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John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!
John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!
Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there’s much more to texting — linguistically, culturally — than it seems, and it’s all good news.
Linguist John McWhorter thinks about language in relation to race, politics and our shared cultural history.
WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM?
John McWhorter studies how language has evolved — and will evolve — with social, historical and technological developments, in addition to studying and writing about race in America.
In recent work, he’s been urging grammarians to think of email and text messages not as the scourge of the English language but as “fingered speech,” a new form between writing and talking. These digital missives, despite their “shaggy construction,” represent an exciting new form of communication in which “lol” and “hey” are particles, he suggests, and written thoughts can be shared at the speed of talking. Should we worry that knowing how to parse “haha kk” means we’ll lose the ability to read Proust? No, he told the TED Blog: “Generally there’s always been casual speech and formal speech, and people can keep the two in their heads.”
McWhorter teaches at Columbia, where his students, including Yin Yin Lu, Sarah Tully, and Laura Milmed, teach him all about the world of texting. He’s also a contributing editor at The New Republic and TheRoot.com. Among his books on language and on race, a selected list:What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be); Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English; and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.
“The man changed my mind about texting. I love to gripe about it, but John McWhorter made me rethink how I felt.” Ginette Evans on TED.com
Bruce Feiler: Agile programming — for your family
Bruce Feiler: Agile programming — for your family
Bruce Feiler has a radical idea: To deal with the stress of modern family life, go agile. Inspired by agile software programming, Feiler introduces family practices which encourage flexibility, bottom-up idea flow, constant feedback and accountability. One surprising feature: Kids pick their own punishments.
Bruce Feiler is the author of “Council of Dads,” and the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries “Walking the Bible.”
WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM?
Bruce Feiler is the author of nine books, including Walking the Bible, Abraham, and America’s Prophet. He is also the writer/presenter of the PBS miniseries Walking the Bible. His book The Council of Dads tells the uplifting story of how friendship and community can help one survive life’s greatest challenges. Most recently Feiler published The Secrets of Happy Families, in which he calls for a new approach to family dynamics, inspired by cutting-edge techniques gathered from experts in the disciplines of science, business, sports and the military.
Feiler’s early books involve immersing himself in different cultures and bringing other worlds vividly to life. These include Learning to Bow, an account of the year he spent teaching in rural Japan; Looking for Class, about life inside Oxford and Cambridge; and Under the Big Top, which depicts the year he spent performing as a clown in the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus.
Walking the Bible describes his perilous, 10,000-mile journey retracing the Five Books of Moses through the desert. The book was hailed as an “instant classic” by the Washington Postand “thoughtful, informed, and perceptive” by the New York Times.
Before you speak- THINK
Before you speak- THINK
Teach children the true power of words
Teach children the true power of words
Say a kind word to someone today
Say a kind word to someone today
Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online
Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online
By the end of this talk, there will be 864 more hours of video on YouTube and 2.5 million more photos on Facebook and Instagram. So how do we sort through the deluge? At the TEDSalon in London, Markham Nolan shares the investigative techniques he and his team use to verify information in real-time, to let you know if that Statue of Liberty image has been doctored or if that video leaked from Syria is legitimate.
The managing editor of Storyful.com, Markham Nolan has watched journalism evolve from the pursuit of finding facts to the act of verifying those floating in the ether.
WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM
Markham calls himself a “literary mercenary.” His main responsibility is to sift through news and information to see what’s true and what’s not. In the era of the ubiquitous and immediate cell phone photo, Twitter message and YouTube video, how do we verify and validate a piece of information arriving, say, from a region at war or one going through a natural disaster? As the managing editor of Storyful, that’s a question he has to answer daily.
“Their mission is to ‘pull the news from the noise.’ They have built up reliable communities in a range of countries, so that when news breaks, they have contacts they can call on to help verify locally-originated social media content.” Currybet.com
Alexander Görlach – “Letters or Numbers”
Alexander Görlach – “Letters or Numbers”
Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!
Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!
When most well-intentioned aid workers hear of a problem they think they can fix, they go to work. This, Ernesto Sirolli suggests, is naïve. In this funny and impassioned talk, he proposes that the first step is to listen to the people you’re trying to help, and tap into their own entrepreneurial spirit. His advice on what works will help any entrepreneur.
Ernesto Sirolli got his start doing aid work in Africa in the 70′s — and quickly realised how ineffective it was.
WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM:
Ernesto Sirolli is a noted authority in the field of sustainable economic development and is the Founder of the Sirolli Institute, an international non-profit organization that teaches community leaders how to establish and maintain Enterprise Facilitation projects in their community. The Institute is now training communities in the USA, Canada, Australia, England and Scotland.
In 1985, he pioneered in Esperance, a small rural community in Western Australia, a unique economic development approach based on harnessing the passion, determination, intelligence, and resourcefulness of the local people. The striking results of “The Esperance Experience” have prompted more than 250 communities around the world to adopt responsive, person-centered approaches to local economic development similar to the Enterprise Facilitation® model pioneered in Esperance.
