Atul Gawande: How do we heal medicine?

"Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work — whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty — is the great task of our generation as a whole.” (Atul Gawande)

Jer Thorp: Make data more human

Jer Thorp creates beautiful data visualizations to put abstract data into a human context. At TEDxVancouver, he shares his moving projects, from graphing an entire year’s news cycle, to mapping the way people share articles across the internet.

Jer Thorp’s work focuses on adding meaning and narrative to huge amounts of data as a way to help people take control of the information that surrounds them.

Billy Collins: Everyday moments, caught in time

Billy Collins: I'm here to give you your recommended dietary allowance of poetry. And the way I'm going to do that is present to you five animations of five of my poems. And let me just tell you a little bit of how that came about. Because the mixing of those two media is a sort of unnatural or unnecessary act.

But when I was United States Poet Laureate -- and I love saying that. (Laughter) It's a great way to start sentences. When I was him back then, I was approached by J. Walter Thompson, the ad company, and they were hired sort of by the Sundance Channel. And the idea was to have me record some of my poems and then they would find animators to animate them. And I was initially resistant, because I always think poetry can stand alone by itself. Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results, in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed. And surely, if you're reading a poem that mentions a cow, you don't need on the facing page a drawing of a cow. I mean, let's let the reader do a little work.

But I relented because it seemed like an interesting possibility, and also I'm like a total cartoon junkie since childhood. I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Loony Tunes cartoons. Bugs Bunny is my muse. And this way poetry could find its way onto television of all places. And I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places -- poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes. When I was Poet Laureate, there I go again -- I can't help it, it's true -- (Laughter) I created a poetry channel on Delta Airlines that lasted for a couple of years. So you could tune into poetry as you were flying.

And my sense is, it's a good thing to get poetry off the shelves and more into public life. Start a meeting with a poem. That would be an idea you might take with you. When you get a poem on a billboard or on the radio or on a cereal box or whatever, it happens to you so suddenly that you don't have time to deploy your anti-poetry deflector shields that were installed in high school.

So let us start with the first one. It's a little poem called "Budapest," and in it I reveal, or pretend to reveal, the secrets of the creative process.

(Video) Narration: "Budapest." My pen moves along the page like the snout of a strange animal shaped like a human arm and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater. I watch it sniffing the paper ceaselessly, intent as any forager that has nothing on its mind but the grubs and insects that will allow it to live another day. It wants only to be here tomorrow, dressed perhaps in the sleeve of a plaid shirt, nose pressed against the page, writing a few more dutiful lines while I gaze out the window and imagine Budapest or some other city where I have never been.

BC: So that makes it seem a little easier. (Applause) Writing is not actually as easy as that for me. But I like to pretend that it comes with ease. One of my students came up after class, an introductory class, and she said, "You know, poetry is harder than writing," which I found both erroneous and profound. (Laughter) So I like to at least pretend it just flows out. A friend of mine has a slogan; he's another poet. He says that, "If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you ever tried."

(Laughter)

The next poem is also rather short. Poetry just says a few things in different ways. And I think you could boil this poem down to saying, "Some days you eat the bear, other days the bear eats you." And it uses the imagery of dollhouse furniture.

(Video) Narration: "Some Days." Some days I put the people in their places at the table, bend their legs at the knees, if they come with that feature, and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs. All afternoon they face one another, the man in the brown suit, the woman in the blue dress -- perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved. But other days I am the one who is lifted up by the ribs then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse to sit with the others at the long table. Very funny. But how would you like it if you never knew from one day to the next if you were going to spend it striding around like a vivid god, your shoulders in the clouds, or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

(Applause)

BC: There's a horror movie in there somewhere. The next poem is called forgetfulness, and it's really just a kind of poetic essay on the subject of mental slippage. And the poem begins with a certain species of forgetfulness that someone called literary amnesia, in other words, forgetting the things that you have read.

