove it. A long workday hides many hidden costs. The tireless worker is a myth. The vicious cycle of exhaustion. The plight of overworked employees should concern all taxpayers. Champion efficiency, not perseverance. Illustration by iStock. Soigner le cerveau sans médicament grâce aux neurosciences | Louis Mayaud | TEDxRennes.
Conf TED : Multi potentialités et innovations | Fabrice Micheau. TED-Ed - Why do we Love? Making War Make Sense, Mathematically. Conflict seems incomprehensible, war a hellish mess. That is, unless you’re Sean Gourley. The San Francisco-based physicist has applied numbers to conflict zones and several other unlikely places. In 2009, he presented an idea at TED: that the apparent chaos of war contains in it some mathematical logic.
Certain patterns, he and his team found, repeated themselves across a number of conflicts, each with its own unhappy mess of factions, problems and economic tensions: Iraq, Colombia, Afghanistan, Senegal, Peru, Indonesia. Armed with his analysis, they could actually “generate an equation that could predict the likelihood of an attack,” as Gourley explains in the accompanying TED Talk. Could anyone have predicted his own trajectory? It began in quiet New Zealand — first in Christchurch and then a small town nearby — with an idyllic beach and two parents who knew they had a smart kid. Thank goodness he got B’s in the law classes — math and physics came a-calling. As for Gourley himself? Stephen Petranek: Your kids might live on Mars. Here's how they'll survive.
The wars that inspired Game of Thrones - Alex Gendler. Refresh your understanding of the basic outline with the Encyclopedia Britannica entry, then delve into more details at this dedicated site with a timeline, maps, and descriptions of the major battles. For a closer look at the beginning of the conflict, check out the BBC’s biographies of Richard II and Henry IV. Of course, Shakespeare’s series of plays remains the best-known fictional account of the wars, though not a historically accurate one, and you can even dive into the world of politics and intrigue yourself with a detailed board game. Finally, make sure to read about Richard III’s recent appearance in the news and his proper royal funeral 530 years after his defeat.
Watch “Richard III: the mystery of the king and the car parking lot” to discover more about who set out to find Richard III’s remains and where they were. Then, NPR’s Weekend Edition discusses, “At Last, A Fitting Farewell For Richard III,” listen and learn. Art that blurs the line between paint and photograph. Alexa Meade doesn’t paint on canvas. No, as she explains in her talk from TEDGlobal 2013, she paints on something very different — human skin. “If I want to paint your portrait, I’m painting it on you — physically on you. That also means you’re probably going to end up with an ear full of paint because I need to paint your ear on your ear,” says Meade in this extremely fun talk, given at TEDGlobal 2013. “The mask of paint mimics what is directly below it. In her talk, Meade tells us how she went from a political science major (who hadn’t picked up a paintbrush since summer camp) to a working artist with an unusual style that swirls paint and reality into a mind-bending remix.
Meade’s work reminds us of artist Liu Bolin, who shared how he paints himself into complex backgrounds at TED2013. So what would an Alexa Meade and Liu Bolin collaboration look like? Watch Alexa Meade’s talk to hear more about the genesis of her style. Egg on Egg This still-life is painted on top of the actual food.
Kenneth Lacovara: Hunting for dinosaurs showed me our place in the universe. Mia Birdsong: The story we tell about poverty isn't true. What really happens to the plastic you throw away - Emma Bryce. If you watched this video, you’re probably interested in how plastics are made, and what impact they have on the environment. For starters, you might want to watch this video that shows you how plastic bottles are produced. The American Chemistry Council also has some helpful guidelines on how the material is manufactured, what different types there are, and what role monomers and polymers play in the manufacturing process.
(What are monomers and polymers anyway? You can read more about how they’re used in plastics, here.) Moving on from the molecular stuff, plastic also has more visible impacts on the earth. First, learn about landfills, and what role plastic plays in the waste stream. Once plastics are in landfills, they could be contributing to leachate: you can learn more about this hazardous substance here. Talking of hazards, plastic in the ocean is one of the greatest hazards of all. But there’s hope: plastics can be recycled, after all. Schrödinger's cat: A thought experiment in quantum mechanics - Chad Orzel. Here’s are more TED-Ed Lessons by the same educator: Particles and waves: The central mystery of quantum mechanics and What is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? Schrödinger’s Cat is a very fertile subject for discussion, and has also been discussed in this lesson from Josh Samani.
Here’s more about the thought experiment described briefly by Minute Physics. Go to the Sixty Symbols video and learn much more detail about Schrodinger’s Cat. For a humorous look at this cat experiment, venture to this site for a simulation. Erwin Schrödinger shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Paul Dirac for his discovery of the equation that governs the behavior of quantum particles. Schrödinger had wide-ranging interests in science and philosophy, and delivered a famous lecture on the physics of biology at Trinity College in 1943. One of the issues associated with Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is exactly how an experiment arrives at the single final state that we observe. Tabetha Boyajian: The most mysterious star in the universe. Elizabeth Gilbert: A new way to think about creativity.
