TEDxSF: Blog

Via Scoop.it – TEDxSF Salons

TEDxSF Salons, hosted by the Bay Area’s premier independent organization that delivers the TED experience to San Francisco, features a select group of thought-provoking speakers looking at struggling contemporary institutions. The event, held on November 29, will focus on the need for innovation in higher education to create more affordable, accessible and relevant models for today’s world.   “In order to reinvent education, we must first unpack the underlying assumptions and shortcomings of current models,” said Emily Chiu, education entrepreneur and TEDxSF salon curator. “Despite dramatic advances in technology and cognitive science, higher education hasn’t changed in decades – and institutions are too entrenched in current models to disrupt themselves to meet changing student needs. SKOOL’d will feature the industry’s brightest minds: the thought leaders and entrepreneurs who are challenging the status quo and re-imagining higher education.”
Via www.pr.com

In Silicon Valley, (WDYDWYD?) has become the hottest team-building meme since Outward Bound,” according to the November issue of WIRED Magazine. The WDYDWYD meme was started by one of our 2010 speakers, Tony Deifell. Over 140 TEDsters have answered “Why do you do what you do?” in 2010 & 2011. wdydwyd? is a leadership meme that you can bring to your company or community. Learn more.
Photos by Collaborating Artists: Lauren Lee Anderson & Tony Deifell.

Find more photos like this on wdydwyd?

By, Lauren Lee Anderson

TEDxSF speaker Mel Robbins –the bold, blonde, ambitious woman that stormed our stage on June 4^th, spoke as mother, lawyer, syndicated radio talk-show host, and relationship coach about what it takes to live our best lives and be who we’re supposed to be. What is it exactly that we want, she challenged, and what exactly are we doing, or failing to do, to get there?

For starts, she claims with verve and unapologetic enthusiasm that you’re not okay if you’re fine. It’s just simply not fine to describe your life, this very auspicious state of existence, as fine. And here’s why:

Every single one of us falls into a category of 1: 400,000,000,000. That’s one in four-hundred-trillion. According to Mel, this is the probability of our being born. It’s a category and a qualification. “You’re not fine. You’re fantastic. You have life-changing ideas for a reason.” Somehow, you beat the odds. That makes our livelihoods extremely and undeniably lucky.

And blessed. Because it happens over and over again when each new day, we wake up born again this human being.  You’re not just one-in-a-million, you’re one-in-four-hundred-trillion. Not bad, you. That said, today is for the chosen ones.

So, how important is our attitude toward this statistic and how we embrace our human-ness? Lucky or blessed, for example, are two matters of perspective. The former infers accidental experience while ‘blessed’ implies a certain ownership and gratitude toward the happenings of our lives. If you haven’t seen Louie Schwartzberg’s film on gratitude that screened at ALIVE!, take ten minutes out now.

It’s a very reasonable argument that our attitude can largely shape the outcome of our experiences. It rains on the good and bad alike and we are surely more than the recipients and victims of mere chance. Ken Robinson, the outspoken vanguard of education reform looks at the idea of luck as a powerful way of illustrating the importance of our basic attitudes in affecting whether or not we get what we’re looking for. He believes, “Its not what happens to us that makes the difference in our lives. What makes the difference is our attitude toward what happens.”

Essentially, we possess huge potential to shape and manifest our opportunities. But, we must be active investors. The perfect first step? Wake up thirty minutes early.

Mel’s philosophy follows that the activation energy required to do the things we want to do is the same thing as pushing yourself out of bed and into the cold room on the other side of the sheets just thirty minutes early. “Parent yourself, make yourself do the crap you don’t want to do so you can be everything your supposed to be. Marry your actions with your impulses within five seconds.” Most of us are already severely sleep-deprived, so it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Ready to mostly heed Mel’s call-to-action and inspired by Tom Foremski, I’ve resolved to wake up a comparable eighteen minutes early. I’m going to wake up each morning in bed with TED!  This TED won’t quite satisfy Nicole Daedone’s orgasmic fifteen-minute meditation for me, but waking up with TED does stimulate something else. Curiosity. Wonder. Affirmation in the power of ideas and a steadfast determination to begin the day cultivating and actualizing them.

