TED Talk #5: David Blaine

David Blaine is an incredible magician who attempts amazing and terrifying stunts like being buried alive and going 44 days without food. But today, he talked about how he held his breath for a full 17 minutes.

Blaine first talks about all the ways things that he could do to make an allusion that he was holding his breath for a really long time, but then he said he really just wanted to actually do it on his own. He did a lot of research about pearl divers and the person who held the record for the longest time to hold their breath.

After his research was complete he wanted to try to break the record. His first attempt ended in failure but he was determined to try again. So, he then went to Oprah and asked if his next try could be on her show. She agreed and then helped him train his body to attack his next attempt at breaking the record on live TV.

He did break the record by 32 seconds. But, in that process he experienced almost having a heart attack and loosing blood in his fingers and many strange things like that. Doctors immediately ran many blood tests to check everything and make sure that his body and brain were o.k..

Blaine expresses that he thinks magic is showing people incredible things that they haven't seen before and didn't think were possible and that's why he really loves being a magician. His passion for magic, I think, inspires people to do what they love even if it doesn't seem possible to accomplish at the time. This means a lot to me because I always thought of magic as something that little kids do for fun but now I think about it as an incredible show of believing in yourself and doing what you love.

David Blaine used some humor in his TED Talk to take away from the complete intensity of his incredible, terrifying challenge of holding his breath for 17 minutes.

His story in this video was quite amazing. I think that it matters to the world because it will inspire kids to follow their dreams and do what they love, even if it means scaring their parents by doing crazy stunts like David Blaine. He may be a little crazy, but he is a truly incredible person with amazing stories to tell.

TED Talk #4: Clay Shirky

Clay Skirky's TED Talk was very interesting and gave everyone food for thought. His ideas about motivation and  cognitive surplus are unique and quite interesting. However, I found some of the terms he was talking about hard to follow and understand.

Shirky, unlike the other speakers, doesn't use humor in his TED Talk. He also tends to talk with his hands and makes a lot of gestures to the screen behind him but he doesn't focus on the screen, it's just there for the audience to look at while he talks. 


Shirky talks about something called Cognitive Surplus. This means that people can share their ideas and other people can interact with them through the internet. Like global websites to wall cats:

He says that we can and should use cognitive surplus to create civic values in the world.


Shirky says that a single idea can become a global deployment in less than 3 years, as proved by a certain website called Ushahidi:

Skirky talks about a few things in his TED Talk, one of them is about motivation. And he says: motivation ideas state that a punishment should make someone do something less. However, due to an experiment where there was a fine to parents who picked up their kids late changed this idea. Many would've said that the amount of parents picking up late would've decreased but that number actually increased. What does this mean for ideas about motivation?


This video matters to the world because the world wide web is all over the world and everyone can access it and utilize it in many different ways to accomplish many tasks. It matters to education so kids can learn to access and use the web to help themselves in the world. This video matter to me personally because it's good that I learn skills to use the web so I can stay involved with the world becoming more technologically advanced.

TED Talk #3: Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink started out is speech with humor to really get the audience's attention about his topic. In his speech he talks about motivation and why it works and how it works. He shows the audience "The Candle Problem." This challenges people to think in new and creative ways. He then talks about how people responded to the puzzle when offered a reward if they solved it correctly and the ones who weren't offered a reward. He says that people offered higher rewards did the worst in all the tests than the people offered smaller rewards and the people not offered any reward at all. I personally think that this is really interesting. I would've thought that the people offered the highest reward would've performed the best in the problem they were given because that just seems like the nature of humans to do something for a reward. Daniel talks about how certain companies have days where the employees can do their work when and where they want to do it and that the product of these days was that the outcome of the company increased. Some might think that those days would cause productivity to go down because people were free to do what ever they wanted to but according to Daniel, that is all wrong. His TED Talk is very interesting and may finally change the way people are motivated  and how people do work in their lives.

1. What are your take-aways from this video?

• If people are offered a reward, it may dull creativity in the mind and force them to perform worse in the task at hand.
• Allowing people to do work on their own time may create a more effective environment for a company or school.

