In Elizabeth Cox’s 3-minute TED-Ed talk, she explores the age-old question: What is fire? Is it a solid, a liquid, or a gas? Through a captivating exploration of both scientific and sensory evidence, Cox provides an answer to the question that has puzzled mankind for generations.
TED-Ed Talk “Is Fire a Solid, a Liquid, or a Gas?” Speech Summary
We analyzed Cox’s TED-Ed talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. Start with http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
Fire is not a solid, liquid, gas, or plasma, but is the sensory experience of a chemical reaction called combustion.
Combustion relies on fuel, heat, and oxygen to create carbon dioxide, water vapor, and heat, which then rise and create flames of color.
The color of the flames is determined by the temperature and the type of molecules present.
Eventually, fire runs out of fuel or oxygen, disappearing into smoke.
TED-Ed Talk “Is Fire a Solid, a Liquid, or a Gas?” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TED-Ed talk transcript for “Is Fire a Solid, a Liquid, or a Gas?”:
Sitting around a campfire, you can feel its heat, smell the woody smoke, and hear it crackle. If you get too close, it burns your eyes and stings your nostrils. You could stare at the bright flames forever as they twist and flicker in endless incarnations. But what exactly are you looking at?
The flames are obviously not solid, nor are they liquid. Mingling with the air, they’re more like a gas, but more visible — and more fleeting. And on a scientific level, fire differs from gas because gases can exist in the same state indefinitely while fires always burn out eventually.
One misconception is that fire is a plasma, the fourth state of matter in which atoms are stripped of their electrons. Like fire and unlike the other kinds of matter, plasmas don’t exist in a stable state on earth. They only form when gas is exposed to an electric field or superheated to temperatures of thousands or tens of thousands of degrees. By contrast, fuels like wood and paper burn at a few hundred degrees — far below the threshold of what’s usually considered a plasma.
So if fire isn’t a solid, liquid, gas, or a plasma, what does that leave? It turns out fire isn’t actually matter at all. Instead, it’s our sensory experience of a chemical reaction called combustion. In a way, fire is like the leaves changing color in fall, the smell of fruit as it ripens, or a firefly’s blinking light. All of these are sensory clues that a chemical reaction is taking place. What differs about fire is that it engages a lot of our senses at the same time, creating the kind of vivid experience we expect to come from a physical thing.
Combustion creates that sensory experience using fuel, heat, and oxygen. In a campfire, when the logs are heated to their ignition temperature, the walls of their cells decompose, releasing sugars and other molecules into the air. These molecules then react with airborne oxygen to create carbon dioxide and water. At the same time, any trapped water in the logs vaporizes, expands, ruptures the wood around it, and escapes with a satisfying crackle. As the fire heats up, the carbon dioxide and water vapor created by combustion expand. Now that they’re less dense, they rise in a thinning column. Gravity causes this expansion and rising, which gives flames their characteristic taper. Without gravity, molecules don’t separate by density and the flames have a totally different shape.We can see all of this because combustion also generates light. Molecules emit light when heated, and the color of the light depends on the temperature of the molecules.
The hottest flames are white or blue. The type of molecules in a fire can also influence flame color. For instance, any unreacted carbon atoms from the logs form little clumps of soot that rise into the flames and emit the yellow-orange light we associate with a campfire. Substances like copper, calcium chloride, and potassium chloride can add their own characteristic hues to the mix. Besides colorful flames, fire also continues to generate heat as it burns. This heat sustains the flames by keeping the fuel at or above ignition temperature. Eventually, though, even the hottest fires run out of fuel or oxygen. Then, those twisting flames give a final hiss and disappear with a wisp of smoke as if they were never there at all.
TED-Ed Talk “Is Fire a Solid, a Liquid, or a Gas?” Speech Analysis
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Elizabeth Cox’s Word Choice
Cox’s word choice analytics were excellent. However, the impressive analytics could be in part due to the fact that Cox wasn’t delivering this talk live. Her TED-Ed talk had zero filler words, no instances of non-inclusive language, and less than 1% of weak words. To give you a better idea of the norm, it’s pretty common for speakers to score about 4% in these areas.
Elizabeth Cox’s word choice also stood out as particularly impressive, as she used no fillers or instances of non-inclusiveness.
Elizabeth Cox’s Delivery
The delivery of Cox’s TED-Ed talk was successful. However, it should be noted that the delivery should be credited to narrator narrated by Addison Anderson. Plus, since this talk was a TED-Ed talk, it was animated, so we don’t get to see Anderson delivering this live.
Still, we can at least take a look at his speaking pace which was around 142 words per minute. This is a very relaxed, conversational pace which is perfect for educational talks. He also used natural pauses to allow the viewer to digest his talk easier.
Elizabeth Cox’s delivery — which is really narrator Addison Anderson’s delivery — was still insightful despite it being an animated video.
The Bottom Line
Yoodli wasn’t just designed to analyze TED-Ed speakers. In fact, anyone can use this AI speech coach to improve their speech and confidence. Try it out for yourself today to discover your own speaking analytics — totally for free.
In Melissa Walker’s TED talk, “Art Can Heal PTSD’s Invisible Wounds,” she explores how art therapy can open the door for those in the military to express their deeply held emotions and experiences in a non-threatening way, and how it can provide a useful path for healing from trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Walker also draws upon her own experiences and shares how this form of therapy has had a profound effect on her patients, helping them to find peace and closure.
TED Talk “Art Can Heal PTSD’s Invisible Wounds” Speech Summary
We analyzed Walker’s TED talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. Start with http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
Combat can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI), known collectively as invisible wounds of war.
The speaker has personal experience with PTSD, as their grandfather was a Marine in the Korean War.
Advances in technology have allowed a better understanding of PTSD and TBI, including the shutdown of the Broca’s, or the speech-language area of the brain.
Art therapy can be a beneficial form of psychotherapeutic intervention for those struggling with PTSD and TBI, as it can bypass the speech issue and access the sensory areas of the brain that encode trauma.
Mask-making has been particularly effective, as it allows service members to come to grips with their trauma, and can lead to healing.
The speaker has observed that service members have been able to express themselves in meaningful ways through art therapy, allowing them to heal from their invisible wounds.
TED Talk “Art Can Heal PTSD’s Invisible Wounds” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TED talk transcript for “Art Can Heal PTSD’s Invisible Wounds”:
You are a high-ranking military service member deployed to Afghanistan. You are responsible for the lives of hundreds of men and women, and your base is under attack. Incoming mortar rounds are exploding all around you. Struggling to see through the dust and the smoke, you do your best to assist the wounded and then crawl to a nearby bunker. Conscious but dazed by the blasts, you lay on your side and attempt to process what has just happened.
As you regain your vision, you see a bloody face staring back at you. The image is terrifying, but you quickly come to understand it’s not real. This vision continues to visit you multiple times a day and in your sleep. You choose not to tell anyone for fear of losing your job or being seen as weak.
You give the vision a name, Bloody Face in Bunker, and call it BFIB for short. You keep BFIB locked away in your mind, secretly haunting you, for the next seven years. Now close your eyes. Can you see BFIB? If you can, you’re beginning to see the face of the invisible wounds of war, commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury.
While I can’t say I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I’ve never been a stranger to it. When I was a little girl, I would visit my grandparents every summer. It was my grandfather who introduced me to the effects of combat on the psyche. While my grandfather was serving as a Marine in the Korean War, a bullet pierced his neck and rendered him unable to cry out. He watched as a corpsman passed him over, declaring him a goner, and then leaving him to die.
Years later, after his physical wounds had healed and he’d returned home, he rarely spoke of his experiences in waking life. But at night I would hear him shouting obscenities from his room down the hall. And during the day I would announce myself as I entered the room, careful not to startle or agitate him. He lived out the remainder of his days isolated and tight-lipped, never finding a way to express himself, and I didn’t yet have the tools to guide him. I wouldn’t have a name for my grandfather’s condition until I was in my 20s.
Seeking a graduate degree in art therapy, I naturally gravitated towards the study of trauma. And while sitting in class learning about post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD for short, my mission to help service members who suffered like my grandfather began to take form.
We’ve had various names for post-traumatic stress throughout the history of war: homesickness, soldier’s heart, shell shock, thousand-yard stare, for instance. And while I was pursuing my degree, a new war was raging, and thanks to modern body armor and military vehicles, service members were surviving blast injuries they wouldn’t have before. But the invisible wounds were reaching new levels, and this pushed military doctors and researchers to try and truly understand the effects that traumatic brain injury, or TBI, and PTSD have on the brain.
Due to advances in technology and neuroimaging, we now know there’s an actual shutdown in the Broca’s, or the speech-language area of the brain, after an individual experiences trauma. This physiological change, or speechless terror as it’s often called, coupled with mental health stigma, the fear of being judged or misunderstood, possibly even removed from their current duties, has led to the invisible struggles of our servicemen and women. Generation after generation of veterans have chosen not to talk about their experiences, and suffer in solitude.
I had my work cut out for me when I got my first job as an art therapist at the nation’s largest military medical center, Walter Reed. After working for a few years on a locked-in patient psychiatric unit, I eventually transferred to the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, NICoE, which leads TBI care for active duty service members. Now, I believed in art therapy, but I was going to have to convince service members, big, tough, strong, manly military men, and some women too, to give art-making as a psychotherapeutic intervention a try.
The results have been nothing short of spectacular. Vivid, symbolic artwork is being created by our servicemen and women, and every work of art tells a story. We’ve observed that the process of art therapy bypasses the speech-language issue with the brain. Art-making accesses the same sensory areas of the brain that encode trauma. Service members can use the art-making to work through their experiences in a nonthreatening way. They can then apply words to their physical creations, reintegrating the left and the right hemispheres of the brain.
Now, we’ve seen this can work with all forms of art — drawing, painting, collage — but what seems to have the most impact is mask-making. Finally, these invisible wounds don’t just have a name, they have a face.And when service members create these masks, it allows them to come to grips, literally, with their trauma. And it’s amazing how often that enables them to break through the trauma and start to heal. Remember BFIB? That was a real experience for one of my patients, and when he created his mask, he was able to let go of that haunting image.
Initially, it was a daunting process for the service member, but eventually he began to think of BFIB as the mask, not his internal wound, and he would go to leave each session, he would hand me the mask, and say, “Melissa, take care of him.” Eventually, we placed BFIB in a box to further contain him, and when the service member went to leave the NICoE, he chose to leave BFIB behind. A year later, he had only seen BFIB twice, and both times BFIB was smiling and the service member didn’t feel anxious. Now, whenever that service member is haunted by some traumatic memory, he continues to paint. Every time he paints these disturbing images, he sees them less or not at all.