I’m an early riser to begin with and I don’t adhere to a routine but last night I set my alarm for eighteen minutes shy of when I thought I wanted/needed to be getting up.

A phenomenal thing happened. I woke up. Not that I was that surprised. I’ve only woken up to a total of 9,939 consecutive new days. The extraordinary thing about this morning is that I woke up exactly eighteen minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off. So technically, I came in this morning beating the most extraordinary and incomprehensible odds, thirty-six minutes early and time enough for TWO sessions with my new boyfriend TED.

As Nicki Minaj would say, “No I’m not lucky, I’m blessed, yes.”

TEDxSF: Can you tell us a little about yourself and One-Heart Worldwide?

AS: I have been a nurse practitioner specializing in maternal fetal medicine for 30 yrs. Now I am the president and founder of One-Heart Worldwide. We’re focusing on training mid-wives in developing countries.

In 1997, I met His Holiness, the Dalai Lama in India. At that time he asked me to go to Tibet to help Tibetan women and children. I had no idea how to get into Tibet, but in 1998 I made my first trip. I heard story after story of women who died in childbirth. There wasn’t a day that went by without someone telling me about how their wife or their newborn child had died. After that, I brought in a team of doctors from the University of Utah so we could try to help them.

We spent over 10 years working on maternal and newborn health in Tibet. In 2008, there was a political uprising, which made it difficult for us to continue our work. In 2009, we turned the project to a local team who has continued our work. We took the model to Nepal to remote areas of the Himalayas and we are down in the bottom of the Copper Canyon in Mexico working a very small tribe of the Raramuri Indians.

TEDxSF: What will speak to in your talk?

AS: I am going to show how simple it is to save lives. With simple life saving messages, clean birth kits and delivery rooms, we can turn back the tragic tides of birth related deaths. It’s not high tech, it’s high touch.
TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

AS: Every day I wake up and give gratitude. I bow to my self and as a Buddhist practitioner, I just acknowledge the God within me and the God within other people. I focus on living my life with compassion.

Listen to the full interview below:

TEDxSF: Who are Reckless Sons?

MB: Reckless Sons is a five-piece rock and roll band from New York City. We’ve been together for a year and we’ve just finished our first EP. We’re excited to be playing for TEDxSF.
Basically, I founded the band with a super group of the coolest and best guys. We’ve been writin’ and, producing songs, rehearsing-just diving head long into it. We did some touring in the UK, and we were selected by John Varvatos, to be the face of his STAR USA clothing line. We played a lot of concerts for him at his stores, the former CBGBs.

TEDxSF: Tell us a little about what you’ll be sharing at the June 4 event.

MB: The new record is a seven song EP. We’ve got a definite coming of age story arch to the album and that’s what makes it perfect for TEDxSF ALIVE! Maximum Living As A Human Being. We’re all early twenties and can provide that middle ground…you know that nebulous area where we are adults but we’re still kids. We provide an interesting viewpoint on that point, you know growing up, assuming responsibilities and reaching our full potential. And that’s really what our record is about.

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

MB: For us, we’re trying to live our best life by pursuing what we are passionate about. That goes beyond music but also to our relationships and connections. We found our perfect medium for connecting with others, that’s playing music. If you put that into context with all the distractions and obstacles that life is going to throw at you, and we’re here banging away, doing what we love, I think we are living our best life.

Listen to the full interview below:

Jonathan is a founder of 1000memories, a website that is creating a new way for everyone to save and share memories. He founded 1000memories in 2010 with 2 friends and the website was a finalist at both the Crunchies and Webby awards in 2011.

TEDxSF: How did you get started in this?

JG: Myself, Brett, and Rudy (co-founders) had unfortunately over the last few years each lost a friend and we felt like we wanted to create a way for the infinite to remember.

