this is tim ferriss circa 1979 a.d. age two. you can tell by the power squat, i was a very confident boy -- and not without reason. i had a very charming routine at the time, which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day's work, doing their crossword puzzles, watching television. i would run into the living room, jump up on the couch, rip the cushions off, throw them on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs and run out because i was the incredible hulk. (laughter) obviously, you see the resemblance. and this routine went on for some time.

when i was seven i went to summer camp. my parents found it necessary for peace of mind. and at noon each day the campers would go to a pond, where they had floating docks. you could jump off the end into the deep end. i was born premature. i was always very small. my left lung had collapsed when i was born. and i've always had buoyancy problems. so water was something that scared me to begin with. but i would go in on occasion. and on one particular day, the campers were jumping through inner tubes, they were diving through inner tubes. and i thought this would be great fun. so i dove through the inner tube, and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles. and i tried to come up for air, and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube. and i went wild eyed and thought i was going to die. a camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us. from that point onward i was terrified of swimming. that is something that i did not get over. my inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments. that is when i realized that i was not the incredible hulk.

but there is a happy ending to this story. at age 31 -- that's my age now -- in august i took two weeks to re-examine swimming, and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming. and went from swimming one lap -- so 20 yards -- like a drowning monkey, at about 200 beats per minute heart rate -- i measured it -- to going to montauk on long island, close to where i grew up, and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water, getting out and feeling better than when i went in. and i came out, in my speedos, european style, feeling like the incredible hulk.

and that's what i want everyone in here to feel like, the incredible hulk, at the end of this presentation. more specifically, i want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer, a world-class language learner, and a tango champion. and i would like to share my art. if i have an art, it's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me. so, moving onward.

swimming, first principles. first principles, this is very important. i find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions. and the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said, "i will go a year without any stimulants" -- this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy -- "if you can complete a one kilometer open water race." so the clock started ticking. i started seeking out triathletes because i found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did. i tried kickboards. my feet would slice through the water like razors, i wouldn't even move. i would leave demoralized, staring at my feet. hand paddles, everything. even did lessons with olympians -- nothing helped. and then chris sacca, who is now a dear friend mine, had completed an iron man with 103 degree temperature, said, "i have the answer to your prayers." and he introduced me to the work of a man named terry laughlin who is the founder of total immersion swimming. that set me on the road to examining biomechanics.

so here are the new rules of swimming, if any of you are afraid of swimming, or not good at it. the first is, forget about kicking. very counterintuitive. so it turns out that propulsion isn't really the problem. kicking harder doesn't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion. the problem is hydrodynamics. so what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. and you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. the only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. the body is denser than water. 95 percent of it would be, at least, submerged naturally.

so you end up, number three, not swimming, in the case of freestyle, on your stomach, as many people think, reaching on top of the water. but actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left, maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible. so let's look at some examples. this is terry. and you can see that he's extending his right arm below his head and far in front. and so his entire body really is underwater. the arm is extended below the head. the head is held in line with the spine, so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up -- very important, especially for people with lower body fat. here is an example of the stroke. so you don't kick. but you do use a small flick. you can see this is the left extension. then you see his left leg. small flick, and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side. and the entry point for his right hand -- notice this, he's not reaching in front and catching the water. rather, he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm, and then propelling himself by streamlining -- very important. incorrect, above, which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you. not their fault, honestly. and i'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment. below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what i did, which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach, no video monitoring. and now i love swimming. i can't wait to go swimming. i'll be doing a swimming lesson later, for myself, if anyone wants to join me.

英语ted演讲稿篇2

dear mr. li dear my schoolmates good morning!

entrusted by the first group of schoolmates the topic of my speech is necessity for lifelong learning.

about lifelong learning there is the famous proverb in chinese: never too old to learn. confucius the famous educator in ancient china also said: if i learn the classical literature "yi" from the age of 50 i would never make so many mistakes.

to sum up necessity of lifelong learning is mainly based on the following reasons: first of all the knowledge of modern society changes so quickly if not to learn new knowledge in time you will soon fall behind the times. for example using the mobile internet technology we can using a mobile phone to book a taxi pay various fees buy all kinds of goods etc. if a person may not grasp the knowledge especially senior people they will not use the convenience brought by internet.

secondly diligent in thinking can effectively prevent the occurrence of alzheimer's disease. this conclusion has been verified in medicine. finally a person who maintains the habit of lifelong learning can have a stronger advantage in occupation choice. this is not only good for the person but also for the country and the society. some people complain that they have too much work and have no time to read a book usually. but in fact lifelong learning is not only reading or having a class we can browse the web read e-books receiving distance courses through the internet conveniently. we can learn not only knowledge but also skills.

age cannot be a barrier to our lifelong learning. chu shijian once the king of china's tobacco industry had suffered a great setback before retirement. he was even put into prison. but at the age of 75 he began to study orange planting technology seriously and finally have a huge success in this area ten years late. harland sandoz of america began learning the fast-food lethal at his age of 83. when he was 88 years old his fast food chain often kentucky had distributed each corner of the world.

therefore lifelong learning is never too late to start let's start our plan today. thank you.