Philosophers have told us for thousands of years that the power to create is very closely linked to the power to destroy. Now science is showing us that the part of the brain that registers a traumatic wound can be the part of the brain where healing happens too. And art therapy is showing us how to make that connection.
We asked one of our service members to describe how mask-making impacted his treatment, and this is what he had to say. (Video)
Service Member: You sort of just zone out into the mask. You zone out into the drawing, and for me, it just released the block, so I was able to do it. And then when I looked at it after two days, I was like, “Holy crap, here’s the picture, here’s the key, here’s the puzzle,” and then from there it just soared. I mean, from there my treatment just when out of sight, because they were like, Kurt, explain this, explain this. And for the first time in 23 years, I could actually talk about stuff openly to, like, anybody. I could talk to you about it right now if I wanted to, because it unlocked it. It’s just amazing. And it allowed me to put 23 years of PTSD and TBI stuff together in one place that has never happened before. Sorry.
Melissa Walker: Over the past five years, we’ve had over 1,000 masks made. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? Thank you. (Applause) I wish I could have shared this process with my grandfather, but I know that he would be thrilled that we are finding ways to help today’s and tomorrow’s service members heal, and finding the resources within them that they can call upon to heal themselves. Thank you. (Applause)
TED Talk “Art Can Heal PTSD’s Invisible Wounds” Speech Analysis
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Melissa Walker’s Word Choice
Walker’s word choice analytics were pretty solid. She used less than 1% of repetition, only a few filler words, and less than 1% of weak words. For reference, it’s normal for speakers to have 4% in these categories.
However, Yoodli did flag an instance of non-inclusive language. In this case, it recommended removing the word “crap” from the speech to improve it.
Melissa Walker’s word choice was pretty solid, especially with reference to repetition and filler word usage.
Melissa Walker’s Delivery
Walker’s TED talk was delivered successfully as an engaging talk. She used a few natural pauses to help the audience understand her talk a bit better. She also maintained a great speaking pace of around 141 words per minute.This is a conversational speed, which is great for speeches like this one.
Although Yoodli flagged both eye contact and centering as potential areas to improve on, we can take this with a grain of salt since it’s more of a reflection of the video recording as opposed to Walker’s speech.
Melissa Walker’s delivery was great, excluding eye contact and centering.
The Bottom Line
You don’t have to give a TED talk to benefit from seeing your own analytics. UsingYoodli, you can pinpoint exactly what you need to work on, whether you’re giving a speech, practicing for an interview, or prepping for an upcoming presentation.
In this TED talk, Deb Willis and Hank Willis Thomas explore the power of love and art in uniting them as a family. Through stories of their own personal experiences, they reveal how the act of love can bring about positive change in the world.
They also discuss how art can be used as a tool to bring about social transformation and create a better future. The two touch on the importance of resilience and perseverance, and how generations of support are the key to achieving success.
TED Talk “A Mother and Son United by Love and Art” Speech Summary
We analyzed Willis and Willis Thomas’ TED talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. Start with http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas are mother and son. They have developed a symbiotic relationship over the years through their life and work.
Love is an action, not a feeling; it is a way of being, listening, and seeing.
Deborah studied photography in art school. During this time, she encountered a male professor who attempted to shame her because she took up a good man’s space.
After graduating, she produced a piece called “A Woman Taking a Place from a Good Man.”
Deb has made and published numerous books on Black photography and has inspired Hank to make his own images.
Ernest Withers’ 1968 photograph of the Memphis Sanitation Workers March inspired Hank to remix its text.
The most powerful two words in the English language are “I am” and we each have the capacity to love.
TED Talk “A Mother and Son United by Love and Art” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TED talk transcript for “A Mother and Son United by Love and Art”:
Hank Willis Thomas: I’m Deb’s son. (Laughter)
Deborah Willis: And I’m Hank’s mom.
HWT: We’ve said that so many times, we’ve made a piece about it. It’s called “Sometimes I See Myself In You,” and it speaks to the symbiotic relationship that we’ve developed over the years through our life and work. And really, it’s because everywhere we go, together or apart, we carry these monikers. I’ve been following in my mother’s footsteps since before I was even born and haven’t figured out how to stop. And as I get older, it does get harder. No seriously, it gets harder. (Laughter) My mother’s taught me many things, though, most of all that love overrules. She’s taught me that love is an action, not a feeling. Love is a way of being, it’s a way of doing, it’s a way of listening and it’s a way of seeing.
DW: And also, the idea about love, photographers, they’re looking for love when they make photographs. They’re looking and looking and finding love. Growing up in North Philadelphia, I was surrounded by people in my family and friends who made photographs and used the family camera as a way of telling a story about life, about life of joy, about what it meant to become a family in North Philadelphia. So I spent most of my life searching for pictures that reflect on ideas about Black love, Black joy and about family life. So it’s really important to think about the action of love overrules as a verb.
HWT: Sometimes I wonder if the love of looking is genetic, because, like my mother, I’ve loved photographs since before I can even remember. I think sometimes that — after my mother and her mother — that photography and photographs were my first love. No offense to my father, but that’s what you get for calling me a “ham” wherever you go. I remember whenever I’d go to my grandmother’s house, she would hide all the photo albums because she was afraid of me asking, “Well, who is that in that picture?” and “Who are they to you and who are they to me, and how old were you when that picture was taken? How old was I when that picture was taken? And why were they in black and white? Was the world in black and white before I was born?”
DW: Well, that’s interesting, just to think about the world in black and white. I grew up in a beauty shop in North Philadelphia, my mom’s beauty shop, looking at “Ebony Magazine,” found images that told stories that were often not in the daily news, but in the family album. I wanted the family album to be energetic for me, a way of telling stories, and one day I happened upon a book in the Philadelphia Public Library called “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes. I think what attracted me as a seven-year-old, the title, flypaper and sweet, but to think about that as a seven-year-old, I looked at the beautiful images that Roy DeCarava made and then looked at ways that I could tell a story about life. And looking for me is the act that basically changed my life.
HWT: My friend Chris Johnson told me that every photographer, every artist, is essentially trying to answer one question, and I think your question might have been, “Why doesn’t the rest of the world see how beautiful we are, and what can I do to help them see our community the way I do?”
DW: While studying in art school — it’s probably true — I had a male professor who told me that I was taking up a good man’s space. He tried to stifle my dream of becoming a photographer. He attempted to shame me in a class full of male photographers. He told me I was out of place and out of order as a woman, and he went on to say that all you could and would do was to have a baby when a good man could have had your seat in this class. I was shocked into silence into that experience. But I had my camera, and I was determined to prove to him that I was worthy for a seat in that class. But in retrospect, I asked myself: “Why did I need to prove it to him?” You know, I had my camera, and I knew I needed to prove to myself that I would make a difference in photography. I love photography, and no one is going to stop me from making images.
HWT: But that’s when I came in.
DW: Yeah, that year I graduated, I got pregnant. Yep, he was right. And I had you, and I shook off that sexist language that he used against me and picked up my camera and made photographs daily, and made photographs of my pregnant belly as I prepared for graduate school. But I thought about also that Black photographers were missing from the history books of photography, and I was looking for ways to tell a story. And I ran across Gordon Parks’ book “A Choice of Weapons,” which was his autobiography. I began photographing and making images, and I tucked away that contact sheet that I made of my pregnant belly, and then you inspired me to create a new piece, a piece that said, “A woman taking a place from a good man,” “You took the space from a good man,” and then I used that language and reversed it and said, “I made a space for a good man, you.” (Applause)
HWT: Thanks, ma. Like mother, like son. I grew up in a house full of photographs. They were everywhere, and my mother would turn the kitchen into a darkroom. And there weren’t just pictures that she took and pictures of family members. But there were pictures on the wall of and by people that we didn’t know, men and women that we didn’t know. Thanks, ma. (Laughter) I have my own timing. (Laughter) Did you see her poke me? (Laughter) Puppet strings.
I grew up in a house full of photographs. (Applause) But they weren’t just pictures of men and women that we knew, but pictures of people that I didn’t know, Pretty much, it was pretty clear from what I learned in school, that the rest of the world didn’t either. And it took me a long time to figure out what she was up to, but after a while, I figured it out. When I was nine years old, she published this book, “Black Photographers, 1840-1940: A Bio-Bibliography.” And it’s astounding to me to consider that in 1840, African Americans were making photographs. What does it mean for us to think that at a time that was two, three decades before the end of slavery, that people were learning how to read, they had to learn how to do math, they had to be on the cutting edge of science and technology, to do math, physics and chemistry just to make a single photograph. And what compelled them to do that if not love?
Well, that book led her to her next book, “Black Photographers, 1940-1988,” and that book led to another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another.(Applause)And throughout my life, she’s edited and published dozens of books and curated numerous exhibitions on every continent, not all about black photographers but all inspired by the curiosity of a little black girl from North Philadelphia.
DW: What I found is that Black photographers had stories to tell, and we needed to listen. And then I found and I discovered Black photographers like Augustus Washington, who made these beautiful daguerreotypes of the McGill family in the early 1840s and ’50s. Their stories tended to be different, Black photographers, and they had a different narrative about Black life during slavery, but it was also about family life, beauty and telling stories about community. I didn’t know how to link the stories, but I knew that teachers needed to know this story.
HWT: So I think I was my mother’s first student. Unwillingly and unwittingly — puppet strings — I decided to pick up a camera, and thought that I should make my own pictures about the then and now and the now and then. I thought about how I could use photography to talk about how what’s going on outside of the frame of the camera can affect what we see inside. The truth is always in the hands of the actual image maker and it’s up to us to really consider what’s being cut out. I thought I could use her research as a jumping-off point of things that I was seeing in society and I wanted to start to think about how I could use historical images to talk about the past being present and think about ways that we can speak to the perennial struggle for human rights and equal rights through my appropriation of photographs in the form of sculpture, video, installation and paintings.
But through it all, one piece has affected me the most. It continues to nourish me. It’s based off of this photograph by Ernest Withers, who took this picture in 1968 at the Memphis Sanitation Workers March of men and women standing collectively to affirm their humanity. They were holding signs that said “I am a man,” and I found that astounding, because the phrase I grew up with wasn’t “I am a man,” it was “I am the man,” and I was amazed at how it went from this collective statement during segregation to this seemingly selfish statement after integration. And I wanted to ponder that, so I decided to remix that text in as many ways as I could think of, and I like to think of the top line as a timeline of American history, and the last line as a poem, and it says, “I am the man. Who’s the man. You the man. What a man. I am man. I am many. I am, am I. I am, I am. I am, Amen.”