A new Tree of Life reminds us to question what we know. Since Darwin’s day, scientists have worked to map all of life on a single tree to show how all forms of life on Earth evolved and are related. The DNA sequencing revolution has allowed us to fill in more of the blanks than ever before, greatly accelerating research into biodiversity and Earth’s ecosystems and constantly changing our understanding of life. Last week, our perspective shifted dramatically when researchers unveiled a newly updated Tree of Life showing a whole branch of heretofore-unknown microbes that appear to dominate Earth’s biodiversity. We asked biodiversity mathematician and TED Fellow Hélène Morlon – who uses computer models and the Tree of Life to better understand the forces that shape evolution – to explain why the new phylogenetic tree is changing the way we view life on Earth.
What is the Tree of Life, and how do you use it in your work? All known living things are related through common ancestry as diagrammed on a unique tree, which we call the Tree of Life. Tom Uglow: An Internet without screens might look like this. Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world. Gallery: Why the stories of Ellis Island matter today. They stand in line, hands clasped in front of them or gripping the suitcases that contain their possessions. The women wear headscarves, the men thick coats, the children the travel-weary expressions of those who have come a very long way.
The photos could be of the refugees currently camped out between Greece and the Balkans, or of the 2,000 migrants living in temporary accommodations at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. But they aren’t. These are archival images of people at the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital — its own special sort of limbo, where many were held or turned away from the opportunity of a new life. Welcome to America As immigrants passed through Ellis Island, doctors examined them and held them at the hospital if they were determined to have a communicable disease or to be in need of the “psychopathic ward.”
Patients of all ages The seven children in this image aren’t wearing head coverings for religious reasons. The anticipation of immigration The ongoing story of immigration. Oren Yakobovich: Hidden cameras that film injustice in the world’s most dangerous places. Pourquoi j’ai créé une école où les enfants font ce qu’ils veulent. | Ramïn Farhangi | TEDxSaclay. What should the future of capitalism look like? Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls himself a libertarian Marxist Keynesian — or “completely confused,” as he jokes.
So it was hard to predict how he would react to Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, a more traditional proponent of free markets. The two economists spoke with TED’s European director Bruno Giussani ahead of December’s TEDGlobal conference in Geneva, where they argued that during these uncertain economic times we should question ideologies, discard certitudes and adapt to a messy, new economic reality. They share their views on how to revive the global economy (the text has been edited for length and clarity). What’s wrong with the world economy today? Dambisa Moyo: We, the international community, very successfully convinced a whole swathe of emerging market countries that they should be more democratic and they should be more market friendly.
Should politicians meddle with the free market? Neither capitalist nor socialist — the confounding case of China. Youngest solo sailor, around the world at 16: Laura Dekker at TEDxYouth@Auckland. Taryn Simon: Photographs of secret sites. What doctors don’t learn about death and dying. I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term — but that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy.
Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives and how it affects those around them? That all seemed beside the point. The way we saw it — and the way our professors saw it — the purpose of medical schooling was to teach us how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise. The one time I remember discussing mortality was during an hour we spent on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s classic novella.
The first times, some cry. In the story, Ivan Ilyich is forty-five years old, a midlevel Saint Petersburg magistrate whose life revolves mostly around petty concerns of social status. “No one pitied him as he wished to be pitied,” writes Tolstoy. When I saw my first deaths, I was too guarded to cry. Kevin Allocca: Why videos go viral. Que se passera-t-il quand nos ordinateurs deviendront plus intelligents que nous ?: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?
The mathematical secrets of Pascal’s triangle - Wajdi Mohamed Ratemi. Math is really fun! Visit this site and find out more about Pascal’s Triangle! Having some trouble doing the questions in the lesson? Visit the Math Forum @ Drexel and get some hints on how to solve problems similar to the ones you just worked on!
Practice makes perfect. Khan Academy also adds some additional assistance with the lesson: Pascal’s Triangle for Binomial Expansion. Do the words Fibonacci Sequences and Fractals in Pascal’s Triangle interest you? Find Pascal’s Triangle fascinating? Pico Iyer: Where is home? How to unlock your family history. The Great Thanksgiving Listen aims to capture the stories of a generation of elders over one weekend. But really, these great questions from StoryCorps are useful every day.
“Imagine if you were able to sit and listen to your great-great-grandparent and get to know them,” says Dave Isay of StoryCorps. That’s the premise behind StoryCorps’ Great Thanksgiving Listen, a mass movement to record the stories of elders across the US. To Isay, people over the age of 65 represent a wealth of knowledge and experience we’d all be wise to learn from and honor. But how do you cut past talk of the weather over the dinner table, and start talking about what matters?
1. This is a great warm-up question, says Isay, because most people feel comfortable answering. 2. Isay was surprised when he asked his mom this question recently, and she shared the origins of a song she sang to him when he was a kid. 3. This question might unlock tales from a one-room schoolhouse, or even a school in another country. 4. Quixotic Fusion: Dancing with light. Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness.