(Video) Narration: "Forgetfulness." The name of the author is the first to go, followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel, which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of. It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain to a little fishing village where there are no phones. Long ago, you kissed the names of the nine muses good-bye and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag. And even now, as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay. Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a bicycle. No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the Moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

(Applause)

BC: The next poem is called "The Country" and it's based on, when I was in college I met a classmate who remains to be a friend of mine. He lived, and still does, in rural Vermont. I lived in New York City. And we would visit each other. And when I would go up to the country, he would teach me things like deer hunting, which meant getting lost with a gun basically -- (Laughter) and trout fishing and stuff like that. And then he'd come down to New York City and I'd teach him what I knew, which was largely smoking and drinking. (Laughter) And in that way we traded lore with each other. The poem that's coming up is based on him trying to tell me a little something about a domestic point of etiquette in country living that I had a very hard time, at first, processing. It's called "The Country."

(Video) Narration: "The Country." I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden strike-anywhere matches just lying around the house, because the mice might get into them and start a fire. But your face was absolutely straight when you twisted the lid down on the round tin where the matches, you said, are always stowed. Who could sleep that night? Who could whisk away the thought of the one unlikely mouse padding along a cold water pipe behind the floral wallpaper, gripping a single wooden match between the needles of his teeth? Who could not see him rounding a corner, the blue tip scratching against rough-hewn beam, the sudden flare and the creature, for one bright, shining moment, suddenly thrust ahead of his time -- now a fire-starter, now a torch-bearer in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid illuminating some ancient night? And who could fail to notice, lit up in the blazing insulation, the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces of his fellow mice -- one-time inhabitants of what once was your house in the country?

(Applause)

BC: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. And the last poem is called "The Dead." I wrote this after a friend's funeral, but not so much about the friend as something the eulogist kept saying, as all eulogists tend to do, which is how happy the deceased would be to look down and see all of us assembled. And that to me was a bad start to the afterlife, having to witness your own funeral and feel gratified. So the little poem is called "The Dead."

(Video) Narration: "The Dead." The dead are always looking down on us, they say. While we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich, they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity. They watch the tops of our heads moving below on Earth. And when we lie down in a field or on a couch, drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon, they think we are looking back at them, which makes them lift their oars and fall silent and wait like parents for us to close our eyes.

(Applause)

BC: I'm not sure if other poems will be animated. It took a long time -- I mean, it's rather uncommon to have this marriage -- a long time to put those two together. But then again, it took us a long time to put the wheel and the suitcase together. (Laughter) I mean, we had the wheel for some time. And schlepping is an ancient and honorable art.

(Laughter)

I just have time to read a more recent poem to you. If it has a subject, the subject is adolescence. And it's addressed to a certain person. It's called "To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl."

"Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born, you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn't have done that all alone. So never mind; you're fine just being yourself. You're loved for just being you. But did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down 150,000 dollars a picture, Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room -- no wait, I mean he had invented the calculator? Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life, after you come out of your room and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks. For some reason I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey was queen of England when she was only 15. But then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model. (Laughter) A few centuries later, when he was your age, Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family, but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas and two complete masses as a youngster. (Laughter) But of course, that was in Austria at the height of Romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland. (Laughter) Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15 or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17? We think you're special just being you -- playing with your food and staring into space. (Laughter) By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes, but that doesn't mean he never helped out around the house."

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Thank you. Thank you.

(Applause)

Thanks.

(Applause)

Evolution in a big city

The cockroach beatbox

By dissecting a cockroach ... yes, live on stage ... TED Fellow and neuroscientist Greg Gage shows how brains receive and deliver electric impulses -- and how legs can respond. This talk comes from the TED-Ed project.

Why you should listen to him:

As half of Backyard Brains, neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage builds "spiker boxes" -- small rigs that help kids understand the electrical impulses that control the nervous system. He's passionate about helping students understand (viscerally) how our brains and our neurons work, because, as he said onstage at TED2012, we still know very little about how the brain works -- and we need to start inspiring kids early to want to know more. He is a 2012 TED Fellow.

Before becoming a neuroscientist, Gage worked as an electrical engineer making touchscreens. As he told the Huffington Post: "Scientific equipment in general is pretty expensive, but it's silly because before [getting my PhD in neuroscience] I was an electrical engineer, and you could see that you could make it yourself. So we started as a way to have fun, to show off to our colleagues, but we were also going into classrooms around that time and we thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could bring these gadgets with us so the stuff we were doing in advanced Ph.D. programs in neuroscience, you could also do in fifth grade?"