DW: Wow, so fascinating. (Applause) But what we learn from this experience is the most powerful two words in the English language is, “I am.” And we each have the capacity to love. Thank you. (Applause)
TED Talk “A Mother and Son United by Love and Art” Speech Analysis
If you liked what you read about Willis and Willis Thomas’ TED talk, “A Mother and Son United by Love and Art,” you have the option to create a free Yoodli account.
On Yoodli, you can upload or record a speech with any length and topic. After that, you’ll get quick feedback on your work along with advice for improvements.
Deb Willis and Hank Willis Thomas’ Word Choice
Both Willis and Willis Thomas had a good grasp on word choice. The pair used around 2% of filler words, 1% of weak words, and zero instances of non-inclusive language. These stats are pretty solid considering it’s typical for speakers to have around 4% in these areas.
However, Yoodli did flag repetition as a potential area of improvement. About 9% of the duo’s talk included repeated words. As an AI speech coach, Yoodli recommended that Willis and Willis Thomas implement some natural pauses. This can help to lower that rate to 3%.
Deb Willis and Hank Willis Thomas’ word choice analytics were great overall.
Deb Willis and Hank Willis Thomas’ Delivery
The delivery of Willis and Willis Thomas’ TED talk was powerful. Their facial expressions and body language were engaging, which is perfect for a talk like this one. They did use a couple of natural pauses, which is a plus.
However, there were a few areas Yoodli targeted for improvement. Two of those areas — eye contact and centering — can be ignored for now. That’s because they’re more of a reflection of the recording. Since the angle isn’t on them for the entire speech, it’s only natural that their metrics would suggest they didn’t make eye contact the whole time.
Another area that could potentially be improved is Willis and Willis Thomas’ pacing. They both spoke at a pace of around 179 words per minute. For reference, this is a bit fast. It’s recommended that speakers talk at a speed lower than 170.
Though Yoodli suggests slowing the pace, the overall delivery analytics of Deb Willis and Hank Willis Thomas’ talk were also impressive.
The Bottom Line
How do you think your speaking analytics would stack up against Willis and Willis Thomas? You don’t have to wait until you’re scheduled to give a TED talk to reap the benefits of seeing your own metrics. Pinpoint exactly what you need to work on for your next interview, an upcoming presentation, or just everyday conversation using Yoodli.
From his own experiences, Stefan Sagmeister shares the design projects, reflective musings and captivating visuals that have shaped his journey of becoming successful in this TED talk titled, “Things I’ve Learned in my Life so Far”. He discusses how his innovative designs and thought-provoking ideas can inspire each of us to find and pursue success in our own lives.
TED Talk “Things I’ve Learned in My Life so Far” Speech Summary
We analyzed Sagmeister’s TED-Ed talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. Start with http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
The speaker has been discussing the relationship between design and happiness for the past four years and has implemented several projects based on this knowledge.
Some of the projects involve inflatable monkeys in Scotland, ‘Changing media,’ 65,000 coat hangers in a street and ‘Money does not make me happy’ in a magazine and on a building in Austria.
The speaker also had a show in New York where people wrote things they had learned into the steam of the windows.
The speaker’s ‘Money does not make me happy’ project was presented on JumboTrons in Singapore and was also depicted on their studio roof in New York.
The billboard on their studio roof stated ‘Complaining is silly. Either act or forget,’ which faded after a week in the sun.
TED Talk “Things I’ve Learned in My Life so Far” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TED-Ed talk transcript for “Things I’ve Learned in My Life so Far”:
I was here about four years ago, talking about the relationship of design and happiness. At the very end of it, I showed a list under that title. I learned very few things in addition since (Laughter) — but made a whole number of them into projects since.
These are inflatable monkeys in every city in Scotland: “Everybody always thinks they are right.” They were combined in the media. “Drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on.” We’re doing changing media. This is a projection that can see the viewer as the viewer walks by. You can’t help but actually ripping that spider web apart. All of these things are pieces of graphic design. We do them for our clients. They are commissioned. I would never have the money to actually pay for the installment or pay for all the billboards or the production of these, so there’s always a client attached to them.
These are 65,000 coat hangers in a street that’s lined with fashion stores. “Worrying solves nothing.” “Money does not make me happy” appeared first as double-page spreads in a magazine. The printer lost the file, didn’t tell us. When the magazine — actually, when I got the subscription — it was 12 following pages. It said, “Money does does make me happy.” And a friend of mine in Austria felt so sorry for me that he talked the largest casino owner in Linz into letting us wrap his building. So this is the big pedestrian zone in Linz. It just says “Money,” and if you look down the side street, it says, “does not make me happy.”
We had a show that just came down last week in New York. We steamed up the windows permanently, and every hour we had a different designer come in and write these things that they’ve learned into the steam in the window. Everybody participated — Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli. Singapore was quite in discussion. This is a little spot that we filmed there that’s to be displayed on the large JumboTrons in Singapore. And, of course, it’s one that’s dear to my heart, because all of these sentiments — some banal, some a bit more profound — all originally had come out of my diary.
And I do go often into the diary and check if I wanted to change something about the situation. If it’s — see it for a long enough time, I actually do something about it.
And the very last one is a billboard. This is our roof in New York, the roof of the studio. This is newsprint plus stencils that lie on the newsprint. We let that lie around in the sun. As you all know, newsprint yellows significantly in the sun. After a week, we took the stencils and the leaves off, shipped the newsprints to Lisbon to a very sunny spot, so on day one the billboard said, “Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.” Three days later it faded, and a week later, no more complaining anywhere. (Laughter) Thank you so much. (Applause)
TED Talk “Things I’ve Learned in My Life so Far” Speech Analysis
If you liked this break down of Sagmeister’s “Things I’ve Learned in My Life so Far” TED talk, you can create a free Yoodli account here.
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Stefan Sagmeister’s Word Choice
Sagmeister’s word choice metrics were all in the clear. He used about 18 filler words, which made up 3% of his speech. This is still below the recommended 4%, so it’s not a big concern.
He also used no instances of non-inclusiveness, and his weak word score was 4%, which is still considered within the normal range.
Stefan Sagmeister’s word choice stands out, since he scored below the recommended 4% in all areas.
Stefan Sagmeister’s Delivery
The delivery of Sagmeister’s TED talk was great. He used strategic, natural pauses to help his audience better understand his talk and maintained a pace of about 129 words per minute, which is perfect.
However, Yoodli flagged both his centering and eye contact as potential issues. We can take this with a grain of salt though, considering he showed examples on the screen (as opposed to the video focusing on the speaker).
Stefan Sagmeister’s delivery was also successful, particularly his pacing.
The Bottom Line
At this point, you might be wondering about your own speaking analytics. The good news is, you can get your own insights from Yoodli, completely free of cost. Explore Yoodli and everything this AI speech coach offers to improve your confidence as well as your speech.
There’s been a lot of hype around ChatGPT as of late. It’s dominated news headlines, trended on Twitter and Google, and has been a topic of discussion on both podcasts and on TV.
But what exactly is ChatGPT? And how is it used? In our cohesive guide, we’ll take a deep dive into what it is, how it works, and what you can expect when using this AI model.
What Is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT — which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer — is a generative AI model. It communicates with users in a conversational manner using a dialogue format. This special format allows ChatGPT to deny inappropriate asks from users, answer follow-up queries, and even admit when it’s made a mistake.
If you’re curious, you can try ChatGPT for yourself.
ChatGPT’s chatbox homepage lists examples, capabilities, and limitations.
What Is Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI?
As humans, we often need to problem-solve and make decisions. Artificial intelligence marries those qualities with the power of machines and computers. AI can be applied in a number of different ways, such as with natural language processing (NLPs), machine vision, and speech recognition, among others.
On the other hand, generative AI is a subset of AI in which machines generate content. This could include writing, audio, video, or imagery. Machines using generative AI rely on algorithms based on their training data.
What Is the Difference between a Search Engine and ChatGPT?
With the buzz around generative AI and ChatGPT, there’s been some confusion about how ChatGPT differs from a typical search engine, like Google search. Here’s the difference.
When users input a keyword into the search bar of a search engine, the search engine will use their keyword to provide a list of existing websites that are related to the said keyword. So, with a search engine, it’s the responsibility of the user to find relevant information they need by searching through the list to find the information they’re looking for.
With ChatGPT, however, the model leverages natural language processing to give users more personalized information directed toward their query. It can understand not only the intent, but also the context of a user’s question. This is what allows ChatGPT to provide precise, specific, and often individualized responses to queries.
Who Owns ChatGPT?
An AI and research development company, OpenAI, owns ChatGPT. OpenAI’s mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
Its headquarters is in San Francisco, California. In fact, it’s likely you’re familiar with a few of the key players. Figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, have all been involved with OpenAI in some way or another.
But Isn’t ChatGPT Owned by Microsoft?
Some are under the impression that Microsoft owns ChatGPT. As we discussed above, that’s not true. But why does that misconception exist?
In 2019, Microsoft joined ChatGPT as a strategic investor. In return for a license to the technology, Microsoft gave OpenAI one billion dollars in funding.
Microsoft plans to up their investment with ten billion more dollars to OpenAI, solidifying their partnership even more, which is likely where the confusion is as to who owns ChatGPT.
Is ChatGPT Free?
Yes, ChatGPT’s basic version is totally free for anyone to use. Not only that, but you can use ChatGPT as much as you want, without any limits.The only limits are on the character and word counts for responses.
How Does ChatGPT Work?
ChatGPT works like this: It gets its info from a variety of sources (more on that below) and then returns responses to a user’s query or prompt based on that info it was trained on.
In addition to this, ChatGPT’s dialogue capabilities are optimized using something called reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Without getting into the nitty gritty, RLHF helps train these massive language models. And ChatGPT isn’t the only model using RLHF. In fact, it’s also used for OpenAI’s InstructGPT models, as well as Anthropic’s Claude, and DeepMind’s Sparrow.
Where Does ChatGPT Get Its Data?
ChatGPT gets its data from a variety of sources. This model was trained on data from sources like news articles, books, Wikipedia, and science journals. However, this data only goes up to 2021. In other words, ChatGPT is missing some more recent information and news.