Talks: The Year in Ideas 2015. Jason deCaires Taylor: An underwater art museum, teeming with life. Joan Halifax: Compassion and the true meaning of empathy. What should the future of capitalism look like? Garth Lenz: The true cost of oil. Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off. Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world. Peter Attia: Is the obesity crisis hiding a bigger problem? Thomas Insel: Toward a new understanding of mental illness. Pamela Meyer: How to spot a liar. Marina Abramović: An art made of trust, vulnerability and connection. BLACK: My journey to yo-yo mastery. Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal. Why we need to slow down our lives. The idea of going nowhere is as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. “All the unhappiness of men,” the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, “arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.”
After Admiral Richard E. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic, in temperatures that sank to 70 degrees below zero, he emerged convinced that “Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.” Or, as they sometimes say around Kyoto, “Don’t just do something.
Sit there.” Yet the days of Pascal and even Admiral Byrd seem positively tranquil by today’s standards. The amount of data humanity will collect while you’re reading The Art of Stillness is five times greater than the amount that exists in the entire Library of Congress. I mentioned this once on a radio program and a woman called in, understandably impatient. Fabian Oefner: Psychedelic science. Andres Lozano: Parkinson's, depression and the switch that might turn them off.
Miguel Nicolelis: A monkey that controls a robot with its thoughts. No, really. Why are we being such idiots about climate change? When I started covering climate change more than thirty years ago, the underlying science was already clear. Heat from the sun warms the Earth. Gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then act like a snuggly blanket or greenhouse to trap much of that warmth, keeping much of the heat from radiating back out to space.
For humans, this greenhouse effect is a vital — and fortuitous — physical phenomenon. Without it, the Earth would be in a deep freeze. But like most good things, we can have too much of this greenhouse effect. And get ready for much worse. Climate change deniers say nothing is certain. I fault both the scientific community and the press for not explaining that uncertainty cuts both ways. I even scared myself by writing a recent story in Scientific American that was prompted by the worries of a few activist scientists, like NASA’s James Hansen, that climate change could happen way faster than anyone had expected. We do know some incontrovertible facts, however. Piffle. A new way to combat food waste. Cucumbers wasted per week at The Netherland’s largest cucumber farm. (Credit: Fiona Jongejans) It is normal — and sometimes even regulated — for absolutely edible and healthy food products to be discarded merely due to cosmetic reasons, says industrial designer Fiona Jongejans at TEDxMaastricht.
In the Netherlands, where Jongejans lives, fruits and vegetables are placed into different classes, with a cucumber required to be “practically straight … [with the] maximum height of the inner arc [being] 10 mm per 10 cm of length” to be considered “class I.” Jongejans is bothered by regulations that put aesthetics or economics over health, saying, “The waste of perfectly edible food is a natural consequence of this food chain we designed.” Fiona Jongejans at TEDxMaastricht Each one of these discarded cucumbers, peppers, apples, so on, could be used to aid the 1.4 million Netherlanders living below the poverty line, Jongejans says. How to do this? Learn how in her talk: Sirena Huang: An 11-year-old's magical violin. Beardyman: The polyphonic me. Seth Godin: The tribes we lead. Larry Smith: Why you will fail to have a great career. Alice Bows-Larkin: Climate change is happening. Here's how we adapt. Stephen Cave: The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death.
Colin Camerer: When you're making a deal, what's going on in your brain? A new way to combat food waste. Daniel Levitin: How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed. Daphne Bavelier: Your brain on video games. Nicholas Negroponte: 5 predictions, from 1984. Scott Dinsmore: How to find work you love. James B. Glattfelder: Who controls the world? How to give a persuasive presentations: A Q&A with Nancy Duarte. Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online. Scott Dinsmore: How to find work you love. BJ Miller: What really matters at the end of life. The importance of self-care | Playlist. Want to be happy? SLOW DOWN. How to make love last | Playlist. Dan Pink sur la surprenante science de la motivation. Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story. David Puttnam: Does the media have a "duty of care"? The unexpected math behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night" - Natalya St. Clair.
The language of lying - Noah Zandan. Andrew Bastawrous: Get your next eye exam on a smartphone. TEDxParis 2011 - Pierre Rabhi - Y a-t-il une vie avant la mort ? Quand le cheval dévoile les limites de l'homme: Jean Loup PEGUIN at TEDxRennes. Talks on how to love work again | Playlist. How to watch a presidential debate (or win it): Tips from Amy Cuddy. Neri Oxman: Design at the intersection of technology and biology. Emilie Wapnick: Why some of us don't have one true calling. How to tell a story | Playlist. Siddharthan Chandran: Can the damaged brain repair itself? Ash Beckham: We're all hiding something. Let's find the courage to open up. David Epstein: Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger? Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids. Alex Wissner-Gross: A new equation for intelligence.
How does my brain work? | Playlist. Debra Jarvis: Yes, I survived cancer. But that doesn't define me. Gary Haugen: The hidden reason for poverty the world needs to address now. Gallery: How networks help us understand the world. Why humans run the world. The dark side of data | Playlist. The mathematical secrets of Pascal’s triangle - Wajdi Mohamed Ratemi | TED-Ed. TEDxChampsÉlyséesED 2015 Paris.