One of the things that’s really interesting and new is that we’ve got the technology now to make memories last forever. It used to be that we wrote things down and paper lasts a very long time. From there we developed new mechanisms, photos and hardrives. Those things didn’t necessarily last as long as our memories and our ability to share. But in the cloud the ability for everyone to be able to share memories and for those things to last a really, really long time is special. The idea that your grandchildren could know what your great-grandparents were really like and what they’re lives were really like is something brand new and very special… Its a different paradigm because it changes the way history is being recorded. Rather than history being the story of a few select individuals whose story is remembered and written in the history books, the opportunity to record everyone’s stories and know in detail what really happened is something new.

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

JG: It’s a mix of taking the opportunities in every day and being able to grow on the richness of history. There are so many amazing examples, stories that help us understand what has happened before and help us learn from that and live a better life as a result. At 1000 Memories we have the opportunity to pass stories between generations so that we can live better and better lives from learning from mistakes to seeing when things have gone really well and utilizing that in every day.

Read amazing stories and browse the gallery of memory.

Listen to the full interview below:

TEDxSF: Tell us a little about your background.

BT: I’m the rarest kind of physician, a specialist who takes care of older people. I’ve spent much of my career looking at American society and how they struggle with questions related to aging… it’s the neutron bomb of American culture in the first half of the twenty-first century. We are going to see the oldest society that the country’s ever seen, perhaps the world has ever seen. Aging is going to be the dominant issue, politically and economically for decades to come. I’m looking forward to sharing some ideas about how this going to change all of us, young and old alike.

As we develop an aging society and as we change we have to re-create aging and we have to remake elderhood so it fits the lives we live now. And old ideas about old age are not going to serve us well. It’s about the new old age that coming in right now.

TEDxSF: So is 50 the new 30?

BT: Fifty is the fifty! Seventy is the new seventy! My talk is really about finding worth within the context of authentic human aging… The clock has a way of enforcing our interest in aging. Every day every person wakes up one day older and that turns out to be a very important and inescapable reality.

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

The most important thing I do is I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. It tends to be a very effective rule in living my best life and I urge others to adopt it. Its interesting, it takes awhile to get over the idea of doing things that you don’t want to do because other people want you to do them. But those things rarely lead us in the direction of our own dreams, ambitions and passion for life. You have to spend time doing things YOU want to do.

Listen to the full interview below:

Professor Rosalind W. Picard, ScD is founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at the MIT Media Lab, co-director of the Things That Think consortium, and leader of the new and growing Autism & Communication Technology Initiative at MIT. In April 2009 she co-founded Affectiva, Inc., where she serves as chairman and chief scientist.

TEDxSF: Tell us a little about yourself and what brought you into your current work.

RP: I got interested in how the brain works and building computers that worked more like the human brain. And while I was trying to build computers that could perceive information, see as we see and hear as we hear, I ran into these important roles of emotion in the brain and decided oh dear, I didn’t really want to work on emotion, but it looked like it was pretty important for building intelligent functioning systems.

TEDxSF: Can you give us into your talk about “Emotion Technology”?

RP: We have been developing ways for computers to process emotional information both to sense it and make sense of what that information is and to use it in a lot of areas that range from learning about oneself to learning about one’s child, especially non-speaking children. We’ve done a lot of work with kids on the autism spectrum. Also, we can apply it to various medical areas. The basics of the emotion systems are involved in things like seizures. We also have a lot of commercial uses for what we’re doing and you can imagine all the online applications, where somebody is showing you some content on the web and its making you bored or making you laugh and you can turn on your web-cam, read your facial expressions, and communicate that back to the creators of the content to help them have what they need to know to make the content better.

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

RP: It’s always a challenge having multiple jobs and also being a wife and a mother. The biggest guide for me is to always believe in and pursue something much bigger than myself. A quiet truth that might surprise a lot of people, I, like many scientists and engineers, happen to believe in god and a greater being. And with that belief comes a belief that all people are created equal –that we all have huge value. And I think that’s what been driving my work that has been focusing not so much on creating new technology, but technology that really improves peoples lives. Especially lives of people that have been really disenfranchised or who have often been left out of opportunities in life.

