Ted summary

Summary of TED talks
Speech 1

In Eddie Obeng’s speech, our world is changing fast, so we can’t follow our previous pattern to operate our new products. Therefore, a smart way to keep up with the fast-changing world is to make valuable failure.

From what Eddie Obeng says, people are used to get a same answer based on their experience. There is an interesting test. When Eddie put two different shapes of lines in front of his audience, he asked which one was longer. The answer was supposed to the same even though he had already changed the length, because we have been educated that the answer is the same at school for a long time.

The test above teaches us that situation is different right now. Our world can be describes as turbulence now days because everything is changing much more rapidly than that in the past. Numerous original ideas come out every day but lots of companies still choose the projects that would be obsoleted in the future.

Thus, I strongly agree with the concept of making smart failure proposed by Eddie Obeng. Doing mistakes help us improve further acts because acting in our turbulent environment needs more intuitive behavior.

Speech 2
Talk nerdy to me Mellissa Marshall Oct 2012

Mellissa Marshall encourages engineers to talk to the public to share powerful scientific idea to audience. Moreover, she got an equation to illustrate the communication skill she highlights: Take the science, subtract the bullet points and jargon, divided by relevance, and multiply it by the passion that engineers have for their incredible work.

Mellissa’s speech is really convincing, however, I do not agree with her equation so much. She mentioned the magnitude of attractiveness should be divided by relevance, which means only sharing what is relevant to the audience. From my perspective, I advocate the close relevance with our audience. I would rather multiply the equation by relevance than been divided by it because I think the more you relate your idea to audience, the more you get consonance. Besides, I don’t think the equation multiplied by passion is enough, I would have a combination of passion, enthusiasm and inspiration exponentially increased. In this way, audience would be more attractive by what you say.

On the other hand, I really like the title Mellissa quoted except her equation. Nerdy is to describe a person who is overly intellectual and lacks social skills. But it became a positive word in Mellissa’s speech. More and more people become to show their strongly interest of scientific and engineering world, thus it’s necessary to acquire good communicative skills for engineers right now, also including me.