2. What are the speaker's effective speaking techniques?

• Daniel uses a lot of humor in his presentaion.
• He also, at some points, got really loud and raised his voice to show his anger and passion about what he was talking about.

3. What is his/her presentation style?

• Daniel Pink uses his hands when he talks to emphasize a point.
• He refers to the power point going on behind him while he talks about it. But he doesn't only focus on what's happening behind him, it's just there as a reference.

4. What matters from this video? How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?

•  This TED Talk matters because it addresses the economy and it addresses the very minds of humans and how they work. He claims that too many people are ignoring the facts of motivation and that is hurting the economy and the way people work in the world.
• This video matters to school because schools could start having free days like some companies now do and that could change the way of education.
• This video definitely matters to me personally because he is saying facts that I would've thought to be the opposite of what is. It opened my mind to new ways of thinking about what motivates me, even though that information was probably inside of me the entire time

TED Talk #2: Kwabena Boahen

1. What are your take-aways from this video?

• The Human brain and the fastest computer in the world, Blue Jean, can process at the same speed at 10 to the 16th power bits per second. However, Blue Jean uses the same amount of electricity as 1,200 houses while the human brain uses about as much power as a laptop.
• As the technology capacity of computers and memory chips increases in holding ability but decreases in size, the computer will actually get slower and crash more often.

2. What are the speaker's effective speaking techniques?

• Boahen uses humor in his TED Talk to add some fun to his presentation.
• He doesn't just talk about his topic, he also talks about his power point going on behind him which I think makes it easier to follow what he's talking about because of the complexity of it.

3. What is his/her presentation style?

• Boahen walks around the stage while presenting instead of just standing in one place the whole time he talks.
• He uses a laser pointer to focus the audience's attention on certain things in the slide show behind him.

4. What matters from this video? How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?

•  This video matters because it is showing everyone how much more advanced the human brain really is compared to the super computers of the world, even though many people believe that some computer can actually do more than the human brain can.
•  This video matters to me personally because my generation is growing up in a world where super computers aren't science fiction but they are happening now.
• This video matters to education because it may change the way students learn in a class room. More and more schools now have laptops in the classrooms and that number will most likely continue to grow.
• This video also matter to education because this information may open up new jobs, colleges, and research to create new technology that is both spacious, functional, and fast.
• This video matters to the world because  Boahen and his colleagues are trying to build a computer that is modeled after the part of your brain called the retina, which is in the eye, and this could change the world if they succeed.

TED Talk #1: Sir Ken Robinson

1. What are your take-aways from this video?

• You shouldn't be afraid to be wrong about something. Most children aren't afraid to be wrong and we should learn that from children.
• Why shouldn't dance be taught at schools like math is? You can easily make a career in dance as you can in math or science.
• Humans are separated from animals because of our creativity in the world.

2. What are the speaker's effective speaking techniques?

• Sir Ken Robinson's speaking style is funny. He uses humor throughout his TED talk to keep his audience involved and interested in what he's talking about.
•  He uses many references to things that everyone knows about and can relate to. He challenges the audience to imagine William Shakespeare as a little kid to tell his information about children. 
• He uses his personal stories to make a point.

3. What is his/her presentation style?

• Robinson doesn't move around a lot on the stage. He stays where he is but he does use his hands sometimes to emphasize a point.
• He changes topics a lot but each topic is closely related to the other and stays on the main idea of what he is trying to talk about.
• He wasn't holding a note card and he didn't stand at a podium. His performance was very casual.

4. What matters from this video? How does it connect to you personally? To education? To the world?

•  This video matters because Robinson talks about how the world is changing.
• This video matters to education because he says how education in schools shouldn't just focus on math but also the arts like painting and dance.
• This TED talk matters to me personally because I really enjoy the arts so these ideas that he is talking about really excite me because I feel that my future may be more open to careers in the arts.
• This video matters to the world because it demonstrated how the world could change in the path of creative thinkers.