The BEST episodes of TED Talks season 2011
Every episode of TED Talks season 2011, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of TED Talks season 2011!
TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. TEDTalks began as a simple attempt to share what happens at TED with the world. Under the moniker "ideas worth spreading," talks were released online. They rapidly attracted a global audience in the millions. Indeed, the reaction was so enthusiastic that the entire TED website has been reengineered around TEDTalks, with the goal of giving everyone on-demand access to the world's most inspiring voices. [TED-Ed and TEDx are separate TVDB series and should NOT be listed here.]
#1 - Nigel Marsh: How to make work-life balance work
Season 2011 - Episode 61 - Aired 2/7/2011
Work-life balance, says Nigel Marsh, is too important to be left in the hands of your employer. At TEDxSydney, Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time, personal time and productivity -- and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen.
#2 - Pamela Meyer: How to spot a liar
Season 2011 - Episode 62 - Aired 7/1/2011
On any given day we're lied to from 10 to 200 times, and the clues to detect those lie can be subtle and counter-intuitive. Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting, shows the manners and "hotspots" used by those trained to recognize deception -- and she argues honesty is a value worth preserving.
#3 - Allan Jones: A map of the brain
Season 2011 - Episode 74 - Aired 7/12/2011
Ted Global 2011 Session 3: Coded Patterns How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up.
#4 - Stefan Sagmeister: 7 rules for making more happiness
Season 2011 - Episode 47 - Aired 6/1/2011
Using simple, delightful illustrations, designer Stefan Sagmeister shares his latest thinking on happiness -- both the conscious and unconscious kind. His seven rules for life and design happiness can (with some customizations) apply to everyone seeking more joy.
#5 - Justin Hall Tipping: Freeing energy from the grid
Season 2011 - Episode 70 - Aired 7/12/2011
Ted Global 2011 Session 2: Everyday rebellions What would happen if we could generate power from our windowpanes? In this moving talk, entrepreneur Justin Hall-Tipping shows the materials that could make that possible, and how questioning our notion of 'normal' can lead to extraordinary breakthroughs.
#6 - Hasan Elahi: FBI, here I am!
Season 2011 - Episode 68 - Aired 7/12/2011
Ted Global 2011 Session 2: Everyday rebellions After he ended up on a watch list by accident, Hasan Elahi was advised by his local FBI agents to let them know when he was traveling. He did that and more ... much more.
#7 - Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies
Season 2011 - Episode 67 - Aired 7/12/2011
Ted Global 2011 Session 1: Beginnings We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.
#8 - Danielle De Niese: A flirtatious aria
Season 2011 - Episode 66 - Aired 7/12/2011
Ted Global 2011 Session 1: Beginnings Can opera be ever-so-slightly sexy? The glorious soprano Danielle de Niese shows how, singing the flirty "Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiss." Which, translated, means, as you might guess: "I kiss so hot." From Giuditta by Frans Lehár; accompanist: Ingrid Surgenor.
#9 - Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet
Season 2011 - Episode 65 - Aired 7/12/2011
Ted Global 2011 Session 1: Beginnings Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection.
#10 - Annie Murphy Paul: What we learn before we're born
Season 2011 - Episode 64 - Aired 7/12/2011
Ted Global 2011 Session 1: Beginnings Pop quiz: When does learning begin? Answer: Before we are born. Science writer Annie Murphy Paul talks through new research that shows how much we learn in the womb -- from the lilt of our native language to our soon-to-be-favorite foods.
#11 - Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms
Season 2011 - Episode 63 - Aired 10/1/2010
In this talk from RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools' dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.
#12 - Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world
Season 2011 - Episode 60 - Aired 7/21/2011
Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control.
#13 - Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran
Season 2011 - Episode 59 - Aired 1/4/2011
Lesley Hazleton sat down one day to read the Koran. And what she found -- as a non-Muslim, a self-identified "tourist" in the Islamic holy book -- wasn't what she expected. With serious scholarship and warm humor, Hazleton shares the grace, flexibility and mystery she found, in this myth-debunking talk from TEDxRainier.
