Archive for December, 2009

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus. ~From Hans Rosling Bio on TED.com

Hans Rosling is a professor of Global Health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He is also the professor you wish you had had, particularly in the hard subjects like economics, science, and statistics. His talks are captivating, but also offer many lessons in style for speakers.

• Hans Rosling’s enthusiasm for his subject is immediate and contagious. At times it reaches the high pitch of a sportscaster, which is remarkable when you realize that he is bringing to life not just statistics, but the world we live in.
• Hans Rosling is one of the world’s “100 most important global thinkers” of 2009, according to Foreign Policy Magazine.
• He founded a non-profit organization called Gapminder which not only “unveils the beauty of statistics for a fact-based world view,” but also closes the gaps in our perception based on the stereotypes we have accepted, and the inertia of lazy thinking.
• The world is a fascinating place, a living organism with dimensions that far exceed our five senses, and also the extension of those senses with technology such as satellites, the Internet, and the global telecommunications system. However, our mind is less limited than our senses, and Hans Rosling has a gift of being able not only to talk about vast trends shaping our lives, but also to show it to you in a way that is instantly understandable.
• He intermingles humor and rhythm in his presentation in a way that is captivating to the end, and deserves the great applause he gets from one of the world’s most demanding audiences at TED.
• He has a mission to give the world access to the vast quantities of data that sleep in our databases, to make it visible through his software, and searchable through the Internet.
• As you watch trends unfold like a global climate tracker on the big screen, you feel a sense of awe and optimism, in spite of all of the problems we have.
• Most of all, Hans Rosling has a gift for tapping into our world, and transporting us into the World.
  

Scientists need to work outside their own areas of expertise to make new technologies that are pertinent to the 21st century and to collaborate, both with other scientific disciplines and the arts and humanities. ~Rachel Armstrong

Rachel Armstrong’s presentation is interesting because it suggests a creative solution to a seemingly insurmountable problem, how to repair architecture that is literally losing its ground. More science than fiction, it also contains the romance of a smart solution.

• Rachel Armstrong begins her presentation at TED on a strong note, by saying that “All buildings today have something in common. They are made using Victorian technologies.” She immediately sets the stage by saying how the one way transfer of energy from our environment into inert structures is not sustainable, and then proceeds to outline a cutting edge solution in progress.
• She speaks with assurance, stays focused on the process, and uses slides just enough to illustrate her ideas and engage our emotions through the problem.
• Although she doesn’t particularly interact with the audience using pauses or humor, her style works because she keeps up the pace, and demonstrates passion for her subject.
• She explains what must be a highly technical subject using captivating metaphors. Protocells contain no DNA, but behave like living matter. Metabolic materials don’t exist, so we we had to create them, and they are vigorously architectural. Terrestrial chemistry works everywhere.
• Her theme of architecture that repairs itself is made immediately relevant through her work in progress, experimenting to create a crystal limestone reef to shore up and reclaim the sagging city of Venice. She engages our imagination by saying that, although it might take time,  eventually the result may be indistinguishable from the work of nature itself.
• She engages the audience locally by referring to the lovely fossilized shells in the limestone brickwork in Oxford, where the TED conference is being held. She engages the audience globally by suggesting that the use of ubiquitous metabolic materials can work in countries anywhere in the world.
• Her message connects architecture metaphorically to the structure of our societies, comparing the top down insulated industrial Victorian approach to the more organic type of architecture of the future, in which buildings could be in constant communication with their environment.
• She doesn’t just talk about technology. She talks about how technology affects people.
• Impressive enough as a TED speaker, Rachel Armstrong has a fascinating bio, as a medical doctor, multi-media producer, science fiction author, and arts collaborator.
  

This is a remarkable presentation by Bill Gates, for three reasons.

1. It reveals some of the massive impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed by Warren Buffet is having on making our world a better place for coming generations.
2. It shows how much better a presenter can become when he or she is in their Flow and living their legacy.
3. In the Wealth Dynamics Profile, Bill Gates is a CREATOR near the top of the Wealth Spectrum.

Here are some of the amazing things you can learn.