What Can ChatGPT Do?
It seems like ChatGPT can do everything. Well, almost everything. Here are the top 11 things that ChatGPT can do.
Solve mathematics equations. Yes, ChatGPT can solve math equations. But it doesn’t stop there. Not only does this model solve the problem, but it also guides the user step-by-step to how it arrived at the correct answer. This can help you understand a mathematics problem inside and out.
Draw out the data from text. Extracting data from text is something ChatGPT does very well. Just input the text into the chatbox and tell the model which kinds of data you’d like to extract. You can also tell ChatGPT which format it should be in.
Write music. Although many people think of ChatGPT as useful for “practical” or “logical” needs like solving math problems, it can tackle creative endeavors as well. One such example is writing music. All you’d need to do is ask it to write a song on a certain topic and ChatGPT can even come up with some basic chords. For example, we asked it to write a song about climate change and here’s what it came up with:
Verse 1:
G D The earth is getting hotter every day Em C The ice caps are melting, the oceans sway G D The air we breathe is full of smoke Em C The forests disappear, it’s no joke
Chorus:
G D We need to act before it’s too late Em C The future of the planet is at stake G D Let’s reduce our carbon footprint Em C And take steps to heal our planet
Verse 2:
G D The weather is changing, it’s not the same Em C The seasons are shifting, it’s not a game G D The animals suffer, their habitats gone Em C The damage we’ve done, can’t be undone
[Chorus]
Bridge:
Em C The power is in our hands G D Let’s change our ways and take a stand Em C We can make a difference, it’s true G D Let’s save the earth for me and you
[Chorus]
Outro:
G D The earth is our home, let’s keep it clean Em C Let’s work together, as a team G D The future is bright, if we try Em C Let’s protect the earth, before we say goodbye.
Generate ideas. Another creative way in which you could use ChatGPT is for idea generation. The options here are endless. For example, you could ask for five party ideas for a 16-year-old’s birthday or for a creative writing prompt. You could also ask it for low-carb dinner ideas — whatever floats your boat.
Simplify complex topics in plain language. You might be familiar with the subreddit, r/explainlikeimfive. It’s a subreddit that explains topics to users “as if they were 5 years old” — essentially, explaining complex topics in layman’s terms. Incredibly, ChatGPT can do this, too. All you’d have to do is ask a question, such as, “How does an Etch-a-Sketch toy work?” followed by “explain like I’m five.” The response will be an answer to your question in simple terms.
Debug code. For programmers, debugging code can be a pain. Luckily, ChatGPT can debug your code for you. Beyond that, it can even point out vulnerabilities. Let’s say you ask it to debug your code. ChatGPT will do that, as well as break down what kind of bug you’re dealing with and examples of how to fix it.
Act as a Linux Terminal. Not many people realize this, but you can ask ChatGPT to “act as a Linux Terminal.” When you do so, you’ll be able to use Linux commands and create directories and files, among other things. If you’d like to try it out, input this text from research scientist Jonas Degrave and senior staff research engineer at DeepMind, Frederic Besse:
I want you to act as a Linux terminal. I will type commands and you will reply with what the terminal should show. I want you to only reply with the terminal output inside one unique code block, and nothing else. Do not write explanations. Do not type commands unless I instruct you to do so. When I need to tell you something in English I will do so by putting text inside curly brackets {like this}. My first command is pwd.
Write code. If you’re unfamiliar with programming, you can ask ChatGPT to write code for you. You can also ask it to write code for practice or as you’re learning to code. Either way, users can ask the model to write code. You can even specify to have ChatGPT write code in a specific language, like Java or Python.
Locate answers (to assignment or homework questions). No matter what grade level a student is, ChatGPT can answer homework or assignment questions. For example, math equations aside, you could ask it a question like, “What is the strongest muscle in the human body?” and the model will tell you it’s the masseter muscle (or the gluteus maximus, which the model added since some scientists disagree).
Translate text from one language to another. Like Google Translate, ChatGPT can also translate text into one language or another. For example, you can paste text in Polish and ask the model to translate it for you. Or, you could ask something like, “How can I wish someone a blessed Ramadan in Arabic?”
ChatGPT can also inform users how to wish someone a blessed Ramadan in Arabic, for example.
Grade papers and essays. Believe it or not, ChatGPT can actually grade essays, too — not just write them. Professors (or students) can ask the model to grade an essay and ChatGPT will comply by assigning the essay a letter grade. It takes it a step further by also providing an explanation for how it arrived at that letter grade, as well as tips and feedback to improve the paper.
What Are ChatGPT’s Limitations?
Of course, ChatGPT isn’t perfect. There are a few limitations to be aware of.
First and foremost, its limited knowledge comes to mind. ChatGPT has access to lots of data, but not all data that’s ever existed. There’s a limit to what it knows. For example, things like recent news or niche topics might be outside the scope of the model.
It’s also not always accurate. For example, ChatGPT is known for having grammatical errors, misspellings, and typos. That’s why it’s always recommended to double check the information (or at least acknowledge that it still might not be accurate).
ChatGPT has trouble juggling multiple asks at once. Multitasking is not a strong suit of this model. If you ask a single question, it can provide a straightforward response. But once you start asking multiple questions or asking for multiple things, ChatGPT has a difficult time prioritizing.
Still, the overall concept and capabilities of this generative AI model are pretty impressive.
How to Use ChatGPT
Luckily, learning how to use ChatGPT is actually pretty simple. You can learn how to use ChatGPT in these three easy steps:
Make an account. Visit chat.openai.com and make a free account. You can use an email address or sign in with your Microsoft or Google account. You’ll also need a phone number, and it can’t be a virtual phone number (VoIP). Once you input your phone number, you’ll have to input a texted code to verify your new account.
Now, just type your request into the ChatGPT chatbox and you’re ready to go. This can be a question, like, “What’s the weather usually like in Georgia in May?” or a prompt, like, “Give me some ideas for a baby shower.”
If you don’t get the answer you’re looking for, try again. Sometimes, you need to rephrase or ask a different question to get the results you’re looking for.
Can ChatGPT Be Detected?
The short answer: Maybe? Currently, there aren’t many options available for detecting the use of ChatGPT in something like essays, for example. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything out there.
Princeton University student Edward Tian created a detection tool called GPTZero that’s said to be able to detect the use of ChatGPT. It was announced early in 2023.
ChatGPT Alternatives
As for ChatGPT alternatives, there are a handful out there. For example, Crossplag, a plagiarism checking tool, provides authenticity checking for content via AI detection.
If you’re looking for ChatGPT alternatives for writing, you might want to check out:
AI examples like ChatGPT can successfully produce code, text, and research. But AI can assist in other areas too, such as public speaking coaching. Yoodli is a great example.
Like ChatGPT, the Yoodli speech coach is powered by AI. Because of this, Yoodli is able to give users human-like feedback on their speaking patterns and speeches. For example, it can tell you things like:
Be more succinct in a certain part
How to reword sections of your speech to improve quality and flow
Where to add more information to improve cohesiveness
This AI coach not only provides specific metrics, such as your speaking pace and your filler word usage, but it also offers individualized coaching comments just for you and your speech.
For those looking for a judgment-free, personalized speech coach, Yoodli is one of the best available.
What’s Next for ChatGPT?
In terms of what’s on the horizon for ChatGPT, experts say the model will have more specific applications.
As a result, researchers expect more intense AI regulation as various models keep cropping up. For the United States, there’s no AI regulation as of right now. We can also expect models like this one to continue getting more buzz and hype as more people branch out and begin using it.
In Jasmine Crowe’s 3-minute TED talk, she questions a topic that has been perplexing many for a long time — what are we doing wrong in the fight to end hunger? Through her analysis of current practices and innovative solutions, Crowe explores the complexities of ending hunger. She also encourages us to consider a new approach.
TED Talk “What We’re Getting Wrong in the Fight to End Hunger” Speech Summary
We analyzedCrowe’s TED talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. You can get started at http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
Volunteer experience at a local food pantry revealed that families were not receiving real meals.
Technology has the power to reduce food waste and end hunger.
821 million people around the world are hungry. This includes 40 million in the US and 11 million children who go to bed hungry.
An app was created to inventory excess food from businesses and donate it to nonprofits and people in need.
France and Italy have banned supermarkets from throwing away unused food, and Denmark has mandated food waste grocery stores.
Social entrepreneurs are working to solve hunger, but don’t always get the same support as national hunger-fighting organizations.
Laws and policies need to be changed to solve hunger, and minds and actions need to be changed in order to make progress.
TED Talk “What We’re Getting Wrong in the Fight to End Hunger” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TEDtalk, “What We’re Getting Wrong in the Fight to End Hunger”:
In June of 2017, I volunteered with a group at a local food pantry on the south side of my home city in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a Friday afternoon, the day of their weekly food giveaway. And as I drove up, I saw people beginning to arrive, many with their rolling carts in tow, prepared to receive their food supply for the week. As I was walking in the door, there were about 40 people outside waiting in line. And I was so excited, because there are very few things I enjoy more than giving back. But then, as I entered the room where the volunteer meeting was taking place, I immediately realized: we weren’t about to give these people any real meals. We were essentially just giving them food.
I took my place on the assembly line, where — get this — I was in charge of making sure that the Weight Watchers Ding Dongs made it into every family’s bag. As the bags started to come around, I’m thinking to myself: What on earth are we doing here? Each bag contained two 20-ounce diet Snapples, a gallon of barbecue sauce, a bag of kettle potato chips, a box of superhero-shaped vegetable-enriched macaroni noodles, a box of belVita breakfast bars, a can of refried beans, a can of sweet peas, a miniature can of corn, I can’t forget about those Ding Dongs and french fried green onions, you know, the kind that go on top of a green bean casserole. And that was it.
We made over a hundred of those bags that day, and people indeed stood in line to receive one. But a feeling came over me; I felt bad and a little angry. It was like, how could I even feel good about the work that I was doing when I knew for a fact that not one meal was to come from the food we had just given to over 100 families? I mean, who wants to have a meal with barbecue sauce and Ding Dongs? (Laughter) And the reality is, I’ve been part of this process all my life. I’ve participated in food drives, I’ve collected cans since I was a kid, I’ve donated in the grocery store more times than I can count, I’ve volunteered at shelters, I’ve worked in food pantries, and I’m sure, like me, so many of you have, too. In 2013, I even created a pop-up restaurant, called Sunday Soul. And I rented tables and chairs and linens and I printed out menus and I took these experiences to alleyways, underneath bridges and in parks to allow people that were experiencing homelessness to dine with dignity.