Itay Talgam: Lead like the great conductors

Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

Fields Wicker-Miurin: Learning from leadership's "missing manual"

Shilo Shiv Suleman: Using tech to enable dreaming

TED video: Three types of online attacks

TEDxTaipei miniTalks - Jiun-Huei Proty Wu - 02

Professor Jiun-Huei Proty Wu is a cosmologist teaching at National Taiwan University, jointly appointed by Academia Sinica and National Cheng-Chi University. Growing up in Taiwan, he developed a fighting spirit from the challenging experience of military service, an attitude he carried throughout his life. At 12 years of age, he built two telescopes using surplus wood and a PVC water pipe, hoping to prove the existence of the goddess of the moon. Two years later, while using these two telescopes to observe the universe, he successfully captured the astonishing moment when the Comet Halley passed, sparking his career in cosmology. At 28, he obtained his PhD in cosmology from the Relativity Group at Cambridge, led by Professor Stephen Hawking. After working at U.C. Berkeley and NASA, he returned to Taiwan and has been back for over a decade. He is currently the Project Scientist of the cosmological telescope, AMiBA, in Hawaii, and plans to build a time machine at the South Pole to search for the origins of the cosmos.

David Agus

Systemic Thinking About Cancer
Dr. David Agus discusses thinking systemically about cancer and other things



Vitamin C and the Limeys
Sal and Dr. David Agus talk about the history of Scurvy and Vitamin C



Inflammation
Dr. David Agus talks about inflammation (while Sal repeatedly misspells it with one "m")

Bjarke Ingels: Hedonistic sustainability

ABOUT THIS TALK

Bjarke Ingels' architecture is luxurious, sustainable and community-driven. At TEDxEast he shows us his playful designs, from a factory chimney that blows smoke rings to a ski slope built atop a waste processing plant.

Tyler Cowen: Be suspicious of stories

ABOUT THIS TALK

Like all of us, economist Tyler Cowen loves a good story. But in this intriguing talk from TEDxMidAtlantic, he asks us to step away from thinking of our lives -- and our messy, complicated irrational world -- in terms of a simple narrative.

Award-winning teen-age science in action

ABOUT THIS TALK

In 2011 three young women swept the top prizes of the first Google Science Fair. At TEDxWomen Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose and Naomi Shah described their extraordinary projects-- and their route to a passion for science.


Lauren Hodge: If you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option, which would you choose, grilled or fried chicken? Now most people would answer grilled, and it's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories. However, grilled chicken poses a hidden danger. The hidden danger is heterocyclic amines -- specifically phenomethylimidazopyridine, or PhIP -- (laughter) which is the immunogenic or carcinogenic compound.

A carcinogen is any substance or agent that causes abnormal growth of cells, which can also cause them to metastasize or spread. They are also organic compounds in which one or more of the hydrogens in ammonia is replaced with a more complex group. Studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines. However, no studies exist yet that show how or why. These here are five different organizations that classify carcinogens. And as you can see, none of the organizations consider the compounds to be safe, which justifies the need to decrease them in our diet.

Now you might wonder how a 13 year-old girl could come up with this idea. And I was led to it through a series of events. I first learned about it through a lawsuit I read about in my doctor's office -- (Laughter) which was between the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine and seven different fast food restaurants. They weren't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken, but they were sued because of California's Proposition 65, which stated that if there's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning.

So I was very surprised about this. And I was wondering why nobody knew more about this dangerous grilled chicken, which doesn't seem very harmful. But then one night, my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner, and I noticed that the edges of the chicken, which had been marinated in lemon juice, turned white. And later in biology class, I learned that it's due to a process called denaturing, which is where the proteins will change shape and lose their ability to chemically function. So I combined these two ideas and I formulated a hypothesis, saying that, could possibly the carcinogens be decreased due to a marinade and could it be due to the differences in PH?

So my idea was born, and I had the project set up and a hypothesis, so what was my next step? Well obviously I had to find a lab to work at because I didn't have the equipment in my school. I thought this would be easy, but I emailed about 200 different people within a five-hour radius of where I lived, and I got one positive response that said that they could work with me. Most of the others either never responded back, said they didn't have the time or didn't have the equipment and couldn't help me. So it was a big commitment to drive to the lab to work multiple times. However, it was a great opportunity to work in a real lab -- so I could finally start my project.