Watch a demo of Emotion Technology at work at Web 2.0:

Listen to the full interview:

Louie Schwartzberg is an award-winning cinematographer, director, and producer whose notable career spans more than three decades providing breathtaking imagery for feature films, television shows, documentaries and commercials. As a visual artist, Louie has created some of the most iconic and memorable film moments of our time. He is an innovator in the world of time-lapse, nature, aerial and “slice-of-life” photography.

TEDxSF: Louis, tell us a little about yourself and what you do.

LS: I’m a filmmaker, and I’ve been trying to capture the magic of nature for over thirty years…Along the way, I directed commercials for fifteen years, music videos, Michael Jackson and I’m now working on feature documentaries…

TEDxSF: What will you be showing to us on June 4^th?

LS: On June 4^th I’m going to be talking about beauty. I’ve always been fascinated with what is beauty. Basically, I’ve been shooting time-lapse flowers for over thirty years non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In thirty years of building, I’ve got 12 hours of material. I thought just capturing the beauty of flowers was enough of a reason for doing it. But the truth was, when I heard that the bees were disappearing, what the scientist call Colony Collapse Disorder, I realized you can’t tell the story of the vanishing bees unless you tell the story about flowers because of their symbiotic relationship. And perhaps that was my vision on this earth, to be able to share that story… I’m going to be talking about beauty and beauty as a tool for survival, how nature seduces us into protecting it by falling in love with it.

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

LS: Well, I think you have to follow your passion. And also know your mission. And if can combine the two, then it’s the best of both worlds.  As I described earlier just by being fascinated by flowers, maybe flowers seduced me into filming them but that became the reason for a making a movie about the vanishing bees which many scientists claim is the most serious environmental threat facing mankind. So if you can overlap the social mission with your passion, your creative passion, it would be the best of both worlds.

Visit the Wings of Life website.

Listen to the full interview below.

TEDxSF: You have a new book coming out, what can we look forward to?

On June 7^th, “We First: How brands and consumers use social media to build a better world”, comes out. It’s a challenge to a lot of the ways we think about branding, advertising, and how we use social media.  It explains how we can acutally use it to not only build brand communities to drive profit but also to have a positive impact…[We First] is a very real expression of my sense of purpose and a contribution that I want to make. I’m excited about it as a man, as an ad guy, and as a father.

TEDxSF: Can you give us a glimpse of the talk?

SW: The context for the talk is the realization that we now live in a mutually dependent intimately connected global community. In 2008 we saw that what happened on Wall Street affects Iceland, Greece, the EU, the Middle East; it affected our families, our friends, our jobs, our homes, our sense of hope. So, that connectedness was driven home very loud and clear. At the same time we can talk to people, post to people, tweet people in real time at virtually no cost anywhere in the world. I believe that we are now in so much trouble in terms of the multiple global crisis’s, we face and yet we are so aware of those crisis’s and capable of sharing information about that, that our survival instinct is kicking in. We’re realizing we are in this together. “We First” is a counterpoint to the ‘me first’ mentality, a recognition that we need to do business, that we need to buy what we want to need, we need to treat the planet in new ways that celebrate the interests of everyone…

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

SW: For a long time I tried to live the version of life that was prescribed to me by others… Over time, from multiple careers and from working in multiple places around the world you get to experience various versions of success… The big realization for me was twofold. One, that true fulfillment which is far more permanent and lasting and substantive in terms of your experience of life cannot come from what you seek for yourself but only from the contribution you make to others. Secondarily, as a man, I came to realize that the greatest success I can enjoy is the success of my family. There are lot of temptations in the corporate world to indulge the worst excesses of our personality, to climb all over each other to get to the top, but ultimately you find that that’s not fulfilling.

Listen to the full interview below.

Gigante from Anthony Haney on Vimeo.

TEDxSF: Tell us a little about who are and what brought you to this place in time.

CJ: I am a filmmaker first and foremost. What brought me here was an undeniable compulsion to express what I was seeing around me in some sort of medium. The one that seemed all inclusive and the one that required all the skills that I was interested in or the passions that I had was film. So I started pursuing it in my twenties …

TEDxSF: You’re working on a project that’s going to be part of the talk, tell us a little about it.