So I’ve invested in this fight for quite some time. In almost every major US city, the food bank is viewed as a beloved community institution. Corporations send volunteers down on a weekly basis to sort through food items and make boxes of food for the needy. And can drives — they warm the hearts of schools and office buildings that participate and fill the shelves of food banks and food pantries across the nation. This is how we work to end hunger. A
nd what I’ve come to realize is that we are doing hunger wrong. We are doing the same things over and over and over again and expecting a different end result. We’ve created a cycle that keeps people dependent on food banks and pantries on a monthly basis for food that is often not well-balanced and certainly doesn’t provide them with a healthy meal.In the US, our approach to doing good, or what we call “charity,” has actually hindered us from making real progress. We’re educating the world on how many people are food insecure. There are television commercials, billboards, massive donations, the engagement of some of our biggest celebrities in the fight. But the ever-present reality is that, even with all of this work, millions of people are still going hungry. And we can do better.
Globally, 821 million people are hungry. That’s one in nine people on this planet. And here in the United States, nearly 40 million people experience hunger every single year, including more than 11 million children that go to bed hungry every night. Yet, we’re wasting more food than ever before — more than 80 billion pounds a year, to be exact. The EPA estimates that food waste has more than doubled between 1970 and 2017, and now accounts for 27 percent of everything in our landfills. And as this food sits, it gradually rots and produces harmful methane gas, a leading contributor to global climate change. We have the waste of the food itself, the waste of all the money associated with producing this now-wasted food and the waste of labor with all of the above.
And then there’s the social inequity between people who really need food and can’t get it and people who have too much and simply throw it away. All of this made me realize that hunger was not an issue of scarcity but rather a matter of logistics.
So in 2017, I set out to end hunger using technology. After all, food delivery apps had begun to explode on the scene, and I thought surely we can reverse-engineer this technology and get food from businesses like restaurants and grocery stores and into the hands of people in need. I believe that technology and innovation have the power to solve real problems, especially hunger.So in 2017, I created an app that would inventory everything that a business sells and make it super easy for them to donate this excess food that would typically go to waste at the end of the night. All the user has to do now is click on an item, tell us how many they have to donate, and our platform calculates the weight and the tax value of those items at time of donation. We then connect with local drivers in the shared economy to get this food picked up and delivered directly to the doors of nonprofit organizations and people in need. I provided the data and the analytics to help businesses reduce food waste at the source by letting them know the items that they waste repeatedly on a regular basis, and they even saved millions of dollars.
Our mission was simple: feed more, waste less. And by 2018, our clients included the world’s busiest airport, Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, and we were working with brands and corporations like Hormel, Chick-fil-A and Papa John’s. We even had the opportunity to work with the NFL for Super Bowl LIII. And over the last two years, we’ve worked with over 200 business to divert more than two million pounds of edible food from landfills into the hands of people that needed it most. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) This has accounted for about 1.7 million meals and allowed us to start to expand our efforts to other cities, like Washington, DC, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia and more. That’s just one approach that actually tackles the problem.
Another was the launch of our pop-up grocery stores. We recover excess food from businesses and set up free community grocery stores right in the middle of food deserts. We bring out a chef, and we do on-site taste-testings and allow families to leave with recipe cards. We give every family reusable grocery bags and allow them to simply shop minus the price tag. We wanted to give people access to meals and not just food. We wanted to change the way that we think and work to solve hunger in this country, get people to believe that we can solve hunger, not as a nonprofit, not as a food bank but as a social enterprise, with the goal of reducing waste and ending hunger. But it hasn’t been as easy as I thought to change the narrative and the thought process on how we think that hunger can be solved.In 2016, France became the first country to ban supermarkets from throwing away unused food. Instead, they must donate it, and they’re fined if they don’t. Yes.(Applause)
In 2017, Italy followed suit, becoming the second European nation to pass an anti-food-waste ban. And they stated it so simply as it was passed through legislation: “We have millions of pounds of good food going to waste, and we have poor people that are going hungry.” That simple. Denmark now has a mandated food waste grocery store. Its name: Wefood. They recover excess food from local grocery stores and sell it at up to a 50 percent off discount. They then use all the proceeds and donate it to emergency aid programs and social need issues for the people in need. It has been hailed as “the Goodwill of grocery.”
And last year, the world got its first pay-what-you-can grocery store, when Feed it Forward opened in Toronto. Their shelves remain stocked by recovering excess food from major supermarkets and allowing families to simply pay what they can at their grocery store. This is amazing. This innovation we need more of. Everyone can take on the roles of changing the attitudes about how we solve hunger. When we think of how we’ve allowed innovation and technology to change our lives, from how we communicate with each other to how we view our entertainment to how we even receive food, it’s amazing that we haven’t solved hunger yet. We literally have cars that can drive themselves and millions of people that cannot feed themselves.
With millions of dollars being donated to end food insecurity, we should’ve solved hunger years ago. And I asked myself — (Applause) I asked myself, why can’t we escape this vicious cycle? Why haven’t we solved this problem? I remember meeting with investors and pitching the idea, trying to raise funds for my business, and one of them said to me, in true seriousness, “Hunger is already being solved,” as if millions of people weren’t going to go to bed hungry that very night, and as if there was nothing else to do. And the reality is, one would think that hunger is being solved, but the truth is, it’s being worked on. If we really want to solve hunger, then we have to change the way we’ve been doing it. The same actions will always garner the same results. There are hundreds of social entrepreneurs all over the world. They have a focus to solve really big problems, like hunger, but they’ll never get the same support that we give national hunger-fighting organizations and food banks. But, if given the opportunity, they have the ability to foster insight and perhaps be forward-thinking enough to solve this problem.
That’s why I’m traveling the world and I’m really talking about what hunger looks like in America and explaining the difference between giving people access to food and access to meals. I’ve been meeting with city council members and city organizers across the US and telling them that technology indeed does have the power to connect businesses with surplus food to people in need, and explaining to them what a meal can actually mean to a family. I’ve been meeting with school boards and school districts to talk about how we feed hungry children, and health care organizations, sharing the message that food is health, and food is life, and that, by solving hunger, we can solve so many more problems. So if we want to know that we don’t live in a nation where perfectly good food goes to waste when our neighbors don’t have food to eat, then we need to change the laws. We need to introduce new policies, and, most importantly, we need to change our minds and our actions. Food drives are fine. Food banks serve a huge purpose. And yes, sometimes I like Ding Dongs, too. But the reality is that food drives do not solve hunger. And if we are smart about connecting the dots that are right in front of our noses, we can do far more than give a family a box of superhero-shaped vegetable-enriched macaroni noodles and a gallon of barbecue sauce to feed themselves.
Instead, we can give them back their dignity. Perhaps we can increase school attendance in schools. We can improve the health outcomes for millions. And, most importantly, we can reduce food waste in our landfills, creating a better environment for all of us. The thing I love most is that we can feel good about it in the process. If we solve hunger, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. So let’s do it. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.
TED Talk “What We’re Getting Wrong in the Fight to End Hunger” Speech Analysis
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Jasmine Crowe’s Word Choice
Crowe’s word choice was excellent overall. Her TED talk contained very little repetition (less than 1%), only two filler words during her entire 12-minute talk, 1% repetition, and less than 1% weak words. For reference, people should shoot for having less than 4% in all of the aforementioned areas, so Crowe really knocked it out of the park.
Jasmine Crowe’s word choice analytics were great.
Jasmine Crowe’s Delivery
Crowe’s delivery statistics were also good. She used natural pauses to help her audience digest her talk and used great body language, such as hand gestures and smiles.
However, there were a few areas in which Yoodli highlighted for improvement. First and foremost, pacing. Crowe’s speaking pace was a little fast at 182 words per minute. As such, Yoodli suggests lowering the pace to about 170 words per minute to improve.
Both eye contact and centering were also flagged as potential issues; however, given that Crowe was being recorded, her eye contact and centering metrics were affected by the camera angle.
Although her metrics were overall impressive, Yoodli flagged Jasmine Crowe’s pacing as a bit too fast.
The Bottom Line
Regardless of whether or not you’re a professional speaker, you can analyze your speaking patterns and speech with Yoodli. Take the first step today to elevate your public speaking and conversational skills with Yoodli.
Are you wondering what it takes to be successful in life? In Chade-Meng Tan’s TED talk, he explores the power of everyday compassion and how it can lead to success, both personally and professionally.
TED Talk “Everyday Compassion at Google” Speech Summary
We analyzedTan’s TED talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. You can get started at http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
Matthieu Ricard is the happiest man ever measured by science and his brain scan shows that compassion is the happiest state ever.
Compassion creates conditions for inner peace and global peace, and it can be made fun as well as profitable.
To create a compassionate corporate environment, there must be a culture of passionate concern for the greater good, autonomy, and focus on inner development and personal growth.
The Dalai Lama said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion,” which has been found to be true both individually and corporately.
TED Talk “Everyday Compassion at Google” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TED talk, “Everyday Compassion at Google”:
So what does the happiest man in the world look like? He certainly doesn’t look like me. He looks like this. His name is Matthieu Ricard. So how do you get to be the happiest man in the world? Well it turns out there is a way to measure happiness in the brain. And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex. And Matthieu’s happiness measure is off the charts. He’s by far the happiest man ever measured by science. Which leads us to a question: What was he thinking when he was being measured? Perhaps something very naughty. (Laughter) Actually, he was meditating on compassion. Matthieu’s own experience is that compassion is the happiest state ever.Reading about Matthieu was one of the pivotal moments of my life.
My dream is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime — and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale. And learning about Matthieu gave me a new angle to look at my work. Matthieu’s brain scan shows that compassion is not a chore. Compassion is something that creates happiness. Compassion is fun. And that mind-blowing insight changes the entire game. Because if compassion was a chore, nobody’s going to do it, except maybe the Dalai Lama or something. But if compassion was fun, everybody’s going to do it. Therefore, to create the conditions for global compassion, all we have to do is to reframe compassion as something that is fun.
But fun is not enough. What if compassion is also profitable? What if compassion is also good for business? Then, every boss, every manager in the world, will want to have compassion — like this. That would create the conditions for world peace. So, I started paying attention to what compassion looks like in a business setting. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look very far. Because what I was looking for was right in front of my eyes — in Google, my company. I know there are other compassionate companies in the world, but Google is the place I’m familiar with because I’ve been there for 10 years, so I’ll use Google as the case study.
