Latest news with #TEDtalk
ABC News
5 days ago
- Science
- ABC News
Darwin uni's inaugural TEDx event welcomes regional expertise to global stage
Storytelling is key to creating an engaging TED talk — but breaking down a subject you understand so deeply, to share that knowledge with the world, comes with a whole lot of nerves. Ten experts from various fields are gearing up to speak on the global TED stage for the first time, and the ABC has been given an insight into how it all works. This Saturday's sold-out TEDx Charles Darwin University (CDU) show will hear from wildlife gurus, tech experts, environmental academics, social thought-leaders and more. PhD candidate and crocodile expert Brandon Sideleau said preparing for the big event was "very much a team effort" between the university and its academics. "I sent my script to the team and they said 'that's not going to work' because I was using some [technical] terminology," he said. Mr Sideleau ditched the jargon in favour of storytelling, using real-life examples and photos to help the audience understand why crocodile attacks happen and how interactions with the predator can be limited without culling. It's a timely reminder since the reptile has already been hunted to extinction in six countries and remains "critically endangered" in others. "I'm nervous for sure, being on a stage of that scale and impact, but I'm also looking forward to getting the information out there," he said. Mr Sideleau said it was important he pointed out "just how rare saltwater crocodile attacks are" locally. Despite the fact at least a quarter of the global saltwater crocodile population lives in the Top End, Mr Sideleau's work exploring "the true extent" of fatal attacks found most of them happened overseas. He discovered, across 14 countries, there were almost 300 crocodile attacks each year — about 150 of them proving fatal. "I was noticing that that there were a lot of incidents in Indonesia especially," he said. The NT researcher found "massive differences" in attack numbers due to the need for people in developing nations to bathe, fish and collect water around crocodile habitat. "Here in Australia, almost all victims are attacked while engaging in leisure activities … compared to middle-income countries in general, 30 per cent of people are attacked while engaging in activities related to sanitation," he said. Mr Sideleau said work needed to happen to help developing nations access plumbing, water pumps and wells. CDU research fellow Sharna Motlap, who is presenting this weekend, has spoken at conferences in the past but never on the TED stage. She's also feeling nervous ahead of the big show, but has a similar story-led strategy to Mr Sideleau that she hopes will engage the audience. Ms Motlap said academic papers were "just love letters to other researchers", so she'll use storytelling to unpack complex ideas in a way the average viewer can understand. "There's this great analogy in this book [which] discusses the concept of 'the best story wins,'" she said. Ms Motlap's work, which looks to safeguard traditional dance by creating digital replicas, will be framed in an entertaining way — so the audience can expect to see video snippets from her lab and references to the famous Macarena. She said it was important to help the crowd understand the research because "it's not about the technology, it's about what it can do". In the same way Mr Sideleau's TED talk hopes to influence a better future, Ms Motlap wants to explain the benefits her project can have on future generations. She's studying the same kind of technology that was used to produce the movie Avatar but, rather than creating for entertainment's sake, her work is protecting traditional culture and knowledge. While director James Cameron's team used motion capture to make Na'vi movements reflect the actors playing the fictional blue characters, Ms Motlap has used the technology to digitise Indigenous dance. "We place reflective markers on the dancer's body and then we use the system of cameras to track the reflective markers," she said. It's a significant step forward from standard video recordings, with computer models able to calculate the angles of a dancer's joints and how force is applied to parts of their body. Beyond immortalising the movements, her research protects the Indigenous culture and knowledge associated with those dances from being lost over time. She described the territory as "a unique part of the world" and said there was plenty of excitement about the chance to share local research with a global audience.
Washington Post
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Why drag queen Pattie Gonia is werking from the mountaintops
It's been a big year for Pattie Gonia: She lip-synched 'Defying Gravity' in front of Cynthia Erivo at the Out 100 party, performed a sold-out show during WorldPride in D.C. and became the first person to deliver a TED talk in full drag. These would be remarkable achievements for any drag queen. But Pattie Gonia is not any drag queen. She's a mustachioed, anti-capitalist, environmentalist activist drag queen.