CJ: The working title “Songs Unsung, Tardiness and Compulsion”, an autodidactic presentation about arriving late and Andres Torres, the 32 year old rookie San Francisco Giant.…” In essence I’m making a film about Andres, and he struggles with ADHD. He is an extraordinary human being and so my hope is to bring his story and his heroic effort to overcome his ADHD and his background to become this beautiful person that he is.

I’m presenting a clip from the film…it hasn’t been shown to anyone. Andres hasn’t seen a stitch of it… I’m bringing my history of becoming inextricably linked to this human being who, I call a beautiful person whose story requires, there’s an obligation to trumpet his message and what he stands for.

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

CJ: Its gonna sound silly, its something I teach my children. I wake up in the morning and I look at my ten toes. And I give thanks ten times for anything I can think of. So it’s an act of gratitude. In focusing on gratitude and the positive, I feel it elevates my life and makes me focus on the things that are wonderful.

Listen to the full interview below.

We are pleased to welcome Nina Wise soon to the stage. Nina is a performance artist, writer, director and educator, and is known for her provocative and original performance works which have been produced in the United States, Europe, South America and Asia. On June 4th, she will grace our stage with her improvised and integrated performance art, Motion Theater, in an interpretation of What Just Happened with our day.

TEDxSF: Can you tell us a little about who you are and what brought you to the work you’re doing?

NW: I do performance art and theater. The work I’ll be doing at TEDxSF is an improvised piece based on the content of the day. I developed this form of improvising work it and it encompasses many fifteen twenty years and it grew out of my initial training as a dancer. Then I got interested in theater, I did scripted work and then I got interested in improvised theater and autobiographical narrative. And started putting together this form…

So what I do at these conferences…is listen to what everybody is saying and then kind of take all those narrative threads –often talks are very theoretical and intellectual, really interesting, really fascinating that don’t necessarily move the human heart because the human heart is moved when stories are grounded in actual human stories… so I take these sorts of themes and then integrate them with stories from my own life. And it’s usually pretty sunny. But it’s also quite moving…

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life? What do you do exactly?

NW: Well I think the word ‘best’ is kind of terrifying and somewhat misleading. And that, when we think about the kinds of lives that we want to lead I think that question comes down to leading a full life, leading a life that attunes itself to a certain value system, a certain moral and ethical system…and its integrated so that love is as much a priority as work, that financial status isn’t as important as spiritual awakening. ‘Best’ has to do with balance, balancing the needs of the human soul, the human heart, the human mind and the human body…If we think about our ultimate goal in life as having an awakened heart and mind, the part of what happens is that the heart breaks because we become aware of the magnitude of human suffering and begin to devote ourselves to transforming our suffering and the suffering of others…Part of living fully is really deeply investigating what gives us the most profound pleasure.

Check out her website: www.ninawise.com

Listen to the full interview:

James Mollison, English-born photographer currently living in Southern Italy. will be speaking about three of his projects that explore being alive in very different ways through his poignantly unique lens. “Where Children Sleep”, a collection of portraits of children in their bedrooms, is an in-depth exploration into being alive at different places around the world, from the innocent position of children.

TEDxSF: What were you looking for and what were you looking at as the project “Where Children Sleep” spans such a diverse landscape of countries, economic classes, and cultures?

JM: It’s a project where I read the declaration of human rights which says we’re all born equal, and it struck me that although this was a noble intention, I thought how completely false it was in reality. A project really to try and explore the different situations that children find themselves living around the world. I think that children are an interesting way to explore situations because as children they’re born into that situation so you can’t really blame them…it started, I went to Israel and the West Bank…it seemed a good way to look at things that are going on in the world.

TEDxSF: Can you tell us a story of one of the children that struck you most profoundly?

JM: One of them was a little girl called Indira who was a seven year old girl that I photographed in a stone quarry in Katmandu. Nepal. And this girl had worked in the stone quarry since she was three years old. And she worked with her family who lived just next door to it. And I think it was just to see the different experience, obviously completely different from my own, growing up in quite a middle class environment in England and all of the things I had perhaps taken for granted, kind of going to school and the healthcare. And to see the families that are really dealing with and living in poverty.”