The first stage was completed at home, which consisted of marinating the chicken, grilling the chicken, amassing it and preparing it to be transported to the lab. The second stage was completed at the Penn State University main campus lab, which is where I extracted the chemicals, changed the PH so I could run it through the equipment and separated the compounds I needed from the rest of the chicken. The final stages, when I ran the samples through a high-pressure liquid chromatography mass spectrometer, which separated the compounds and analyzed the chemicals and told me exactly how much carcinogens I had in my chicken.

So when I went through the data, I had very surprising results, because I found that four out of the five marinating ingredients actually inhibited the carcinogen formation. When compared with the unmarinated chicken, which is what I used as my control, I found that lemon juice worked by far the best, which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent. The saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well, decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent. Olive oil slightly decreased the PhIP formation, but it was nearly negligible. And the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range, but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens.

Another important factor that I didn't take into account initially was the time cooked. And I found that if you increase the time cooked, the amount of carcinogens rapidly increases. So the best way to marinate chicken, based on this, is to, not under-cook, but definitely don't over-cook and char the chicken, and marinate in either lemon juice, brown sugar or saltwater.

(Applause)

Based on these findings, I have a question for you. Would you be willing to make a simple change in your diet that could potentially save your life? Now I'm not saying that if you eat grilled chicken that's not marinated, you're definitely going to catch cancer and die. However, anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle.

Is it worth it to you? How will you cook your chicken now?

(Applause)

Shree Bose: Hi everyone. I'm Shree Bose. I was the 17-18 year-old age category winner and then the grand prize winner. And I want all of you to imagine a little girl holding a dead blue spinach plant. And she's standing in front of you and she's explaining to you that little kids will eat their vegetables if they're different colors. Sounds ridiculous, right. But that was me years ago. And that was my first science fair project. It got a bit more complicated from there. My older brother Panaki Bose spent hours of his time explaining atoms to me when I barely understood basic algebra. My parents suffered through many more of my science fair projects, including a remote controlled garbage can.

(Laughter)

And then came the summer after my freshman year, when my grandfather passed away due to cancer. And I remember watching my family go through that and thinking that I never wanted another family to feel that kind of loss. So, armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology, I decided I wanted to do cancer research at 15. Good plan. So I started emailing all of these professors in my area asking to work under their supervision in a lab. Got rejected by all except one. And then went on, my next summer, to work under Dr. Basu at the UNT Health Center at Fort Worth, Texas. And that is where the research began.

So ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people don't know about, or at least don't pay that much attention to. But yet, it's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States. In fact, one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer. One in 100 will die from it. Chemotherapy, one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today, involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells.

Cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug -- a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the DNA of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves. Sounds great, right? But here's the problem: sometimes patients become resistant to the drug, and then years after they've been declared to be cancer free, they come back. And this time, they no longer respond to the drug. It's a huge problem. In fact, it's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today.

So we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called Cisplatin. And we wanted to figure this out, because if we could figure that out, then we might be able to prevent that resistance from ever happening. So that's what we set out to do. And we thought it had something to do with this protein called AMP kinase, an energy protein. So we ran all of these tests blocking the protein, and we saw this huge shift. I mean, on the slide, you can see that on our sensitive side, these cells that are responding to the drug, when we start blocking the protein, the number of dying cells -- those colored dots -- they're going down. But then on this side, with the same treatment, they're going up -- interesting.

But those are dots on a screen for you; what exactly does that mean? Well basically that means that this protein is changing from the sensitive cell to the resistant cell. And in fact, it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant. And that's huge. In fact, it means that if a patient comes in and they're resistant to this drug, then if we give them a chemical to block this protein, then we can treat them again with the same drug. And that's huge for chemotherapy effectiveness -- possibly for many different types of cancer. So that was my work, and it was my way of reimagining the future for future research, with figuring out exactly what this protein does, but also for the future of chemotherapy effectiveness -- so maybe all grandfathers with cancer have a little bit more time to spend with their grandchildren.

But my work wasn't just about the research. It was about finding my passion. That's why being the grand prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair -- cute picture, right -- it was so exciting to me and it was such an amazing honor. And ever since then, I've gotten to do some pretty cool stuff -- from getting to meet the president to getting to be on this stage to talk to all of you guys.