• Bill Gates points out that the market does not drive people to do the right thing. As one of the richest and most successful entrepreneurs in the world, he certainly speaks with authority on that.
• It reveals some of the massive impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed by Warren Buffet is having on making our world a better place for coming generations.
• It shows how much better a presenter can become when he or she is in their Flow and living their legacy.
• He admits that he is an optimist saying that, “Any tough problem can be solved.” Talk about tough problems, his foundation is tackling malaria, early childhood deaths in poor countries, providing great teachers to people of low income, and by any measure his foundation is making profound and remarkable progress.
• He speaks with passion and dedication about how previous efforts to eradicate malaria have been effective in developed countries, but how much remains to be done in developing countries.
• He uses plain speech, anchors it with numbers and graphical malaria maps we can understand, and then reinforces his point by releasing some (uninfected) mosquitoes into the auditorium, saying that “there is no reason that only poor people should have this problem.”
• He uses a small number of uncluttered slides, in great contrast to his speeches at Microsoft, and resulting in a far superior presentation!
• He uses metaphors to masterfully illustrate the problem so that people get it without any need for explanation. Listen to how he states that there is more money spent on baldness drugs than on malaria, suggesting that baldness is more likely to be an affliction of rich men.
• After explaining the dimensions and solutions to the problem of how to fight malaria and reduce childhood deaths in poor countries, he shifts the focus to how to increase the quality of education for low income people in rich countries.
• He connects the quality of good teachers with the level of innovation that keeps an economy strong, and points out that while less than 20% of people have access to good teachers, while the chances of a lower income child going to jail are much greater than that of being able to attend a 4-year college.
• He tells how his foundation is focusing on the issue of how to reward, retain, model, and widely share the benefits of learning from top teachers, realizing from their research that this is what makes all of the difference.
• His foundation supports KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) , an organization which helps kids from lower income climb the mountain to college, and how in fact 96% of their high school graduates do end up going to a 4-year college.
• He gives us a glimpse of how the teachers in this program are fully engaged themselves, and work hard in team teaching to keep all of the kids involved, particularly those in the critical time of Middle School, grades 5~8.
• He returns to his optimistic note, that now with technology many of the benefits of learning from top teachers can be widely shared, through digital video in the classrooms, team teaching, and making the classes of master teachers available on the Internet and on DVDs.
• He ends with a strong You-Focus, saying that Education is the most important thing to get right, and that the people in the TED audience are not only engaged in a similar mission, but are also in a perfect position to help.
• He ends by presenting all of the people present with a free copy of the book by Jay Matthews, the Newsweek journalist who wrote, Work Hard, Be Nice: How Tow Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.
• No wonder Bill Gates got a standing ovation at TED. And that is competing against some of the top speakers of our time.

Evan Williams is the Co-Founder of Twitter, the revolutionary 140-character microblog platform that is revolutionizing the way we communicate and do business. BusinessWeek said “Williams has a knack for figuring out how people want to keep in touch, even before they seem to know it themselves.”

While Williams is not a dynamic speaker, in terms of what he has actually done, he makes many platform performers seem like sideshows. In this video at TED, which comes with a translation in Japanese subtitles, he shares some intriguing glimpses behind the scenes of a quiet revolution in communication.

• Note that Evan Williams formerly worked at Google, where he invented eBlogger, one of the major free blogging platforms available.
• He helped launch Twitter as a side project in 2006 while working at Odeo, simply following a hunch.
  
• Twitter is based on what he describes as simple trivial concept, is that people enjoy being connected in real time despite distance.
• Indeed, a Twitter message which he sends out from the TED conference goes out to his 60,000 plus subscribers in an instant.
• Although it was conceived as a broadcast medium, he says that many of its uses were not anticipated, and a number were invented by users of the platform.
• For example, Twitter has been used in emergencies, elections, and events, and has generated over 2000 Twitter applications thanks to API software, so that users help invent, evolve, and shape the system.
• It has been used in a wide range of applications from helping people track good prices at gas stations, communicating with customers, and raising funds online.
• Many speakers now set up Twitter events to match their real events, so that people involved can all participate, wherever they are in the world.
• Some speakers, such as Guy Kawasaki, actually have started speaking in sound bytes as a courtesy to the many people in their audience who are Twittering during his talk, and spreading his message to tens of thousands of people in real time.
• He ends his talk by saying that he has “learned to follow a hunch, but never assume where it will go.” Modest words masking a powerful and practical intuition.
• Here you can read a TED bio of Evan Williams.