TEDxSF: How do you live your best life?

JM: Well I think that being a photographer is an amazing job because I’ve always seen it as like a key into people’s lives and it gets me into these situations that I would never normally go into. Last week I was in Libya so I got to see the situation on the ground. I think my best life is a combination of working on projects and also getting the chance to live life. That’s why I love living in Italy, you’ve got great food, great wine, great weather. And it’s a kind of mixture between going away and doing projects and then also coming back and being able to enjoy the great things about life.

James Mollison website.

Listen to the full interview below.

We are pleased to welcome and announce Nicole Daedone, upcoming speaker for our June 4th event, ALIVE! Maximum Living as a Human Being. She is a sought-after speaker, author, and educator focusing on the intersection between orgasm, intimacy, and life. She is the founder of OneTaste, a cutting-edge company bringing a new definition of orgasm to women.

Listen to our pre-event interview with Nicole as she explores her background with TEDxSF committee member Jeanne Alford.

The practice at the heart of her work is called OM or Orgasmic Meditation. OM uniquely combines the tradition of extended orgasm with Nicole’s own interest in Zen Buddhism, mystical Judaism and semantics. Helping to foster a new conversation about orgasm —one that’s real, relevant, and intelligent—she has inspired thousands of students to make OM a part of their everyday lives.

SAVE THE DATE for the Slow Sex Book Premiere at 111 Minna Gallery in SF.
Join as the party counts down the book launch of Nicole Daedone’s book: Slow Sex; The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm.

Sponsored by OneTaste and 7X7 magazine, you won’t want to miss the burlesque dancers, high-end cocktails and a chance to have your book signed by Nicole! This is the party to kick off the summer in style.

You MUST RSVP to attend the party.
Get your name on the list!

RSVP: www.onetaste.us/premiere.php

Filmmakers: Do you have a vision, an insight, an image to share on life in this human body at various stages?

We are looking for 1-4 minute films to screen for our June 4th, 2011 event at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Your films can explore, animate, depict, illustrate, snapshot or metaphorically present a stimulating visual experience on what it means to be fully alive in any of the following stages of life:

• Orgasm, Conception
• Birth
• Infancy
• Childhood
• Coming of Age
• Rite of Passage
• Central Questions of Adulthood (Meaning, Identity, Mission, Actualization)
• Vibrant Aging
• Elderhood
• Death

Winning Entries

Receive a ticket to the event, the after-party, and VIP dinner with speakers on June 3rd, 2011.

Top picks will screened at the live event on June 4th to an audience of 750 with an additional simulcast viewership of 30,000. Qualified submissions can also be made available on TEDx YouTube channel.

About the event

What does it mean to live fully?

ALIVE! asks questions and showcases powerful ideas on topics ranging from vibrant aging, the teen mind, infancy, pushing the limits of humanity, living with intent and purpose, connecting deeply, and self-actualization. Join your TEDxSF colleagues, meet cutting-edge researchers,inventors,entrepreneurs, and performers. Get turned on TED-style and leave with new knowledge, experience and insight. Our event format leaves more time for networking and connecting, with science, music, art, image, and play.

Submit: facebook.com/TEDxSanFrancisco

Deadline: 5.00p, May 14th, 2011

Terms and Conditions:

• All the work is original to the submitter(s) or is in compliance with copyright laws.
• Your film must not breach any copyright, including music or sound contained in your entry.
• You agree that TEDx and TED can rebroadcast at will, although you retain ownership or any other use.
• You agree that we can show your film with presented by TEDx San Francisco into screen attached to the film.
• Filmmakers of all ages are invited to apply. Only filmmakers over 21 years will be able to attend the after-party on June 4th.

Additional questions? Email lauren@tedxsf.org

Thank you for your creative force and participation in the TEDxSF community.

As our events grow, we add more great people to the organizing committee!

Please welcome:

Lauren Anderson
Kai Chang