#14 - Rory Stewart: Time to end the war in Afghanistan
Season 2011 - Episode 58 - Aired 7/25/2011
British MP Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan after 9/11, talking with citizens and warlords alike. Now, a decade later, he asks: Why are Western and coalition forces still fighting there? He shares lessons from past military interventions that worked -- Bosnia, for instance -- and shows that humility and local expertise are the keys to success.
#15 - JD Schramm: Break the silence for suicide survivors
Season 2011 - Episode 57 - Aired 6/11/2011
Even when our lives appear fine from the outside, locked within can be a world of quiet suffering, leading some to the decision to end their life. At TEDYou, JD Schramm asks us to break the silence surrounding suicide and suicide attempts, and to create much-needed resources to help people who reclaim their life after escaping death. Resources: http://t.co/wsNrY9C
#16 - Alice Dreger: Is anatomy destiny
Season 2011 - Episode 56 - Aired 6/10/2011
Alice Dreger works with people at the edge of anatomy, such as conjoined twins and intersexed people. In her observation, it's often a fuzzy line between male and female, among other anatomical distinctions. Which brings up a huge question: Why do we let our anatomy determine our fate?
#17 - Paul Romer: The world's first charter city
Season 2011 - Episode 55 - Aired 6/9/2011
Back in 2009, Paul Romer unveiled the idea for a "charter city" -- a new kind of city with rules that favor democracy and trade. This year, at TED2011, he tells the story of how such a city might just happen in Honduras ... with a little help from his TEDTalk.
#18 - Janet Echelman: Taking imagination seriously
Season 2011 - Episode 54 - Aired 6/8/2011
Janet Echelman found her true voice as an artist when her paints went missing -- which forced her to look to an unorthodox new art material. Now she makes billowing, flowing, building-sized sculpture with a surprisingly geeky edge. A transporting 10 minutes of pure creativity.
#19 - Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken
Season 2011 - Episode 53 - Aired 6/7/2011
Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He's found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he's taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a "Chickenosaurus".
#20 - Damon Horowitz calls for a moral operating system
Season 2011 - Episode 52 - Aired 6/6/2011
At TEDxSiliconValley, Damon Horowitz reviews the enormous new powers that technology gives us: to know more -- and more about each other -- than ever before. Drawing the audience into a philosophical discussion, Horowitz invites us to pay new attention to the basic philosophy -- the ethical principles -- behind the burst of invention remaking our world. Where's the moral operating system that allows us to make sense of it?
#21 - Rob Harmon: How the market can keep streams flowing
Season 2011 - Episode 51 - Aired 3/11/2011
With streams and rivers drying up because of over-usage, Rob Harmon has implemented an ingenious market mechanism to bring back the water. Farmers and beer companies find their fates intertwined in the intriguing century-old tale of Prickly Pear Creek.
#22 - Ron Gutman: The hidden power of smiling
Season 2011 - Episode 50 - Aired 5/11/2011
Ron Gutman reviews a raft of studies about smiling, and reveals some surprising results. Did you know your smile can be a predictor of how long you'll live -- and that a simple smile has a measurable effect on your overall well-being? Prepare to flex a few facial muscles as you learn more about this evolutionarily contagious behavior.
#23 - Jessi Arrington: Wearing nothing new
Season 2011 - Episode 49 - Aired 6/4/2011
Designer Jessi Arrington packed nothing for TED but 7 pairs of undies, buying the rest of her clothes in thrift stores around LA. It's a meditation on conscious consumption -- wrapped in a rainbow of color and creativity.
#24 - Aaron O'Connell: Making sense of a visible quantum object
Season 2011 - Episode 48 - Aired 6/2/2011
Physicists are used to the idea that subatomic particles behave according to the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics, completely different to human-scale objects. In a breakthrough experiment, Aaron O'Connell has blurred that distinction by creating an object that is visible to the unaided eye, but provably in two places at the same time. In this talk he suggests an intriguing way of thinking about the result.
#25 - Avi Rubin: All your devices can be hacked
Season 2011 - Episode 116 - Aired 10/3/2011
Could someone hack your pacemaker? Avi Rubin shows how hackers are compromising cars, smartphones and medical devices, and warns us about the dangers of an increasingly hack-able world.