Google is a company born of idealism. It’s a company that thrives on idealism. And maybe because of that, compassion is organic and widespread company-wide. In Google, expressions of corporate compassion almost always follow the same pattern. It’s sort of a funny pattern. It starts with a small group of Googlers taking the initiative to do something. And they don’t usually ask for permission; they just go ahead and do it, and then other Googlers join in, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And sometimes it gets big enough to become official. So in other words, it almost always starts from the bottom up. And let me give you some examples.
The first example is the largest annual community event — where Googlers from around the world donate their labor to their local communities — was initiated and organized by three employees before it became official, because it just became too big. Another example, three Googlers — a chef, an engineer and, most funny, a massage therapist — three of them, they learned about a region in India where 200,000 people live without a single medical facility. So what do they do? They just go ahead and start a fundraiser. And they raise enough money to build this hospital — the first hospital of its kind for 200,000 people.
During the Haiti earthquake, a number of engineers and product managers spontaneously came together and stayed overnight to build a tool to allow earthquake victims to find their loved ones. And expressions of compassion are also found in our international offices.In China for example, one mid-level employee initiated the largest social action competition in China, involving more than 1,000 schools in China, working on issues such as education, poverty, health care and the environment. There is so much organic social action all around Google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts. And this idea, again, came from the grassroots, from two Googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job. And I found it fascinating that the social responsibility team was not formed as part of some grand corporate strategy. It was two persons saying, “Let’s do this,” and the company said, “Yes.”
So it turns out that Google is a compassionate company, because Googlers found compassion to be fun.But again, fun is not enough. There are also real business benefits. So what are they? The first benefit of compassion is that it creates highly effective business leaders. What does that mean? There are three components of compassion. There is the affective component, which is, “I feel for you.” There is the cognitive component, which is, “I understand you.” And there is a motivational component, which is, “I want to help you.” So what has this got to do with business leadership?
According to a very comprehensive study led by Jim Collins, and documented in the book “Good to Great,” it takes a very special kind of leader to bring a company from goodness to greatness. And he calls them “Level 5 leaders.” These are leaders who, in addition to being highly capable, possess two important qualities, and they are humility and ambition. These are leaders who are highly ambitious for the greater good. And because they’re ambitious for a greater good, they feel no need to inflate their own egos. And they, according to the research, make the best business leaders. And if you look at these qualities in the context of compassion, we find that the cognitive and affective components of compassion — understanding people and empathizing with people — inhibits, tones down, what I call the excessive self-obsession that’s in us, therefore creating the conditions for humility.
The motivational component of compassion creates ambition for greater good. In other words, compassion is the way to grow Level 5 leaders. And this is the first compelling business benefit. The second compelling benefit of compassion is that it creates an inspiring workforce. Employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good. It creates a vibrant, energetic community where people admire and respect each other. I mean, you come to work in the morning, and you work with three guys who just up and decide to build a hospital in India. It’s like, how can you not be inspired by those people — your own coworkers?
So this mutual inspiration promotes collaboration, initiative and creativity. It makes us a highly effective company. So, having said all that, what is the secret formula for brewing compassion in the corporate setting? In our experience, there are three ingredients. The first ingredient is to create a culture of passionate concern for the greater good. So always think: how is your company and your job serving the greater good? Or, how can you further serve the greater good? This awareness of serving the greater good is very self-inspiring and it creates fertile ground for compassion to grow in. That’s one.
The second ingredient is autonomy. So in Google, there’s a lot of autonomy. And one of our most popular managers jokes that, this is what he says, “Google is a place where the inmates run the asylum.” And he considers himself one of the inmates. If you already have a culture of compassion and idealism and you let your people roam free, they will do the right thing in the most compassionate way.
The third ingredient is to focus on inner development and personal growth. Leadership training in Google, for example, places a lot of emphasis on the inner qualities, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, empathy and compassion, because we believe that leadership begins with character. We even created a seven-week curriculum on emotion intelligence, which we jokingly call “Searching Inside Yourself.” It’s less naughty than it sounds. So I’m an engineer by training, but I’m one of the creators and instructors of this course, which I find kind of funny, because this is a company that trusts an engineer to teach emotion intelligence. What a company. (Laughter) So “Search Inside Yourself” — how does it work? It works in three steps.
The first step is attention training. Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. Therefore, any curriculum for training emotion intelligence has to begin with attention training. The idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. And this creates the foundation for emotion intelligence.
The second step follows the first step. The second step is developing self-knowledge and self-mastery. So using the supercharged attention from step one, we create a high-resolution perception into the cognitive and emotive processes. What does that mean? It means being able to observe our thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity, objectivity and from a third-person perspective. And once you can do that, you create the kind of self-knowledge that enables self-mastery.
The third step, following the second step, is to create new mental habits. What does that mean? Imagine this. Imagine whenever you meet any other person, any time you meet a person, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, “I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy.” Imagine you can do that. Having this habit, this mental habit, changes everything at work. Because this good will is unconsciously picked up by other people, and it creates trust, and trust creates a lot of good working relationships. And this also creates the conditions for compassion in the workplace. Someday, we hope to open-source “Search Inside Yourself” so that everybody in the corporate world will at least be able to use it as a reference.
And in closing, I want to end the same place I started, with happiness. I want to quote this guy — the guy in robes, not the other guy — the Dalai Lama, who said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” I found this to be true, both on the individual level and at a corporate level. And I hope that compassion will be both fun and profitable for you too. Thank you. (Applause)
TED Talk “Everyday Compassion at Google” Speech Analysis
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Chade-Meng Tan’s Word Choice
Tan’s word choice analytics were great. Using Yoodli, we discovered that about 3% of his speech included repetition and another 3% included weak words. Tan also used less than 1% of filler words, which is particularly impressive.
Tan gets top marks in the word choice category, since best practices are to have less than 4% in all of those areas.
However, Yoodli did flag a single instance of non-inclusive language with the word “guys.” Luckily, the AI speech coach provides us with an easy alternative: “folks.”
Chade-Meng Tan’s delivery was great, especially with regard to filler words.
Chade-Meng Tan’s Delivery
The delivery of Tan’s TED talk was noticeably impressive, and his speaking metrics support this. Tan not only used appropriate body language (think gestures and facial expressions), but he also used natural pauses to help his listeners digest the information better.
In addition to that, Tan spoke at an even, conversational pace of 130 words per minute, which is fantastic.
However, Yoodli targeted two potential areas where Tan could improve, and those are eye contact and centering. However, we have to take this with a grain of salt. Because Tan was being recorded live, these metrics are more of a reflection of the recording as opposed to Tan himself.
Chade-Meng Tan’s delivery was also great, particularly his pacing.
The Bottom Line
Tan’s talk was pretty impressive. But you don’t have to stellar public speaking skills like him to get the most out of Yoodli. In fact, Yoodli can help you improve your speech no matter what level of comfortability you have with speaking. Try it out today!
In Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s 3-minute TED talk “What Soccer Can Teach Us about Freedom,” he explores how the exhilaration of the game can provide a sense of liberation and empowerment to those facing boundaries and limitations.
Through his personal stories, he shows us how utilizing the same muscle used to plan the next goal can also be used to navigate the next block.
TED Talk “What Soccer Can Teach Us about Freedom” Speech Summary
We analyzedJoseph’s TED talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. You can get started at http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
The two moments where the speaker feels most free are in dance and scoring a goal in soccer.
The speaker is a curator at a contemporary arts center and believes in art that has a practical application.
Soccer is a means for the speaker’s immigrant family to foster a sense of continuity and community.
The speaker has created a curriculum that intertwines soccer, politics, and art to access the concept of freedom for immigrant youth
The curriculum is called “Moving and Passing” and uses soccer as a metaphor for political enfranchisement
Soccer is the only thing everyone on the planet can agree to do together and connects joy to immigrants moving in search of a better position
TED Talk “What Soccer Can Teach Us about Freedom” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TED talk, “What Soccer Can Teach Us about Freedom”:
The two places where I feel most free aren’t actually places. They’re moments. The first is inside of dance. Somewhere between rising up against gravity and the feeling that the air beneath me is falling in love with my body’s weight. I’m dancing and the air is carrying me like I might never come down. The second place that I feel free is after scoring a goal on the soccer pitch. My body floods with the chemical that they put inside of EpiPens to revive the dead, and I am weightless, raceless.
My story is this: I’m a curator at a contemporary arts center, but I don’t really believe in art that doesn’t bleed or sweat or cry. I imagine that my kids are going to live in a time when the most valuable commodities are fresh water and empathy. I love pretty dances and majestic sculpture as much as the next guy, but give me something else to go with it. Lift me up with the aesthetic sublime and give me a practice or some tools to turn that inspiration into understanding and action.For instance, I’m a theater maker who loves sports.
When I was making my latest piece /peh-LO-tah/ I thought a lot about how soccer was a means for my own immigrant family to foster a sense of continuity and normality and community within the new context of the US. In this heightened moment of xenophobia and assault on immigrant identity, I wanted to think through how the game could serve as an affirmational tool for first-generation Americans and immigrant kids, to ask them to consider movement patterns on the field as kin to migratory patterns across social and political borders. Whether footballers or not, immigrants in the US play on endangered ground. I wanted to help the kids understand that the same muscle that they use to plan the next goal can also be used to navigate the next block.
For me, freedom exists in the body. We talk about it abstractly and even divisively, like “protect our freedom,” “build this wall,” “they hate us because of our freedom.” We have all these systems that are beautifully designed to incarcerate us or deport us, but how do we design freedom? For these kids, I wanted to track the idea back to something that exists inside that no one could take away, so I developed this curriculum that’s part poli-sci class, part soccer tournament, inside of an arts festival. It accesses /peh-LO-tah/’s field of inquiry to create a sports-based political action for young people. The project is called “Moving and Passing.” It intersects curriculum development, site-specific performance and the politics of joy, while using soccer as a metaphor for the urgent question of enfranchisement among immigrant youth.
Imagine that you are a 15-year-old kid from Honduras now living in Harlem, or you’re a 13-year-old girl born in DC to two Nigerian immigrants. You love the game. You’re on the field with your folks. You’ve just been practicing dribbling through cones for, like, 15 minutes, and then, all of a sudden, a marching band comes down the field. I want to associate the joy of the game with the exuberance of culture, to locate the site of joy in the game at the same physical coordinate as being politically informed by art, a grass-laden theater for liberation. We spend a week looking at how the midfielder would explain Black Lives Matter, or how the goalkeeper would explain gun control, or how a defender’s style is the perfect metaphor for the limits of American exceptionalism. As we study positions on the field, we also name and imagine our own freedoms.