英语ted演讲稿篇3

a word has that change the world ——smile and the world smiles with you good morning, ladies and gentlemen. today i am very happy to be here to share with you some of my thoughts on the topic of “a word has that change the world——smile and the world smiles with you “. first, please look at my face. do you know what i’m doing? yes, quite right, i’m smiling. i like smiling, because it makes me more confident and more popular. don’t you think it important? can you imagine a world without smiles? can you bear seeing sad faces here and there? what a gloomy world it would without smiles!

smile is so important of the world; it also can change the world! smile and the world smiles with you!

do you still remember the smiles from someone in your mind? what’s your feeling about that? the majority of people are trying to pursue happiness through their lifetime, but what is the root of happiness? i take the strong position that one of the secrets is smile. smile makes the world go around.

it’s easier to make new friends through charming and friendly smiles. smile always creates a good impression. maybe we cannot remember someone’s name after meeting each other for the first time; however, his

or her smile impressed us. but people sometimes overlook the importance of smiling since it is so simple. it seems that people are always in such a hurry for their own business that they complain a lot about the lack of happiness in life and some people even want to be harry porter to learn the magic spell of happiness.

ladies and gentlemen, every one of us want to know exactly well what the spell actually is and the spell is can change the world. what is it? so simple and just at hand. that’s smile.

smile is such a magic spell. it is a kind of emotional contact. it makes strangers becomes friends. it makes parents and children understand each other better and it makes the love between lovers deeper.

smile is such a magic spell. it’s also a kind of encouragement. it makes people feel warm in ice and snow. it gives thirsty people power to walk on in a dessert. it makes cowards become brave and it makes people see hope in desperate situations.

so please remember smile make your life brighter. smile and the world smiles with you. every time you smile you give yourself a perfect chance to enjoy life. every time you smile, you bring the brilliant sunshine to the whole world around you as well as to yourself.

a smile is the common language of the world, is the perfect way to communicate. smile to the world's stability and peace is hard to imagine that role. a smile can change the world , can change the way we live and

attitude.

so please smile, it will not only make your life happiness, will let others feel happy, still can let the whole world is filled with the taste of happiness!!!!!

my speech is over, thank you very much!

英语ted演讲稿篇4

dear students and teachers ,respected judgers:

good afternoon.it’s my great honor to be here and give a speech about reading and learning english .

as we all know ,english is an international language. if we want to keep up with the world , we must learn the language well. how to learn englishwell ?in my opinion the best way to learn english is to read englisheveryday. reading some world famous books is really a good way to learn not only the languagebut also western history and culture as well. so we can understand the language better. fromshakespear to mark twain, fromnewton to sharlockholmes , from tom sawyer to alice, these famous writer and their characters are all my friends.reading newspapersand magazines are also helpful for us to know some new words and different ways of expressions. from newspapers, we can quickly widen our vocabulary and learn about the world. poems are also good choices. from poems, we can learn lots of graceful words in english .all these will make our articles colorful and help us to learn english better. surfing the internet you can also find some good english-learning websites. you can find millions of e-books on line. it’s a time of free reading. so, why not enjoy reading and learning english ?

“a good book is like a good friend.” “books are the ladder of human progress.”by reading i can learn so much about the world .reading is not only beneficial to widen your horizon but also

helpful to master the language.by reading i made so many famous friends. while reading ,it’s just like communicating with many great minds through time and space. by reading i learn to find the truth of life . i learn to think aboutlife .i learn to understand and love.by reading some world

famous english booksi gain both strength and courage to overcome all the difficulty i met. reading makes me laugh. i can’t help laughing when i read the stories by mark twain. reading makes me think. while reading holmes，i myself has become the famous detective . my heart goes up and down with the development of the story. it’s really exciting,right ? reading makes me cry. so , do you think it’s really important to read english books everyday? by reading, my english is improving all the time . i know how to express myself in a better way because i learn so much form books. books to our minds are just like food to our bodies. they nourish our minds.

here is some advice for you to read and learn english . first, read out loudly. this can help you remember the new words better. second, guess the meaning of new words instead of looking it up in a dictionary. this will exercise your brain, so you will be able to understand it better. at last, if you don’t like the book, just close it. you’ll remember nothing unless you really like reading it. so , it’s really important to choose some good books to read.

above all ,let’senjoy the happiness of reading and learning english . let our thoughts travel through time and space to discover the true beauty of our lives.

thank you !

