What do whales have to do with pollution? How is pouring DDT down your sink connected to pollution in the ocean and in your body? In this talk from TEDxBeaconStreet Roger Payne, the co-discoverer of the whale song, tells how pollution transfers through mammals, from generation to generation. Having led over 100 expeditions to every ocean and studied every species of large whale in the wild, Payne tells us that pollution is the biggest problem faced by whales. With more than one billion people depending on seafood as their primary source of animal protein, it’s very much our problem too. Do you consider yourself an apex predator? You may after hearing this talk.

There is a dangerous and demoralizing division in our society that threatens the concept of both citizenship and the integrity of our nation. Out of 315 million Americans, less than one percent serve in our active military. What are the consequences of this radical imbalance for relationships and understanding at the highest levels of policy? ALLIES was created as a framework to address this societal schism through transformative, experiential education. ALLIES unites the U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy, West Point, Tufts University, and other liberal arts colleges to influence the trajectories of future leaders on both sides of the Civil-Military divide.

Sherman Teichman is the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University in Boston, MA, a pedagogical project in ethical, complexity-embracing, and immersive education to create young global leaders.

We’re thrilled to announce that TEDxBeaconStreet is now re-blogged as part of the Boston.com Community Voices program!

Welcome Boston.com visitors to the TEDxBeaconStreet community where all year long we put Ideas in Action.

Our annual free TEDx  and TEDxYouth conference takes place in November. Our 2012 conference featured 80+ world class speakers and our talks have been viewed more than 3 MILLION TIMES.  Save the date for our next conference on November 16 & 17, 2013.

All year we host ADVENTURES - think of them as the worlds greatest field trips, hosted by TED speakers and the TEDx community. They offer unparalleled, behind-the-scenes access to the people and places that make Greater Boston so dynamic.

Sign up for an Adventure – Open to all and free to attend

Preview our 2013 Speakers – many of whom will host Adventures in the days and months to come…

Grapes, like people, come in hundreds of different shapes, shades and varieties; but most of us rarely venture to evaluate other types of grapes. People come in many different shades, too. Like our grape selections, we get accustomed to what we know and rarely stray from it. But we’ll never know if we have a preference or a bias, unless we step out of our comfort zone and give something different and new a try. Michael Gropman is a adjunct professor of psychology and a local police commander. In this talk from TEDxYouth@BeaconStreet he explores decreasing our bias and making intolerance intolerable.

How far would you go to find out exactly what happened to a lost loved one? When the USS Grunion submarine sank mysteriously in 1942, 70 fathers, sons, uncles and brothers were gone without a trace…or were they? In a search that has spanned over half a century, the Grunion was found on the bottom of the Bering Sea thanks to the collaboration of numerous families, friends and historians from around the world. John Abele, the retired founding Chairman of Boston Scientific, and his brothers were able to locate the final resting place of their father and the rest of the crew and became that much closer to discovering what happened to the USS Grunion. This talk contains incredible pictures and video of the submarine.

Award-winning web designer Kerah Cottrell has some advice on how to design your life: “Find your passion, develop a support network, be kind to everyone, follow your heart… and you will be full-filled.” In this engaging talk, the designer of the iconic Google search page and Google News explains the art of simplicity and the importance of thinking outside the box while looking at the big picture in the quest for creativity.

Kerah introduces her fiancé, pop star Heath Hunter, who shares her passion for dance and life. Heath explains the importance of music and dance in life and the joy to be found in connecting them as he did with his song “Revolution in Paradise.” He encourages the audience to show their creativity and embrace technology that accelerates the spread of music to new places. Demonstrating their ability to bring people together, Heath and Kerah invite the audience onstage to learn the dance for “Revolution in Paradise.”

Adam Frankel was a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama for four and a half years. But one day Frankel felt that words weren’t enough—he wanted to be active in the topics he cared about, namely, education. Frankel became the founding Executive Director of Digital Promise, a bipartisan, public-private partnership chartered by Congress to advance innovation in education. Frankel and his team launched a national coalition of school districts who pilot, evaluate, and scale up some of the emerging technological innovations that work for them. From technology procurement to personalized learning, to curbing summer learning loss, no issue is too big to tackle. In this forward-thinking TEDxBeaconStreet talk, Frankel outlines how we can begin to accelerate positive change, the challenges we’ll face, and how technology can help redesign classes to meet 21^st century learning.