But like I said, my journey wasn't just about the research, it was about finding my passion, and it was about making my own opportunities when I didn't even know what I was doing. It was about inspiration and determination and never giving up on my interest for science and learning and growing. After all, my story begins with a dried, withered spinach plant and it's only getting better from there.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Naomi Shah: Hi everyone. I'm Naomi Shah, and today I'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients. 1.6 million deaths worldwide. One death every 20 seconds. People spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors. And the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of HIV and tuberculosis combined. Now these statistics had a huge impact on me, but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round. It confused me; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season?

With this question in mind, I started researching, and I soon found that indoor air pollutants were the culprit. As soon as I realized this, I investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients. At first, I just wanted to figure out which of these four pollutants have the largest negative health impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients. But soon after, I developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients. And it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health, because that relationship seems so important.

So with that in mind, I started researching more, I started investigating more, and I became very passionate. Because I realized that if we could find a way to target remediation, we could also find a way to treat asthmatic patients more effectively. For example, volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools, homes and workplaces. They're everywhere. These chemical pollutants are currently not a criteria air pollutant, as defined by the U.S. Clean Air Act. Which is surprising to me, because these chemical pollutants, through my research, I show that they had a very large negative impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients and thus should be regulated.

So today I want to show you my interactive software model that I created. I'm going to show it to you on my laptop. And I have a volunteer subject in the audience today, Julie. And all of Julie's data has been pre-entered into my interactive software model. And this can be used by anyone. So I want you to imagine that you're in Julie's shoes, or someone who's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder. So Julie's going to her doctor's office to get treated for her asthma. And the doctor has her sit down, and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate -- which is essentially her exhalation rate, or the amount or air that she can breathe out in one breath.

So that peak expiratory flow rate, I've entered it up into the interactive software model. I've also entered in her age, her gender and her height. I've assumed that she lives in an average household with average air pollutant levels. So any user can come in here and click on "lung function report" and it'll take them to this report that I created. And this report really drives home the crux of my research.

So what it shows -- if you want to focus on that top graph in the right-hand corner -- it shows Julie's actual peak expiratory flow rate in the yellow bar. This is the measurement that she took in her doctor's office. In the blue bar at the bottom of the graph, it shows what her peak expiratory flow rate, what her exhalation rate or lung health, should be based on her age, gender and height. So the doctor sees this difference between the yellow bar and the blue bar, and he says, "Wow, we need to give her steroids, medication and inhalers."

But I want everyone here to reimagine a world where instead of prescribing steroids, inhalers and medication, the doctor turns to Julie and says, "Why don't you go home and clean out your air filters. Clean out the air ducts in your home, in your workplace, in your school. Stop the use of incense and candles. And if you're remodeling your house, take out all the carpeting and put in hardwood flooring." Because these solutions are natural, these solutions are sustainable, and these solutions are a long-term investments -- long-term investments that we're making for our generation and for future generations. Because these environmental solutions that Julie can make in her home, her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her.

So I'm very passionate about this research and I really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma, more respiratory disorders, as well as more pollutants. But before I end my talk today, I want to leave you with one saying. And that saying is that genetics loads the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. And that made a huge impact on me when I was doing this research. Because what I feel, is a lot of us think that the environment is at a macro level, that we can't do anything to change our air quality or to change the climate or anything.

But if each one of us takes initiative in our own home, in our own school and in our own workplace, we can make a huge difference in air quality. Because remember, we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors. And air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients, anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general.

So I want you to reimagine a world with better air quality, better quality of life and better quality of living for everyone including our future generations.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Lisa Ling: Right. Can I have Shree and Lauren come up really quickly? Your Google Science Fair champions. Your winners.

(Applause)

Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology

ABOUT THIS TALK

We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do -- Drew Berry wants to change that. At TEDxSydney he shows his scientifically accurate (and entertaining!) animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells.

A.J. Jacobs: How healthy living nearly killed me

I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement. And I've done this in three parts. So first I started with the mind. And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z -- or, more precisely, from "a-ak" to "Zywiec." And here's a little image of that. And this was an amazing year. It was really a fascinating journey. It was painful at times, especially for those around me. My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. So it had its downsides.