英语ted演讲稿篇5

i gave this talk at facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. i said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. and she said, "i learned something today. i learned that i need to keep my hand up." "what do you mean?"she said, "youre giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. i had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. i put my hand down, and i noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men." and i thought to myself,"wow, if its me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk.

英语ted演讲稿篇6

my subject today is learning. and in that spirit, i want to spring on you all a pop quiz. ready? when does learning begin? now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher. or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork. maybe you've encountered the zero-to-three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones. and so your answer to my question would be: learning begins at birth.

well today i want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology. and that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb. now i'm a science reporter. i write books and magazine articles. and i'm also a mother. and those two roles came together for me in a book that i wrote called "origins." "origins" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins. fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb. now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me. i was myself pregnant while i was doing the research for the book. and one of the most fascinating insights i took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it.

when we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. today i want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies.

first of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices. because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled. one researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of charlie brown's teacher in the old "peanuts" cartoon. but the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily. and because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's.

how can we know this? newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking. researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice. babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one. scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored. this is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of dr. seuss' "the cat in the hat" while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb. my favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. so fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into.

a study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language. french babies cry on a rising note while german babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages. now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? it may have evolved to aid the baby's survival. from the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it -- its mother. it even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language.

but it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. it's also tastes and smells. by seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning. the flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus. babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world. in one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water. six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it. the offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more.

a sort of french version of this experiment was carried out in dijon, france where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life. babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as "yuck." what this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat. fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food. they're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth.

now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons. but before i get to that, i want to address something that you may be wondering about. the notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus -- like playing mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. but actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that. much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her fetus. they make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. the fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. and often it does something more. it treats these maternal contributions as information, as what i like to call biological postcards from the world outside.

so what a fetus is learning about in utero is not mozart's "magic flute" but answers to questions much more critical to its survival. will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? the pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind. the resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert.

to conclude, i want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born. in the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of world war ii, german troops blockaded western holland, turning away all shipments of food. the opening of the nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades -- so cold the water in the canals froze solid. soon food became scarce, with many dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day -- a quarter of what they consumed before the war. as weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs. by the beginning of may, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted. the specter of mass starvation loomed. and then on may 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when holland was liberated by the allies.

the "hunger winter," as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more. but there was another population that was affected -- the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality. but others wouldn't be discovered for many years. decades after the "hunger winter," researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. these individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. they have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance -- a precursor of diabetes.

why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? one explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. when food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver. this keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease.

but that may not be all that's going on. it seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. they're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb. the fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. and the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats. the meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation. this story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems -- an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival. faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood.

the real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty. this is what happened to the children of the dutch "hunger winter." and their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result. bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war western diet. the world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born.

here's another story. at 8:46 a.m. on september 11th, 2019, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the world trade center in new york -- commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on wall street. 1,700 of these people were pregnant women. when the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster -- the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives.

about a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the world trade center attack. in the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or ptsd, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to ptsd -- an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester. in other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero.

now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering. but there's another way of thinking about ptsd. what looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances. in a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of ptsd -- a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger -- could save someone's life. the notion that the prenatal transmission of ptsd risk is adaptive is still speculative, but i find it rather poignant. it would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, "be careful."

let me be clear. fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy. it's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation. that important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb. learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined.

thank you.

英语ted演讲稿篇7

when i was about three or four years old, i remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and i remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing.

and my mum said, "darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page."

and i thought to myself, "but that's what i want to do. i love stories. i want to read." little did i know that i would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true.

i was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. the condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. little did i know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that i'd been born at the right place and the right time, that i was in a country where i could participate in the technological revolution.

there are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from north america, europe, japan and other developed parts of the world. computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but i think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. and so i want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person i am today. it's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. but let me tell you a bit about it today.

when i was five, i went to school and i learned braille. it's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and i can feel them with my fingers. in fact, i think they're putting up my grade six report. i don't know where julian morrow got that from. (laughter) i was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. (laughter)

when you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. look for it. have you noticed it? i do. i look for it all the time.