When Simon Kim says the word “architecture,” he doesn’t envisage traditional structures; he sees flexibility and dynamic movement. Kim pushes architecture to evolve. His firm, IK Studio, defines architecture as anything that mediates or changes an environment. Using modular robotics, Kim and his team have crafted a mobile POLYhouse that roams environments, a wearable Cloud Cloak that conceals the wearer’s identity, and a modular architectural display at the MoMA that can morph on a daily basis. Kim’s futuristic TEDxBeaconStreet talk challenges us to see architecture as more than geometry—it can be whatever we engineer it to be, to produce something extraordinary.
Simon Kim is an architect trained at the famed Architectural Association in London and at MIT, who employs cross-products to various disciplines to produce new outcomes.

Humanistic roboticist and ethical innovator Daniel Theobald sees a changing world and he wants to give you the tools to help him make it better. In the technological Age of Automation only one thing is constant: change. The line between technology and robots is blurring and the nagging question of how we can survive the “robot revolution” keeps popping up. In this talk from TEDxBeaconStreet, Theobald explores what automation means for humanity and how the technology at our fingertips has made us more powerful as individuals than ever before. “We can all be superheroes instead of zombies,” says Theobald, and in a world that is changing faster and faster we must step up to create the type of world we want to live in.

Our media-centric culture drowns us in negative energy, says social worker Matthew Cooney. It has become all too easy to get flooded by despair and get lost looking for causes to support. In answer to that, Cooney encourages us to think about what impact we can have as individuals and to make a commitment to our communities. Drawing on his own experience as Executive Director of the Brookline Teen Center, Cooney reminds us that local action can be a huge step forward and communities can make great advances by focusing on the things within their control. “Don’t get stuck on large ideas. Change starts small,” he says. And even small ideas can push boundaries.

Can you explain the design process in eleven minutes and sixteen seconds?  If you’re designer Kevin Young, Managing Principal at Continuum, you can.  In this TEDxBeaconStreet talk, he reveals the formula for creating innovative designs that are sure to release a flood of endorphins.  Through a series of examples, highlighting both brilliant and disastrous ideas, Kevin opens a window into the mind of the designer and shares his insights into how to create a powerful emotional connection between people and objects.  Sharing his experience as manager of the One Laptop Per Child project at the MIT Media Lab, he explains both the process and the point of the successful endeavor and how it exemplifies the teamwork, creativity and attention to detail required to serve the needs of any given consumer.

Designer Jon Friedman, the Co-Founder of Freight Farms, explains how lateral thinking got its start and how this creative problem solving technique can help us all create a more sustainable society.  He illustrates how this can be done with the global food supply system, which accounts for a third of the carbon footprint humans leave on the earth.  All it takes is something that we already have, shipping containers!  By redesigning commercial agriculture to focus on people, planet and profit, his team at Freight Farms is turning a global food crisis into a global food surplus by re-purposing shipping containers.

Using trumpet, piano, and voice, David opens a window into his musical life and invites the audience to join him for a number of his songs, preceding each one with a short history.  Using music to tell stories, David delights and engages preschoolers and grandparents alike.  David Polansky claims to have never grown up but has been writing music for over 50 years and has performed it for thousands of delighted listeners who attend his concerts and listen to recordings of his songs.

Ashley Stanley founded Lovin’ Spoonfuls in 2012, based on her realization that the “There is Not Enough” model of food drives was inherently flawed.  While eating in a restaurant with her mother in 2010, Ashley suddenly became aware of just how much leftover food was going to waste.   A little research that included both Googling and knocking on the back door of Trader Joe’s to see what was being thrown away revealed that an unbelievable amount of usable food was being discarded.

Her dream of being a professional athlete might have ended with blowing out both of her knees, but it placed her on the path that led to her present work.  In the past 3 years she has brought the city of Boston together to fight hunger and food insecurity with fresh, healthy food and been honored by the Boston Business Journal and Oxfam International for her efforts.

The TEDx Global Music Project is a collection of the best live music from TEDx events around the world.  This initiative is to sound what TEDx is for the world of ideas;  namely, a genre-defying library of passionate performances curated locally from over 140 countries.  The TEDx Global Music Project is an opportunity for innovative musicians to reach a global audience and a chance for the world to redefine what music can be.

The TEDx Global Music Project is independently organized by a group of TEDx licensees around the globe, not created by TED.

Amy Robinson (@amyleerobinson) is the Creative Director of EyeWire, a game to map the brain from MIT.  She founded and runs the TEDx Global Music Project, a collection of the best live music from TEDx events, which can be found at https://soundcloud.com/tedxglobalmusicproject

TEDx veteran Ramy Nassar shares how TEDx events have spread around the world and how a growing global community of organizers is working together to promote ideas worth spreading, with thousands of independently organized TEDx events happening every year.

Ramy Nassar is the organizer of TEDxWaterloo and TEDxYouth@Waterloo and has been involved with TEDx events around the world, including TEDxAthens, TEDxCERN and the first ever TEDxSummit.