March 28, 2012 - 1:53pm
What are the TEDxUofM speeches about?
BY JENNIFER XU
- Illustration by Nolan Loh
The Power Center will open its doors at 10 a.m. tomorrow and showcase a total of 19 speakers over seven hours. The speakers cover a diverse array of backgrounds, ranging from a sustainable shoe company to an astrophysicist to a slam poet. In their own words, here's what their speeches will focus on.
“Detroit Treads is a U of M start up social venture that emerged out of the Integrated Product Development course offered by the Tauber Institute for Global Operations. The team will be discussing how U of M students are in a unique position to use their time on campus to push themselves out of their comfort zones, and ultimately create a product, service or business that improves the world around them.”
–Engineering Master's student Kirk Goodman, co-founder of Detroit Treads
“I will be speaking about energy in the context of food and housing in a very personal way. My talk will focus on our farm, where we grow almost 50 percent of our food — vegetables and rare breeds of livestock — and on our off-grid strawbale home we built ourselves.”
–Art & Design Prof. Joe Trumpey
“I am performing a piece of slam poetry, and I cannot wait to see all of the creative and innovative ideas that my fellow speakers have to offer.”
–LSA senior Ryan Krasnoo
“My talk is going to be about the increasing value of having a structured yoga practice — or, more specifically, a meditation practice — in the context of our modern lives. This opportunity to participate in a TED event is both humbling and a blessing, and I wholeheartedly wish to thank the organizers for their ceaseless work and encouragement.”
—LSA senior Trevor Weltman
“We'll be talking about how education, healthcare and sustainable technologies can improve the well-being of a rural community in the Brazilian Pantanal — the world's largest wetland.”
—Engineering senior Julie Bateman and University alum Ethan Shirley
“TED was totally new to me until I was invited to speak at this year's conference. I'll be talking about challenging the paradigms, the rules, the ‘received wisdom’ that we're expected to live by. I'm looking forward to the diversity and the high quality of the presentations.”
—Jim Toy, LGBT activist
“I'm going to try to connect the dots between switching my major six times while at the University of Michigan, running a record label and design studio in New York, teaching graduate school and abandoning academia, driving 75,000 miles across the country, my obsession with ghost towns, a brief stint in law school and moving to New Orleans to start a company called Civic Center that focuses on creating dignified public spaces and conversations. It should be a busy 15 minutes and, at the very least, there will be some pretty photographs to look at.”
—University alum James Reeves
“I will describe some of the most exciting recent discoveries about how we understand the underlying mathematical framework of the laws of nature. Almost without exception, the predictions made by quantum field theory are extremely hard to obtain using modern techniques — often requiring many human and CPU years of effort. And yet, almost every prediction is ultimately found to be extremely simple and elegant — so elegant, in fact, that researchers are often led to ask if the final answer could have simply been guessed.“
—University alum Jacob Bourjaily, a junior fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows
“I'm going to talk about market failures and moral failures of the current health system, then demonstrate the CHAT game that engages ordinary people in deciding how to spend limited resources for health.”
—Internal Medicine and Public Health Prof. Susan Dorr Goold, M.D., M.H.S.A., M.A.
“My presentation for TEDx will focus on the role of religion in contemporary American political life. The point will be to consider how we might relate the moral and social absolutes often associated with religion to the genius of compromise often thought essential to American political life in our plural society.”
–English Prof. Ralph Williams
“I will be inviting attendees to join us in the adventure of re-shaping the future of our food. I will talk a bit about my path with Selma Cafe, Tilian Farm Development Center and Nifty Hoops and will share some ideas of where I believe this journey is going and how anyone can jump in.”
–University alum Jeff McCabe, founder of Selma Cafe
“My talk serves a pretty specific purpose, which is to arouse in TEDx attendants the fiery hot conviction that they must act – effectively, relentlessly – to catalyze and support the success of K-12 schools and students. I can't wait for the other speakers to arouse all sorts of fiery hot convictions in me.”
–LSA senior Libby Ashton
"I love living in the 21st century. There's such a rich world at the intersection of technology and genuine human connection. I'll be exploring that in my performance, through audience participation and looped recordings that I'll make in real time. It's an honor to be part of TEDxUofM — I'm excited to nerd out on all the other talks and presentations."
–Singer Vienna Teng, a student in the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise
“I will give a talk about my work conducting independent ‘counter expertise’ mapping analysis for coal-impacted communities in West Virginia, and the need for engineers to become organizers.”
–Rackham student Elias Schewel
“I will be speaking about my experience as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Burkina Faso, West Africa and the role I played in helping to change the U.S. Peace Corps policy towards people living with HIV.”
–University alum Rebecca Coulborn
"I'll be talking about shape and entropy, and how these fundamental concepts influence the way we design new materials on nanometer scales - sizes larger than the width of the DNA double helix, but smaller than a red blood cell. "
–Engineering Prof. Sharon Glotzer