I don’t know, man, soccer is, like, the only thing on this planet that we can all agree to do together. You know? It’s like the official sport of this spinning ball. I want to be able to connect the joy of the game to the ever-moving footballer, to connect that moving footballer to immigrants who also moved in sight of a better position. Among these kids, I want to connect their families’ histories to the bliss of a goal-scorer’s run, family like that feeling after the ball beats the goalie, the closest thing going to freedom.Thank you. (Applause)
TED Talk “What Soccer Can Teach Us about Freedom” Speech Analysis
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Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Word Choice
Joseph’s word choice analytics were pretty insightful. We found out that he used from less than 1% of filler wordsand less than 1% of weak words. He also didn’t use any non-inclusive language, which is a win. For reference, it’s best to have less than 4% in both of those areas.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s word choice was great overall.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Delivery
The delivery of Joseph’s TED talk was also successful. During his entire speech, he used appropriate body language, like facial expressions and gestures. He also implemented strategic but natural pauses to let his audience sit with the information for a moment..
However, Yoodli highlighted two areas of improvement for Joseph: eye contact and centering. Still, Joseph was speaking to a large audience and was recorded, so those two metrics are more of a reflection of the recording.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s delivery was awesome, especially his speaking pace.
The Bottom Line
You don’t have to be a TED talk speaker like Joseph to take advantage of speech and speaking pattern metrics. In fact, using Yoodli can help you improve not only your public speaking skills, but also your everyday conversation skills. Don’t hesitate: try it out (for free) today.
In this TED talk, Sinan Aral examines how we can protect the truth in the age of misinformation. He explores the ways in which false and misleading information can be spread, the dangers of this, and how we might be able to guard against it.
TED Talk “How We Can Protect Truth in the Age of Misinformation” Speech Summary
We analyzedAral’s TED talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. You can get started at http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
The Associated Press tweet on April 23, 2013 was not real news, but false news propagated by Syrian hackers.
The false news caused the stock market to crash. This wiped out 140 billion dollars in equity value in a single day.
In the 2016 US presidential election, the Internet Research Agency’s misinformation campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook. It also issued three million individual tweets and 43 hours worth of YouTube content.
A study by Oxford University shows that in the recent Swedish elections, one third of the information spreading on social media was fake or misinformation.
A longitudinal study of the spread of fake news on Twitter from 2006 to 2017 showed that false news diffused further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth.
False news spreaders had fewer followers, followed fewer people, were less active, less often “verified”, and had been on Twitter for shorter period of time.
Bots were accelerating the spread of false news, but not more than the spread of true news.
Generative adversarial networks and the democratization of artificial intelligence make it easier to create fake videos.
Five possible paths to address the issue of fake news: labeling, incentives, regulation, transparency, and algorithms and machine learning.
Humans have to be at the core of technology solutions to address fake news, as defining truth and falsehood is an ethical and philosophical question.
We must be vigilant in defending the truth against misinformation..
TED Talk “How We Can Protect Truth in the Age of Misinformation” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TED talk, “How We Can Protect Truth in the Age of Misinformation”:
So, on April 23 of 2013, the Associated Press put out the following tweet on Twitter. It said, “Breaking news: Two explosions at the White House and Barack Obama has been injured.” This tweet was retweeted 4,000 times in less than five minutes, and it went viral thereafter.
Now, this tweet wasn’t real news put out by the Associated Press. In fact it was false news, or fake news, that was propagated by Syrian hackers that had infiltrated the Associated Press Twitter handle. Their purpose was to disrupt society, but they disrupted much more. Because automated trading algorithms immediately seized on the sentiment on this tweet, and began trading based on the potential that the president of the United States had been injured or killed in this explosion. And as they started tweeting, they immediately sent the stock market crashing, wiping out 140 billion dollars in equity value in a single day.
Robert Mueller, special counsel prosecutor in the United States, issued indictments against three Russian companies and 13 Russian individuals on a conspiracy to defraud the United States by meddling in the 2016 presidential election. And what this indictment tells as a story is the story of the Internet Research Agency, the shadowy arm of the Kremlin on social media. During the presidential election alone, the Internet Agency’s efforts reached 126 million people on Facebook in the United States, issued three million individual tweets and 43 hours’ worth of YouTube content. All of which was fake — misinformation designed to sow discord in the US presidential election.
A recent study by Oxford University showed that in the recent Swedish elections, one third of all of the information spreading on social media about the election was fake or misinformation. In addition, these types of social-media misinformation campaigns can spread what has been called “genocidal propaganda,” for instance against the Rohingya in Burma, triggering mob killings in India. We studied fake news and began studying it before it was a popular term. And we recently published the largest-ever longitudinal study of the spread of fake news online on the cover of “Science” in March of this year. We studied all of the verified true and false news stories that ever spread on Twitter, from its inception in 2006 to 2017. And when we studied this information, we studied verified news stories that were verified by six independent fact-checking organizations. So we knew which stories were true and which stories were false. We can measure their diffusion, the speed of their diffusion, the depth and breadth of their diffusion, how many people become entangled in this information cascade and so on. And what we did in this paper was we compared the spread of true news to the spread of false news.
And here’s what we found. We found that false news diffused further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information that we studied, sometimes by an order of magnitude. And in fact, false political news was the most viral. It diffused further, faster, deeper and more broadly than any other type of false news. When we saw this, we were at once worried but also curious. Why? Why does false news travel so much further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth?
The first hypothesis that we came up with was, “Well, maybe people who spread false news have more followers or follow more people, or tweet more often, or maybe they’re more often ‘verified’ users of Twitter, with more credibility, or maybe they’ve been on Twitter longer.” So we checked each one of these in turn. And what we found was exactly the opposite.
False-news spreaders had fewer followers, followed fewer people, were less active, less often “verified” and had been on Twitter for a shorter period of time. And yet, false news was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, controlling for all of these and many other factors. So we had to come up with other explanations. And we devised what we called a “novelty hypothesis.” So if you read the literature, it is well known that human attention is drawn to novelty, things that are new in the environment. And if you read the sociology literature, you know that we like to share novel information. It makes us seem like we have access to inside information, and we gain in status by spreading this kind of information.
So what we did was we measured the novelty of an incoming true or false tweet, compared to the corpus of what that individual had seen in the 60 days prior on Twitter. But that wasn’t enough, because we thought to ourselves, “Well, maybe false news is more novel in an information-theoretic sense, but maybe people don’t perceive it as more novel.” So to understand people’s perceptions of false news, we looked at the information and the sentiment contained in the replies to true and false tweets. And what we found was that across a bunch of different measures of sentiment — surprise, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, joy and trust — false news exhibited significantly more surprise and disgust in the replies to false tweets. And true news exhibited significantly more anticipation, joy and trust in reply to true tweets.
The surprise corroborates our novelty hypothesis. This is new and surprising, and so we’re more likely to share it. At the same time, there was congressional testimony in front of both houses of Congress in the United States, looking at the role of bots in the spread of misinformation. So we looked at this too — we used multiple sophisticated bot-detection algorithms to find the bots in our data and to pull them out. So we pulled them out, we put them back in and we compared what happens to our measurement. And what we found was that, yes indeed, bots were accelerating the spread of false news online, but they were accelerating the spread of true news at approximately the same rate. Which means bots are not responsible for the differential diffusion of truth and falsity online. We can’t abdicate that responsibility, because we, humans, are responsible for that spread.
Now, everything that I have told you so far, unfortunately for all of us, is the good news. The reason is because it’s about to get a whole lot worse. And two specific technologies are going to make it worse. We are going to see the rise of a tremendous wave of synthetic media. Fake video, fake audio that is very convincing to the human eye. And this will powered by two technologies.
The first of these is known as “generative adversarial networks.” This is a machine-learning model with two networks: a discriminator, whose job it is to determine whether something is true or false, and a generator, whose job it is to generate synthetic media. So the synthetic generator generates synthetic video or audio, and the discriminator tries to tell, “Is this real or is this fake?” And in fact, it is the job of the generator to maximize the likelihood that it will fool the discriminator into thinking the synthetic video and audio that it is creating is actually true. Imagine a machine in a hyperloop, trying to get better and better at fooling us. This, combined with the second technology, which is essentially the democratization of artificial intelligence to the people, the ability for anyone, without any background in artificial intelligence or machine learning, to deploy these kinds of algorithms to generate synthetic media makes it ultimately so much easier to create videos. The White House issued a false, doctored video of a journalist interacting with an intern who was trying to take his microphone. They removed frames from this video in order to make his actions seem more punchy. And when videographers and stuntmen and women were interviewed about this type of technique, they said, “Yes, we use this in the movies all the time to make our punches and kicks look more choppy and more aggressive.” They then put out this video and partly used it as justification to revoke Jim Acosta, the reporter’s, press pass from the White House. And CNN had to sue to have that press pass reinstated.
There are about five different paths that I can think of that we can follow to try and address some of these very difficult problems today. Each one of them has promise, but each one of them has its own challenges. The first one is labeling. Think about it this way: when you go to the grocery store to buy food to consume, it’s extensively labeled. You know how many calories it has, how much fat it contains — and yet when we consume information, we have no labels whatsoever. What is contained in this information? Is the source credible? Where is this information gathered from? We have none of that information when we are consuming information. That is a potential avenue, but it comes with its challenges. For instance, who gets to decide, in society, what’s true and what’s false? Is it the governments? Is it Facebook? Is it an independent consortium of fact-checkers? And who’s checking the fact-checkers?
Another potential avenue is incentives. We know that during the US presidential election there was a wave of misinformation that came from Macedonia that didn’t have any political motive but instead had an economic motive. And this economic motive existed, because false news travels so much farther, faster and more deeply than the truth, and you can earn advertising dollars as you garner eyeballs and attention with this type of information. But if we can depress the spread of this information, perhaps it would reduce the economic incentive to produce it at all in the first place.
Third, we can think about regulation, and certainly, we should think about this option. In the United States, currently, we are exploring what might happen if Facebook and others are regulated. While we should consider things like regulating political speech, labeling the fact that it’s political speech, making sure foreign actors can’t fund political speech, it also has its own dangers. For instance, Malaysia just instituted a six-year prison sentence for anyone found spreading misinformation. And in authoritarian regimes, these kinds of policies can be used to suppress minority opinions and to continue to extend repression.