(laughter)

when i was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so i'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way i could read. when i was in high school, i got my first philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. i could have family and friends read me material, and i could then read it back as many times as i needed. and it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. for example, when i studied at graduate school at queen's university in canada, the prisoners at the collins bay jail agreed to help me. i gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. as one of them said to me, "ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment."

(laughter)

but think of it. these men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities i'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help.

well, i went back and became an academic at melbourne's monash university, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. in fact, in my office in 1990, i had 18 miles of tape. students, family and friends all read me material. mrs. lois doery, whom i later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. one of the reasons i agreed to give this talk today was that i was hoping that lois would be here so i could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. but sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. but i thank you here, lois, from this platform.

(applause)

i saw my first apple computer in 1984, and i thought to myself, "this thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." how very wrong i was. in 1987, in the month our eldest son gerard was born, i got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. see it up there? and you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. (laughter) it's a blind computer. (laughter) it's a keynote gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. (laughter) don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (laughter) i think there's more memory in my watch.

it was invented by russell smith, a passionate inventor in new zealand who was trying to help blind people. sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2019, but his memory lives on in my heart. it meant, for the first time, i could read back what i had typed into it. it had a speech synthesizer. i'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. this now allowed me to read back what i'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory.

in 1974, the great ray kurzweil, the american inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. and his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of january, 1976. i saw my first commercially available kurzweil in march 19xx, and it blew me away, and in september 19xx, the month that my associate professorship at monash university was announced, the law school got one, and i could use it. for the first time, i could read what i wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. i didn't have to be nice to people!

(laughter)

i no longer would be censored. for example, i was too shy then, and i'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. (laughter) but, you know, i could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and -- (laughter) (applause)

now, the kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. that's what it's shrunk to. and now i can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. i can keep up with my friends.

there are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that i haven't met. one is another american inventor ted henter. ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. he then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. but in 19xx, he teamed up with bill joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the net or from what was on the computer. it's called jaws, job access with speech, and it sounds like this.

(jaws speaking)

ron mccallum: isn't that slow?

(laughter) you see, if i read like that, i'd fall asleep. i slowed it down for you. i'm going to ask that we play it at the speed i read it. can we play that one?

(jaws speaking)

(laughter)

rm: you know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly.

(laughter) (applause)

this technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iphone and on yours as well. but, you know, i find reading with machines a very lonely process. i grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and i loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. do you love being read to? and one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, mary reading to me and the children down near manly beach "harry potter and the philosopher's stone." isn't that a great book? i still love being close to someone reading to me. but i wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life.

of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. after all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on cds using the digital access system known as daisy. but when i'm reading with synthetic voices, i love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice.

now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. many websites we can't read using jaws and the other technologies. websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the world wide web consortium 3, known as w3c, has developed worldwide standards for the internet. and we want all internet users or internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. there are other barriers brought about by our laws. for example, australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. but those books can't travel across borders. for example, in spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in spanish. in argentina, there are 50,000. in no other latin american country are there more than a couple of thousand. but it's not legal to transport the books from spain to latin america. there are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the united states, britain, canada, australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where english is the first and the second language. and remember i was telling you about harry potter. well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different english-speaking countries: britain, united states, canada, australia, and new zealand all had to have separate readings of harry potter.

and that's why, next month in morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. it's something that a group of countries and the world blind union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. i want that to happen.

(applause)

my life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the university of sydney law school, where i served a term as dean, or now as i sit on the united nations committee on the rights of persons with disabilities, in geneva. i've indeed been a very fortunate human being.

i wonder what the future will hold. the technology will advance even further, but i can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, "remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers." i'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world.

i'd like to thank my researcher hannah martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, professor mary crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. i want to thank her too.

i think i have to say goodbye now. bless you. thank you very much.

(applause) yay! (applause) okay. okay. okay. okay. okay. (applause)

英语ted演讲稿篇8

in 2024 — not so long ago — a professor who was then at columbia university took that case and made it [howard] roizen. and he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. he changed exactly one word: "heidi" to "howard." but that one word made a really big difference. he then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought heidi and howard were equally competent, and that's good.the bad news was that everyone liked howard. he's a great guy. you want to work for him. you want to spend the day fishing with him. but heidi? not so sure. she's a little out for herself. she's a little political.you're not sure you'd want to work for her. this is the complication. we have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the a, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not. the saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. and i'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but i think important.

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英语ted演讲稿8篇