Well we all know the World Wide Web has absolutely transformed publishing, broadcasting, commerce and social connectivity, but where did it all come from? And I’ll quote three people: Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee. So let’s just run through these guys.

This is Vannevar Bush. Vannevar Bush was the U.S. government’s chief scientific adviser during the war. And in 1945, he published an article in a magazine called Atlantic Monthly. And the article was called “As We May Think.” And what Vannevar Bush was saying was the way we use information is broken. We don’t work in terms of libraries and catalog systems and so forth. The brain works by association. With one item in its thought, it snaps instantly to the next item. And the way information is structured is totally incapable of keeping up with this process.

(Source: ted.com)

When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he’d bought. And the guy took it apart, and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels. And as he did so, his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving, were words. And he said to the guy, “Why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see?” And the watchmaker turned around and said, “God can see it.” Now I’m not in the least bit religious, neither was my father, but at that point, I noticed something happening here. I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves, and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere, I guess. But I felt something. And it was a physiological response. And from that point on, from my age at the time, I began to think of things in a different way.

And as I took on my career as a designer, I began to ask myself the simple question: Do we actually think beauty, or do we feel it? Now you probably know the answer to this already. You probably think, well, I don’t know which one you think it is, but I think it’s about feeling beauty. And so I then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things. One of the most early work was done in automotive design — some very exciting work was done there. And during a lot of this work, we found something, or I found something, that really fascinated me, and maybe you can remember it. Do you remember when lights used to just go on and off, click click, when you closed the door in a car? And then somebody, I think it was BMW, introduced a light that went out slowly. Remember that? I remember it clearly. Do you remember the first time you were in a car and it did that? I remember sitting there thinking, this is fantastic. In fact, I’ve never found anybody that doesn’t like the light that goes out slowly. I thought, well what the hell’s that about?

(Source: ted.com)

What is going on in this baby’s mind? If you’d asked people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric — that he couldn’t take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect. In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture. So in some ways, we think that this baby’s thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists.

Let me give you just one example of this. One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what’s going on in the mind of that other baby. After all, one of the things that’s hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn’t actually exactly like what we think and feel. Anyone who’s followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get. We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people. Now the question is: How could we ask them? Babies, after all, can’t talk, and if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you’ll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. So how do we actually ask them the question?

(Source: ted.com)

I am a conductor, and I’m here today to talk to you about trust. My job depends upon it. There has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in.

Now in the old days, conducting, music making, was less about trust and more, frankly, about coercion. Up to and around about the Second World War, conductors were invariably dictators — these tyrannical figures who would rehearse, not just the orchestra as a whole, but individuals within it, within an inch of their lives. But I’m happy to say now that the world has moved on, music has moved on with it. We now have a more democratic view and way of making music — a two-way street. I, as the conductor, have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music, within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine.

(Source: ted.com)

I’m a garbage man. And you might find it interesting that I became a garbage man, because I absolutely hate waste. I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life. And I’d like to start at the very beginning. Think back when you were just a kid. How did look at the stuff in your life? Perhaps it was like these toddler rules: It’s my stuff if I saw it first. The entire pile is my stuff if I’m building something. The more stuff that’s mine, the better. And of course, it’s your stuff if it’s broken.

(Laughter)

Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry, it’s become pretty clear to me that we don’t necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults. And let me tell you why I have that perspective. Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people’s discarded stuff. Now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff, but it’s a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world — well less than one percent. In fact, the United Nations estimates that there’s about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year — and that’s one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream. And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles. And of course, the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains.

(Source: ted.com)

What’s in the box? Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I’ve traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Sound familiar? Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago? Three times. So you’d think, with all this extra space, we’d have plenty of room for all our stuff. Nope. There’s a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal storage. So we’ve got triple the space, but we’ve become such good shoppers that we need even more space. So where does this lead? Lots of credit card debt, huge environmental footprints, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years.

