InfoCompanions » Inspiring

Julian Treasure: Shh! Sound health in 8 steps

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:34:51 +0000

Julian Treasure says our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health — even costing lives. He lays out an 8-step plan to soften this sonic assault (starting with those cheap earbuds) and restore our relationship with sound.

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Rob Dunbar: The Threat of Ocean Acidification

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 17:21:49 +0000

Rob Dunbar hunts for data on our climate from 12,000 years ago, finding clues inside ancient seabeds and corals. His work is vital in setting baselines for fixing our current climate — and, scarily, in tracking the rise of deadly ocean acidification.

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Caroline Phillips: Hurdy-gurdy for Beginners

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 17:15:59 +0000

Caroline Phillips cranks out tunes on a seldom-heard folk instrument: the hurdy-gurdy, a.k.a. the wheel fiddle. A searching, Basque melody follows her fun lesson on its unique anatomy and 1,000-year history.

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Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 14:00:47 +0000

Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation’s success by its productivity — instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn’t have to cost the earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You might be surprised.

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Johan Rockstrom: Let The Environment Guide Our Development

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:55:32 +0000

Human growth has strained the Earth’s resources, but as Johan Rockstrom reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and change behavior. His research has found nine “planetary boundaries” that can guide us in protecting our planet’s many overlapping ecosystems.

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Derek Sivers: Keep Your Goals To Yourself

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:50:07 +0000

After hitting on a brilliant new life plan, our first instinct is to tell someone — but Derek Sivers says it’s better to keep goals secret. He presents research stretching as far back as the 1920s to show why people who talk about their ambitions may be less likely to achieve them.

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Rachel Sussman: The World’s Oldest Living Things

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:32:58 +0000

Rachel Sussman shows photographs of the world’s oldest continuously living organisms — from 2,000-year-old brain coral off Tobago’s coast to an “underground forest” in South Africa that has lived since before the dawn of agriculture.

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Kevin Stone: The bio-future of joint replacement

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:41:36 +0000

Arthritis and injury grind down millions of joints, but few get the best remedy — real biological tissue. Kevin Stone shows a treatment that could sidestep the high costs and donor shortfall of human-to-human transplants with a novel use of animal tissue.

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Julian Assange: Why The World Needs WikiLeaks

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 15:45:12 +0000

The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who’s reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED’s Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished — and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.

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Laurie Santos: How monkeys mirror human irrationality

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:34:23 +0000

Why do we make irrational decisions so predictably? Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in “monkeynomics” shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

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Lewis Pugh’s mind-shifting Mt. Everest swim

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:55:58 +0000

After he swam the North Pole, Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold-water dip. Then, he heard of Mt. Everest’s Lake Imja — a body of water at an altitude of 5,300 meters, entirely created by recent glacial melting — and began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach both swimming and think about climate change.

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Legos for grownups

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:51:52 +0000

Lego blocks: playtime mainstay for industrious kids, obsession for many (ahem!) mature adults. Hillel Cooperman takes us on a trip through the beloved bricks’ colorful, sometimes oddball grownup subculture, featuring CAD, open-source robotics and a little adult behavior.

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The politics of fiction

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:49:37 +0000

Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.

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The Art of Choosing

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 14:47:36 +0000

Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices — and how we feel about the choices we make. At TEDGlobal, she talks about both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones, and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions.

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Java 4-Ever Trailer – Nerds Know Humor!

Himanshu Sharma — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 21:59:55 +0000

Ha! Check out this incredibly funny video called “Java 4-ever”. The age old saga of the battle between Java and .NET… with musical references that remind you of American Beauty and Requiem for a Dream. A must watch. Who said nerds ain’t funny!!

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Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

Himanshu Sharma — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:20:28 +0000

Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers — and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.

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Elizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs and HIV – let’s get rational

Himanshu Sharma — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:49:12 +0000

Armed with bracing logic, wit and her “public-health nerd” glasses, Elizabeth Pisani reveals the myriad of inconsistencies in today’s political systems that prevent our dollars from effectively fighting the spread of HIV. Her research with at-risk populations — from junkies in prison to sex workers on the street in Cambodia — demonstrates the sometimes counter-intuitive measures that could stall the spread of this devastating disease.

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Dean Kamen: The emotion behind invention

Himanshu Sharma — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:39:33 +0000

Soldiers who’ve lost limbs in service face a daily struggle unimaginable to most of us. At TEDMED, Dean Kamen talks about the profound people and stories that motivated his work to give parts of their lives back with his design for a remarkable prosthetic arm.

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Technology Made Personal

Himanshu Sharma — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:34:34 +0000

Check out this cool Google search ad. Love how it makes technology feel “personal” and such an integral part of our life.

Richard St. John: “Success is a continuous journey”

Himanshu Sharma — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 16:41:38 +0000

In his typically candid style, Richard St. John reminds us that success is not a one-way street, but a constant journey. He uses the story of his business’ rise and fall to illustrate a valuable lesson — when we stop trying, we fail.

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