But after that, I decided to work on the spirit. As I mentioned last year, I grew up with no religion at all. I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. (Laughter) Not really. But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it. So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible. And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard -- because Leviticus says you cannot shave. So this is what I looked like by the end. Thank you for that reaction. (Laughter) I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski. I got both of them. So there was the topiary there. And there's the sheep.

Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be, the healthiest person alive. So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years. And I just finished a couple of months ago. And I have to say, thank God. Because living so healthily was killing me. (Laughter) It was so overwhelming, because the amount of things you have to do, it's just mind-boggling. I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers. And they were telling me all the things I had to do. I had to eat right, exercise, meditate, pet dogs, because that lowers the blood pressure. I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book. I had to put on sunscreen. This was no small feat, because if you listen to dermatologists, they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen. And you have to reapply it every two to four hours. So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen. I was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year. There was the washing of hands. I had to do that properly. And my immunologist told me that I should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house, because those are just orgies of germs. So that took a lot of time.

I also tried to be the safest person I could be, because that's a part of health. I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council. They started a public campaign that says, "A walking helmet is a good helmet." So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking, but also for walking around. And you can see there they're shopping with their helmets. (Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that. Now it's a little extreme, I admit. But if you think about this, this is actually -- the "Freakonomics" authors wrote about this -- that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving. So something to think about tonight if you've had a couple.

So I finished, and it was a success in a sense. All of the markers went in the right direction. My cholesterol went down, I lost weight, my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant. So that was nice. And it was successful overall. But I also learned that I was too healthy, and that was unhealthy. I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family. And as Dan Buettner can tell you, having a strong social network is so crucial to our health.

So I finished. And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over. I went to the dark side, and I just indulged myself. It was like something out of Caligula. (Laughter) Without the sex part. Because I have three young kids, so that wasn't happening. But the over-eating and over-drinking, definitely. And I finally have stabilized. So now I'm back to adopting many -- not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore -- but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year. It was really a life-changing project. And I, of course, don't have time to go into all of them. Let me just tell you two really quickly.

The first is -- and this was surprising to me; I didn't expect this to come out -- but I live a much quieter life now. Because we live in such a noisy world. There's trains and planes and cars and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy. (Laughter) And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard -- not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does, but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response. A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage. The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year. And it was done in Europe. And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution. So they think it's actually very deadly.

And by the way, it's also terrible for your brain. It really impairs cognition. And our Founding Fathers knew about this. When they wrote the Constitution, they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate. So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist. So as a patriot, I felt it was important to -- I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way.

And the second point I want to make, the final point, is that -- and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED -- that joy is so important to your health, that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them. And just to give you one instance of this: food. The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what's the most pleasurable. But I think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food. To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel. So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes -- throw in some sunflower seeds. And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos. (Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person.

So that is it. The book about it comes out in April. It's called "Drop Dead Healthy." And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour. That's my greatest hope.

So thank you very much.

(Applause)

Sebastian Wernicke: 1000 TEDTalks, 6 words

I am a statistician by training, so for my TED talk I did a tongue-in-cheek data analysis of about 600 other TED talks. I found that the most loved talks typically evoke emotion—for example, through using words like “happiness,” “the brain,” and “coffee.” So you might want to try talking about “how drinking coffee spreads happiness in the brain.” Also, don’t talk about oxygen, aircraft, or computers—statistically, technical terms are associated with less popular talks. These also cite the New York Times much more than the best-rated ones. The more successful speakers tend to use fewer slides and more props. About half of the most popular TED talks don’t even use slides at all. And for some reason, talks that people rank as “fascinating” employ a lot of purple, and ones that are “ingenious” emphasize the color green. It is statistically significant, but I haven’t found anyone who can explain that to me.

The maximum time you are given for a TED talk is 18 minutes. This really forces the speakers to make just one point, and get to it immediately. You don’t have any time for diversions. When you prepare your talk, there are always certain phrases or slides that you think are incredible. Then you start showing them to other people, and they tell you different. You have to be really brutal about cutting them out. For my TED talk, there was tons of stuff I had to throw out. It was the right thing to do, but I’m still sad for some of that material.

At your typical conference, people there are basically forced to endure the talks—it’s happening at you. Looking at the TED speakers, many of them talk about very serious or fascinating topics, yet they don’t flaunt their ego. At TED, it’s more about contributing to the conference.