(Source: ted.com)

So I have a strange career. I know it because people come up to me, like colleagues, and say, “Chris, you have a strange career.” (Laughter) And I can see their point, because I started my career as a theoretical nuclear physicist. And I was thinking about quarks and gluons and heavy iron collisions, and I was only 14 years old. No, no, I wasn’t 14 years old. But after that, I actually had my own lab in the computational neuroscience department, and I wasn’t doing any neuroscience. Later, I would work on evolutionary genetics, and I would work on systems biology.

But I’m going to tell you about something else today. I’m going to tell you about how I learned something about life. And I was actually a rocket scientist. I wasn’t really a rocket scientist, but I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny California where it’s warm; whereas now I’m in the mid-West, and it’s cold. But it was an exciting experience. One day a NASA manager comes into my office, sits down and says, “Can you please tell us, how do we look for life outside Earth?” And that came as a surprise to me, because I was actually hired to work on quantum computation. Yet, I had a very good answer. I said, “I have no idea.” And he told me, “Biosignatures, we need to look for a biosigniture.” And I said, “What is that?” And he said, “It’s any measurable phenomenon that allows us to indicate the presence of life.” And I said, “Really? Because isn’t that easy? I mean, we have life. Can’t you apply a definition, like for example, a Supreme Court-like definition of life?”

(Source: ted.com)

The night before I was heading for Scotland, I was invited to host the final of “China’s Got Talent” show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium. Guess who was the performing guest? Susan Boyle. And I told her, “I’m going to Scotland the next day.” She sang beautifully, and she even managed to say a few words in Chinese: 送你葱 So it’s not like “hello” or “thank you,” that ordinary stuff. It means “green onion for free.” Why did she say that? Because it was a line from our Chinese parallel Susan Boyle — a 50-some year-old woman, a vegetable vendor in Shanghai, who loves singing Western opera, but she didn’t understand any English or French or Italian, so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in Chinese. (Laughter) And the last sentence of Nessun Dorma that she was singing in the stadium was “green onion for free.” So [as] Susan Boyle was saying that, 80,000 live audience sang together. That was hilarious.

So I guess both Susan Boyle and this vegetable vendor in Shanghai belonged to otherness. They were the least expected to be successful in the business called entertainment, yet their courage and talent brought them through. And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams. Well, being different is not that difficult. We are all different from different perspectives. But I think being different is good, because you present a different point of view. You may have the chance to make a difference.

(Source: ted.com)

So I’m a doctor, but I kind of slipped sideways into research, and now I’m an epidemiologist. And nobody really knows what epidemiology is. Epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you. And it’s best understood through example as the science of those crazy, wacky newspaper headlines. And these are just some of the examples.

These are from the Daily Mail. Every country in the world has a newspaper like this. It has this bizarre, ongoing philosophical project of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer. So here are some of the things they said cause cancer recently: divorce, Wi-Fi, toiletries and coffee. Here are some of the things they say prevents cancer: crusts, red pepper, licorice and coffee. So already you can see there are contradictions. Coffee both causes and prevents cancer. And as you start to read on, you can see that maybe there’s some kind of political veilance behind some of this. So for women, housework prevents breast cancer, but for men, shopping could make you impotent. So we know that we need to start unpicking the science behind this.

(Source: ted.com)

I was born in Switzerland and raised in Ghana, West Africa. Ghana felt safe to me as a child. I was free, I was happy. The early 70s marked a time of musical and artistic excellence in Ghana. But then by the end of the decade, the country had fallen back into political instability and mismanagement.

In 1979, I witnessed my first military coup. We the children had gathered at a friend’s house. It was a dimly lit shack. There was a beaten up black and white television flickering in the background, and a former head of state and general was being blindfolded and tied to the pole. The firing squad aimed, fired — the general was dead. Now this was being broadcast live. And shortly after, we left the country, and we returned to Switzerland.

(Source: ted.com)