TED Talk Topics
1. Television Violence
A. Identify the growing desensitization of America's youth to violent stimuli
B. Change minds of parents upon what they allow their children to watch and play and make others aware once more what is truly acceptable behavior in public and at home as children along with adults observe by watching.
2. Bilingual Education
A. Other Countries around the world begin teaching English among other languages within the first few years of school and are fluent in at least 2 by their teenage years.
B. In American schools foreign languages are often not required and are rarely offered prior to the high school level.
C. As an 18 year old student I am fluent in only English and have a rudimentary knowledge of two other languages, but only by choice.
D. Language opens many doors in the ways of communication, understanding of words and their origins, and languages allow you to take upon the mindset of a culture as you immerse yourself in the nuances of meanings within their speech.
3. Organ Donation
A. Identify the uses ones body can provide once deceased, the benefits they provide to those in need, and the information they can provide to those in scientific fields.
B. Possibly persuade people against archaic and harmful practices such as cremation and casket burial.
4. Cloning
A. Inform people of the implications and benefits cloning provides such as the ability to right the wrongs humanity has made in the forms of resurrecting animals from forced human extinction.
B. Change the minds of those who find moral or religious conflicts with the subject.
5. More or Less Military
A. Identify and elaborate upon the sheer amount of money America is spending on defense
B. Point out the numerous uses for the money spent on defense and the implications of the money we are spending versus the money we are making
C. Show the astronomic amount we spend each year on defense versus the next 15 highest spending countries and show the amount our adversaries and enemies are spending.
I like your idea of doing the TED Talk on organ donation. The points you make are good, Its helpful to those in need, and it has the possibility of advancing technology and science. But I also wonder what your purpose is, is it to persuade people to become an organ donor do you have personal experience with this? why are you interested in the subject? The other topic that looked really interesting was Cloning. You mention "ability to right the wrongs humanity has made" this seems like you feel strongly that cloning can work and will help. Your second bullet under cloning says you want to change the minds who have moral or religious grievances about cloning, are you going to show why they are against it?
ReplyDeleteMilitary - it would be so cool for you to do a sort of narrative history of military structure. Fun fact - the first "professional" military was Rome. Before then, it was just rich people looking to loot from the people they killed. After Rome fell, military reverted back to this system until VERY recently. You could also look at the build-up of the "military industrial complex" that Eisenhower hated so much, and how much military spending shapes our economic and social policies.
ReplyDeleteCloning would work as either an "oh cool science" aspect, a way to build up to genetically modified foods to save the world, or a persuasive piece in which you lay out the arguments for/against and make your own call.
I think organ donation might be a little rougher for you in terms of grabbing onto something to talk about, UNLESS you either tie it into cloning (i recently saw a TED that did something similar), or a personal narrative.
Bilingual education would look really cool, especially if you examine the language proficiencies of people who speak more than 1 language. It's true - if you speak more than one language you prove proficient in both to a higher degree than norm. This includes text speak! You could dig into this as a narrative with a huge persuasive bent, or you could compare/contrast our educational policies to other nations, or you could build a cause/effect - how do our educational policies on bilingual speech effect our place in the world? What might it say about us as a nation that we are so intolerant of other cultures to the point where we don't even want to learn the languages?
TV violence might be an interesting expose in this sense - statistically speaking, this kind of violence only affects those who are already violent. Perhaps reconfigure this - why do we as a society want to scapegoat television, internet, and video game violence? What might the real causes be? How do we compare to other nations?
- Japan and South Korea have pop entertainment which we could best define as "pornography" with heavy doses of ultra-violence. However, those two nations have such a low crime rate that many areas don't even have dedicated violent crimes units. I wonder why that might be?