Wernicke, a consultant at Oliver Wyman, created the website TEDPad.










If you go on the TED website, you can currently find there over a full week of TEDTalk videos, over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings. And that's a huge amount of data. And it got me wondering: If you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis, could you reverse engineer a TEDTalk? Could you create the ultimate TEDTalk? (Laughter) (Applause) And also, could you create the worst possible TEDTalk that they would still let you get away with?

To find this out, I looked at three things: I looked at the topic that you should choose, I looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage. Now, with the topic: There's a whole range of topics you can choose, but you should choose wisely, because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk. Now, to make this more concrete, let's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite TEDTalks and in the least favorite TEDTalks. So if you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go. (Laughter) (Applause) Whereas, if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen, girls, aircraft -- actually, I would like to hear that talk, (Laughter) but statistics say it's not so good. Oh, well. If you generalize this, the most favorite TEDTalks are those that feature topics we can connect with, both easily and deeply, such as happiness, our own body, food, emotions. And the more technical topics, such as architecture, materials and, strangely enough, men, those are not good topics to talk about.

How should you deliver your talk? TED is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock, so they're going to hate me for revealing this, because, actually, you should talk as long as they will let you. (Laughter) Because the most favorite TEDTalks are, on average, over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones. And this holds true for all ranking lists on TED.com except if you want to have a talk that's beautiful, inspiring or funny. Then, you should be brief. (Laughter) But other than that, talk until they drag you off the stage.

(Laughter)

Now, while ... (Applause) While you're pushing the clock, there's a few rules to obey. I found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite TEDTalks as opposed to the least favorite TEDTalks. I'll give you three examples. First of all, I must, as a speaker, provide a service to the audience and talk about what I will give you, instead of saying what I can't have. Secondly, it's imperative that you do not cite The New York Times. (Laughter) And finally, it's okay for the speaker -- that's the good news -- to fake intellectual capacity. If I don't understand something, I can just say, "etc., etc." You'll all stay with me. It's perfectly fine. (Applause)

Now, let's go to the visuals. The most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker. And analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite TED speakers, you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average, make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average TED speaker. Slides are okay, though you might consider going for props. And now the most important thing, that is the mood onstage. Color plays a very important role. Color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website. (Applause) For example, fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color, (Laughter) much more than the average TEDTalk. Ingenious TEDTalks, much more this green color, etc., et. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, personally, I think I'm not the first one who has done this analysis, but I'll leave this to your good judgment.

So, now it's time to put it all together and design the ultimate TEDTalk. Now, since this is TEDActive, and I learned from my analysis that I should actually give you something, I will not impose the ultimate or worst TEDTalk on you, but rather give you a tool to create your own. And I call this tool the TEDPad. (Laughter) And the TEDPad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected, highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own TEDTalk. You only have to make one decision, and that is: Are you going to use the white version for very good TEDTalks, about creativity, human genius? Or are you going to go with a black version, which will allow you to create really bad TEDTalks, mostly about blogs, politics and stuff? So, download it and have fun with it.

Now I hope you enjoy the session. I hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible TEDTalks. And I hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this, which I really want to see.

Thank you very much.

(Applause) Thanks.


若你上 TED 的網站， 你會看到 超過一整星期的 TEDTalk 影片， 超過13億字 的字幕。 還有百萬以上的使用者評比， 資料量很龐大。 所以我在想， 如果你把這些資料 進行統計分析， 你可不可能反向製作出一個 TEDTalk？ 還是你可以創造出 一個「最棒的」TEDTalk？ （掌聲） 還是說，你可以製作出 一個最爛的 TEDTalk， 而且還可以全身而退？