Forbes
12-06-2025
- Forbes
Seven Deadly Tells Of AI Writing
There's a new voice creeping across the internet. It sounds confident, insightful, and polished, made of measured meaningless prose delivered with oh so dramatic flourishes. It's in press releases, social media posts, and student essays. This amateurish easy-to-spot style is characterized by a number of tells which, when revealed, will change the way you read content. I call it The TED-talk style. The TED-talk style seeks to create engagement, drama, and snappy punch lines that border on insight but are decidedly not insightful. If you know what to listen for, the tells of GPT writing are everywhere. Through limited personal research, I've found many of these same tics in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Grok. In fairness, any writer could have one or more of these ticks, but there are so many to pick from, you can tell. Here are some examples from a substack post by a well-known marketing influencer with tens of thousands of followers which landed in my inbox Monday. The topic is AI, and it is clearly written by AI. In fairness, only the first ten examples are from his newsletter. Here are the tells. Starting with the most annoying one. Contrastive Rhetorical Framing 'So Amazon isn't just buying content. They're buying credibility.' 'This isn't just about revenue diversification. It's about survival.' 'Quality journalism isn't just surviving the AI revolution—it's becoming the premium product that differentiates good AI from bad AI.' Asking and Answering Rhetorical Questions. This writing tic has traditionally been associated with bad high-school level essays. Why would one begin a thought with a question? A TED talk needs some drama, but that's contrived in a social media post. For comprehension, context is as important as content. ChatGPT can't tell the difference. 'Financial terms? Undisclosed.' 'What changed? The math did.' 'Why? Because human credibility matters.' Dashes Everywhere – For No Reason. ChatGPT favors dashes – over commas. This is the easiest tell – really. 'Amazon can now feed Times articles—plus content from NYT Cooking and The Athletic—directly into Alexa and their AI models.' 'The old model—hire more writers to chase more pageviews to sell more ads—is breaking down in real time.' Other tics to look out for. Triplet Framing. 'Fast, cheap, and out of control.' Clever alliteration to a bosa nova beat. Triples confer rhythm, cleverness and creativity to suggest glib authority. They are often characterized by clever alliteration. It's not necessarily wrong to use triplets but AI uses them compulsively, to wrap up paragraphs with authoritative style. 'Not for advertising. Not for distribution. For AI training.' The Inspirational Pivot. As easy to spot as contrastive framing. Example: 'This isn't just about AI. It's about humanity.' This is a head fake is to elevate tech talk into TED talk. It shifts from the specific to the abstract to create fake profundity. Universal Authority Without Source. Example: 'Studies show that storytelling is 22 times more memorable than facts.' Which studies? From where? This tell launders opinion into truth. In this, Perplexity is better than ChatGPT as it returns attributions. Quotes without attribution. 'AI is the new electricity,' said Musk. Really? I ask the bot. When and where did he say this? When interrogated, ChatGPT admits it is fabricated, and offers to go searching for more quotes. This is the flypaper on which students are often caught. Their critical thinking skills aren't up to challenging the AI. The reasons writers (and student writers) fall victim to these tropes is that they are human. A student can't recognize the traps: if it sounds good, it is good. Professional writers (not me!) can be lazy, which leads to AI slop. You've written two stories, it's time for lunch, you glance at the prose AI put out and you decide, meh, close enough, even though, on examination, it's not. Since its launch more than two years ago, ChatGPT's main flaw was delivering overblown, long-winded, and content-free paragraphs. After the March 2025 update, the number of meaningless sentences finally declined, only to be replaced by this very specific TED-talk rhetorical style, which is infecting every model, because they are continuously trained on one another's content and style. A good TED talk is substantive, fresh, engaging, persuasive and dramatic. Out of context this style is a parody of itself. It is, as author William Faulkner wrote, 'sound and fury, signifying nothing.'