The fourth possible option is transparency. We want to know how do Facebook’s algorithms work. How does the data combine with the algorithms to produce the outcomes that we see? We want them to open the kimono and show us exactly the inner workings of how Facebook is working. And if we want to know social media’s effect on society, we need scientists, researchers and others to have access to this kind of information. But at the same time, we are asking Facebook to lock everything down, to keep all of the data secure. So, Facebook and the other social media platforms are facing what I call a transparency paradox. We are asking them, at the same time, to be open and transparent and, simultaneously secure. This is a very difficult needle to thread, but they will need to thread this needle if we are to achieve the promise of social technologies while avoiding their peril.
The final thing that we could think about is algorithms and machine learning. Technology devised to root out and understand fake news, how it spreads, and to try and dampen its flow. Humans have to be in the loop of this technology, because we can never escape that underlying any technological solution or approach is a fundamental ethical and philosophical question about how do we define truth and falsity, to whom do we give the power to define truth and falsity and which opinions are legitimate, which type of speech should be allowed and so on. Technology is not a solution for that. Ethics and philosophy is a solution for that. Nearly every theory of human decision making, human cooperation and human coordination has some sense of the truth at its core.
But with the rise of fake news, the rise of fake video, the rise of fake audio, we are teetering on the brink of the end of reality, where we cannot tell what is real from what is fake. And that’s potentially incredibly dangerous.We have to be vigilant in defending the truth against misinformation. With our technologies, with our policies and, perhaps most importantly, with our own individual responsibilities, decisions, behaviors and actions. Thank you very much. (Applause)
TED Talk “How We Can Protect Truth in the Age of Misinformation” Speech Analysis
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Sinan Aral’s Word Choice
The word choice analytics from Aral’s TED talk were very insightful. He used less than 1% of filler words(in total, six fillers) during his talk, which is pretty impressive. He also used less than 1% weak words.People should shoot to have less than 4% in all of those areas, so this is definitely a win for Aral.
However, Yoodli did flag one instance of non-inclusive language: the word “fat.” Although this was flagged, the context helps, too. In this case, Aral was speaking on nutritional information, so using “fat” wouldn’t be considered non-inclusive language.
Sinan Aral’s word choice was particularly impressive, with only six fillers during his 15-minute talk.
Sinan Aral’s Delivery
Aral’s delivery was also great. He made use ofnatural pauses, which helps listeners better understand speech and also used appropriate body language, including facial expressions.
Aral’s speaking pace was perfect at 143 words per minute — relaxed and conversational.
However, Yoodli did flag two potential areas of improvement: eye contact and centering. That being said, since Aral was speaking on stage and was recorded, these metrics were affected by the actual recording — in other words, Aral is in the clear.
Sinan Aral’s delivery was also great, especially with regard to his speaking pace.
The Bottom Line
It doesn’t matter if you’re looking to practice public speaking or if you’re just trying to work on your everyday small talk skills — Yoodli is here to help. Explore Yoodli’s capabilities — totally free — and check out your own speaking analytics.
Come and find out what Su Kahumbu has to say about solving global food insecurity, one text message at a time. In her 3-minute TED talk, she will explore how text messaging can help us reduce childhood stunting, the consequences it can have, and how it can create a healthier and more stable future.
TED Talk “How We Can Help Hungry Kids, One Text at a Time” Speech Summary
We analyzedKahumbu’s TED talk using the free, AI-powered communication coach, Yoodli. Try it out at http://www.yoodli.ai and view the speech here.
Thelma and Louise are an example of the speaker’s badass friends.
Cows have been getting a lot of negative attention due to methane emissions and climate change, but the speaker is passionate about trying to redeem their reputation by showing how important they are for food security.
Childhood stunting is a problem in Africa, especially due to lack of essential amino acids, which come primarily from animal-derived sources.
Zoonotic diseases are a threat and can be transmitted between animals and humans.
Smallholder farmers are essential to food security, but they are limited in terms of knowledge and resources.
Innovative solutions, such as SMS and cutting-edge genomics can help empower smallholder farmers and address food security issues.
By harnessing the power of smallholder farmers, food security and stunting can be addressed in Africa.
TED Talk “How We Can Help Hungry Kids, One Text at a Time” Speech Text
Using AI, the Yoodli speech coach platform provides this TED talk, “How We Can Help Hungry Kids, One Text at a Time”:
I want to introduce you to my badass friends. Meet Thelma and Louise. (Laughter) I’m passionate about cows. And although they’ve been getting a lot of crap lately due to methane emissions and climate change, I hope that I can redeem their reputation in part by showing you how incredibly important they are in solving one of the world’s biggest problems: food security. But more importantly, for Africa — it’s resultant childhood stunting.
Nutritional stunting manifests itself in a reduction of growth rate in human development. And according to UNICEF, stunting doesn’t come easy. It doesn’t come quickly. It happens over a long period of time during which a child endures painful and debilitating cycles of illness, depressed appetite, insufficient nutrition and inadequate care. And most kids simply can’t endure such rigors. But those that do survive, they carry forward long-term cognitive problems as well as losses of stature. The numbers of stunted children under the age of five, in most regions of the world, has been declining. And I really hate to say this, but the only place where they haven’t been declining is here, in Africa. Here, 59 million children, three in 10 in that age group, struggle to meet their genetic potential — their full genetic potential. Protein is one of our most important dietary requirements, and evidence shows that lack of essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in young children’s diets, can result in stunting. Essential amino acids are called essential because we can’t synthesize them in our bodies. We have to get them from our foods and the best sources are animal-derived: milk, meat and eggs. Most protein consumed on the African continent is crop-based. And although we have millions of smallholder farmers rearing animals, livestock production is not as easy as we think.
The big livestock gaps between rich countries and poor countries are due to poor animal health. Endemic livestock diseases, some of them transmissible to humans, threaten not only livestock producers in those poor countries, but all human health across all countries. This is a global pathogens network. It shows the pathogens found across the world according to the Enhanced Infectious Diseases database. And it shows those pathogens that share hosts. In a nutshell, we share pathogens, and thus diseases, with the species we live closest to: our livestock. And we call these zoonotic diseases. Recent reports show that the deadly dozen zoonotic diseases kill 2.2 million people and sicken 2.4 billion people annually. And Jimmy says, “The greatest burden of zoonoses falls on one billion poor livestock keepers.” We totally underestimate the importance of our smallholder farmers.
We’re beginning to recognize how important they are and how they influence our medical health, our biosafety and more recently, our cognitive and our physical health. They stand at the frontline of zoonotic epidemics. They pretty much underpin our existence. And they need to know so much, yet most lack knowledge on livestock disease prevention and treatment.So how do they learn? Apart from shared experiences, trial and error, conventional farming extension services are boots on the ground and radio — expensive and hard to scale in the face of population growth. Sounds pretty gloomy, doesn’t it? B
ut we’re at an interesting point in Africa. We’re changing that narrative using innovative solutions, riding across scalable technologies. Knowledge doesn’t have to be expensive. My company developed an agricultural platform called iCow. We teach farmers best livestock practices using SMS over simple, low-end phones. Farmers receive three SMSs a week on best livestock practices, and those that execute the messages go on to see increases in productivity within as short a time as three months. The first increases in productivity, of course, are improved animal health. We use SMS because it is retentive. Farmers store their messages, they write them down in books, and in effect, we’re drip-feeding agricultural manuals into the fields.
We recognize that we are all part of the global food network: producers and consumers, you and me, and every farmer. We’re focusing now on trying to bring together producers and consumers to take action and take responsibility for not only food security, but for food safety. This beautiful animal is an African-Asian Sahiwal crossed with a Dutch Fleckvieh. She’s milkier than her Sahiwal mom, and she’s sturdier and more resistant to disease than her Fleckvieh father. In Ethiopia and Tanzania, the African Dairy Genetic Gains program is using SMS and cutting-edge genomics and pioneering Africa’s first tropically adapted dairy breeding centers and dairy performance recording centers. Farmers contribute their production data — milking records, breeding records and feeding records — to the ADGG platform. This stage is synthesized through algorithms from some of the top livestock institutions in the world before it lands back in the farmers’ hands in actionable SMSs. Customized data, customized responses all aimed at increasing productivity based on the potential on the ground.
We’re at a very interesting place in agriculture in Africa. By the end of this year, we’ll have almost one billion mobile phone subscriptions. We have the power in our hands to ensure that livestock production systems are not only healthy, productive and profitable, but that farmers are knowledgeable, and more importantly, that our farmers are safe. Working with smallholder farmers is one of the best ways to guarantee food security. Working with smallholder farmers is one of the best ways to guarantee each and every child their full opportunity and ability to reach their full genetic potential. And harnessing the power of millions of smallholder farmers and their badass cows like mine, we should be able to bring a halt to stunting in Africa. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.
TED Talk “How We Can Help Hungry Kids, One Text at a Time” Speech Analysis
If you were impressed by Kahumbu’s TED talk about how to help hungry kids through texting, you can create an account on Yoodli for free.
There you can upload or record a speech on any topic and get feedback and improvement ideas.
Su Kahumbu’s Word Choice
Kahumbu’s word choice analytics were extremely insightful. She used less no filler words at all, which is quite a feat. It’s normal to have a few fillers and many people struggle with how to stop using filler words. Her TED talk was less than 1% of repetition and weak words, too.
In terms of areas of improvement, Yoodli highlighted an instance of non-inclusive language. The AI speech coach suggests removing “profanity” (in this case, the word “crap”) which would be an easy fix.
Su Kahumbu’s word choice analytics were very insightful (not to mention impressive).
Su Kahumbu’s Delivery
The delivery analytics of Kahumbu’s speech were also great. She had a perfect speaking pace at 132 words per minute, which is relaxed and conversational. She also used a few natural pauses so the audience had time to comprehend important statements. Kahumbu’s body language — namely her facial expressions and hand gestures — stood out as a success, too.
The only thing Yoodli highlighted was Kahumbu’s eye contact and centering. However, we know that she was speaking live and that the video analyzed is just a record. This explains why she scored low in those two areas (through no fault of her own).
Su Kahumbu’s delivery was also pretty impressive, especially her pacing speed.
The Bottom Line
You don’t need to be a TED speaker to take advantage of Yoodli’s free speaking analytics. Check out your own speech analytics — you might be surprised at what you find.