為了找到解答，我選擇三個層面來分析。 我先看該選什麼當做演說的標題， 再來看看在台上該怎麼表達， 以及該使用什麼視覺輔助。 先來說標題，你可以選的標題範圍很廣， 但你應該謹慎地選擇， 因為你所選定的標題， 將會嚴重影響聽眾對你演說的反應。 為了讓你更明白一點， 讓我們先來看看篩選出來的前十名最佳字句， 這是統計分析的結果， 是分別從聽眾最喜愛的 TEDTalk， 和聽眾最不喜愛的 TEDTalk 中所篩選出來的。 所以，如果你到這兒來， 發表一個主題是「法國咖啡如何 在我們的大腦裡傳播快樂」的演說， 那就對了！ （掌聲） 但是，如果你的主題 是敘述你所從事的專案計畫， 內容與氧氣、女孩、飛機等字眼有關， 我個人其實還滿想聽這種演說的， 但統計數據卻告訴我們這不夠吸引人。 嗯, 好。 如果我們廣泛地推論， 最受歡迎的 TEDTalk 所談論的主題， 是聽眾容易與之產生共鳴的， 既簡單而又深入， 像是快樂、我們的身體、 食物和情緒等。 而比較技術性的主題， 像是建築、材料、還有 – 這非常的奇怪 – 男人， 這些就不是那麼受歡迎的主題。

該怎麼進行演說呢？ TED 最負盛名的是 對演說者時間的嚴格掌控， 所以他們會很討厭我告訴你們這一點， 因為根據統計， 你應該在他們允取你的時間範圍內，說得愈長愈好， 因為最受歡迎的 TEDTalk， 平均比最不受歡迎的演說， 時間長上一半。 這是 TED.com 的排行榜告訴我們的事實， 除非你的演說是 優美的、具啟發性的或是有趣的， 那麼，你應該簡潔些。不然的話， 你應該一直說到他們要把你拖下台為止。

（笑聲）

嗯，好.. （掌聲） 在你爭取更多演說時間的同時，還有幾項規則要遵守。 我會發現這些規則， 是因為我統計了演說中所出現的辭句， 看看哪些在最受歡迎的 TEDTalk 中較常出現， 哪些又在最不受歡迎的 TEDTalk 中出現。 我會舉三個例子說明。 首先，身為一個演說者， 我必須提供我所知道的資訊給聽眾， 而不是告訴聽眾我不知道什麼。 第二，要記住 不要引用紐約時報的報導。 （笑聲） 最後，我要告訴你們一個好消息， 要學會不懂裝懂。 如果不瞭解某件事，就用「諸如此類...」來矇混過去。 你們都知道我在說什麼吧! 這樣很好啊！ （掌聲）

現在我們來談談視覺輔助。 在講台上最醒目的視覺標的應該就是演說者了。 統計分析顯示，若你想成為 最受歡迎的 TED 演說者， 你應該把頭髮留得比一般人長一點， 記得戴上眼鏡，然後穿得比一般 TED 演說者 再正式一點， 投影片可以用，但如果能有道具輔助會更好。 然而，最重要的事是 講台上的氣氛。 色彩佔有很重要的地位， 你選用的色彩會決定 你在網路上的評價 （掌聲） 舉例來說，被評價為「引人入勝」的 TEDTalk 都大量使用 這種藍色， 使用頻率比一般的 TEDTalk 高得多。 被評價為「機智」的演說多是這種綠色， 諸如此類... （掌聲） 我個人覺得， 我應該不是第一個做這種分析的人， 但這留給你們 自己判斷吧！

現在該是我們把所有東西拼湊在一起 製作出最棒的 TEDTalk 的時候了。 由於這是 TEDActive， 從我研究的統計資料裡， 我知道我該給你們一些實際的東西， 我不會強迫你們做出最棒的 或是最爛的 TEDTalk， 但我會給你們一套工具讓你們製作出自己的演說。 我把這個工具命名為 TED Pad。 （笑聲） TED Pad 內含有 100 組精選語句， 你可以善加組合， 製作出你自己的 TEDTalk。 你所要做的決定只有一個， 那就是：你是要使用白色的版本 來製作出優質的 TEDTalk， 內容關於創造力、人類的才華？ 還是你想要選用黑色的版本？ 那讓你可以製作出超爛的 TEDTalk， 內容大部分涵蓋部落格 還有政治這些玩意兒。 現在就下載，好好玩一玩吧！

希望你們喜歡我的演說。 也希望你們喜歡自己製作出來的 最棒及最爛的 TEDTalk。 也希望你們之中有人會受到啟發， 明年可以站在台上，我真的很期待你們的演說。

謝謝你們。

（掌聲）

Paddy Ashdown: The global power shift

Quyen Nguyen: Color-coded surgery

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Quyen Nguyen
Quyen Nguyen uses molecular probes that make tumors -- and just the tumors -- glow, as an extraordinary aid to surgeons.