Here is an instagram shot of the progress on the Stocker AstroScience Center which has been championed by TEDxFIU 2012 Speaker, James Webb.
This facility will open later this year. A full press release is coming in the next month. Stay tuned.
An increased demand for organ transplants and donations has complicated the lines between life and death while making the judgment more crucial than ever, Elizabeth Price Foley explains.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Nothing is certain except for death and taxes.” While our bank accounts are reliable indicators that tax time has come and gone, indicators of death aren’t always so clear.
Declaring death is important for several reasons, including for the purposes of organ donation. As transplants become easier, demand for organs has increased faster than supply. To meet this growing need, the industry must find transplantable organs beyond willing individuals indicating their post-death wishes – typically after cardiopulmonary death.
The other option, based on current legal definitions, is donation upon brain death. The definition is clear – brain death is the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem ¬– but the application much more fuzzy.
Foley points to two main ambiguities in the real-world setting – testing and training – that need to be standardized for us to have complete confidence in the practice of using organs from brain dead patients. Until then, we’re left to the judgment of the jurisdictions where we die.
Watch Foley’s full talk here:
Philip Koenig started his nonprofit, Leading Miami, in 2009, when he was in high school. Three years, 300 workshops and 600 middle school students later, he shares his formula for teaching leadership at TEDxFIU.
Being engaged and feeling empowered can motivate any adult to new heights. Those same keys in the hands of a 12-year-old – or hundreds of 12-year-olds – have the power to change a city and more.
His five-part curriculum is familiar – it is not only what he teaches, but it is how he got to this point in the first place. Every step he teaches is one he’s been through before, whether or not he was conscious of it at the time.
Koenig’s favorite part of the program is the small-scale project that allows students to “ignite their passion,” as Koenig puts it. Passion projects that students have taken on so far include re-launching a defunct after-school arts program and initiating a school-wide recycling effort.
Some leaders may be born, but Leading Miami shows that leadership can also be learned.
Watch his full talk below:
Ileana Rodriguez shares her unique perspective on disabilities and devices and inspires us to pursue our goals despite perceived obstacles.
What do you see when someone enters a room? Their physical traits? Their clothes?
When Ileana Rodriguez enters, many people notice her wheelchair first. She has been in a wheelchair since the age of 13 and since then she has achieved heights most walking folks can only imagine. Still, many people still see the device first.
Rodriguez learned early on that, while her wheelchair set her apart from the crowd on land, in the water she was like everyone else. Her device “disappeared.”
Her desire to be seen for who she is, not where she sits, inspired the design of a dress for one of her FIU architecture classes. Unlike her classmates, who aimed to protect themselves from physical elements like rain and heat, her creation protected her from people – people who couldn’t see beyond the wheelchair.
Rodriguez has certainly proved herself. She and her fellow athletes in the 2012 Paralympics Games are as dedicated to their sport as their Olympic counterparts.
Though the American Record-holder didn’t place in London, Rodriguez did fulfill a dream that nearly every athlete holds: to represent her country on the world stage. And she did it without her wheelchair.
Watch her full TEDxFIU talk:
The world is a dangerous place. Professor Richard Olson, an expert in disaster preparedness, only needed a few seconds to prove that to the audience listening to his TEDxFIU talk. His maps told the whole story: at any given time, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes threaten some of the Earth’s largest cities; and our planet’s population is only getting larger.
“Natural disasters. It trips off the tongue,” he said. “But natural disasters? Not so much. Natural events? Yes. Nature provides those. But the disasters, what we put in harm’s way, well, that’s on us.”
Population Growth Areas. Credit: PBS, NOVA
And as our population grows, so do the risks of catastrophic loss of life. Here’s another problem: For many countries around the globe, if their major city is struck by disaster, the entire nation is paralyzed.
So Olson has spent his entire career convincing world leaders that building massive cities ultimately contributes to high death tolls. He calls it the 21st century imperative: create “second” cities that spread populations out. “We need to create national tiers of second cities. They need to be safer, they need to be vital. In many countires, if you lose the lead city, the country goes down. Second cities would spread the risk.
Dr. Pedro “Joe” Greer challenges physicians to look beyond the business of medicine and truly improve lives in their communities.
For the first time in the history of our nation, today’s children will have shorter life expectancy than their parents.
The United States is one of the top spenders on health care among industrialized nations, yet has some of the worst health outcomes.
These are just two of many sobering statistics that have convinced Greer that there is something very wrong with the current state of the medical establishment.
Greer explains that many of the factors leading to poor health in America are not scientific, but social – things like poverty, violence, racism and food deserts. These are factors most doctors are not trained to consider, yet would make a huge difference on patient outcomes. The business of medicine has placed a premium on treating symptoms, rather than preventing them in the first place.
The solution, Greer argues, begins in the medical school classroom, where aspiring physicians should be trained in social accountability alongside human anatomy.
A social mission is not just talk for Greer, but also practice and implementation at FIU’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine. Along with traditional training, Greer and his colleagues have another mission: To instill in their students an understanding of social determinants and a commitment to the communities where their patients live through interdisciplinary and hands-on experiences, such as NeighborhoodHELP.
Watch the full talk below:
Professor James Webb argues that we are now at a crossroads in space exploration and education.
“With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly.”
This quote from Edwin Powell Hubble is part of a longer thought on the limits and reach of telescopes during his time on earth, yet it plays well into what Extra-Galactic Astronomer and Professor James Webb articulated on the stage at TEDxFIU.
While professor Webb grew up, Carl Sagan made space education accessible to his generation through the Cosmos series. Man landed on the moon and one of the most popular television shows of its time, Star Trek, dealt with exploring the far reaches of space. Space education and exploration was embedded in pop-culture and the possibilites for new knowledge of the universe were infinite.
Studying the planets have taught us so much about our own. The planet Venus is a living example of the effects of global warming. A crater the size of Earth slammed into Jupiter in 1994. Even more important is the perspective one gets from the Hubble deep field image released in 1996. It represents a speck in the sky yet shows over 1,500 galaxies.
We have gained so much knowledge but Webb argues that we should be much further along. He would have expected bases on the Moon or Mars landings by now. Instead, NASA’s brain trust is being disseminated, there are no missions on the horizon and funding for the next advance in space telescopes (The James Webb Telescope) is year to year and not fully secured.
Unless we act soon and pay attention to what it seems the world has forgotten we are risking the future of humankind.
Ximena Prugue’s talk at TEDxFIU inspires us to consider how easy it might be to alleviate the issues of energy poverty through technological advances like solar-powered lights.
Energy poverty is something most of us here in the United States would equate with camping. But in other parts of the world it results in health issues, diseases and even death. In rural India, entire villages rely on kerosine lights at night and cook with cow manure briquettes This creates a 
“lethal cocktail”, as Ximena puts it, of fumes and harmful chemicals which result in the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
Ximena was seventeen years old when she started a non-profit organization called Giving the Green Light to India. She sought out a vendor, raised some money and journeyed to a land she knew very little about with a friend and a bag of 250 solar powered 
lights. Her adventure actually led to her academic focus on mechanical engineering. She is inspired by the ability to engineer a product or system that will ease or possibly eliminate energy poverty and she is eager to pick up her project where she left off when she graduates. Ximena understands that while this is a small change for the three villages she visited, it can have a profound effect on awareness and help inspire her generation to keep searching for solutions.
And so we mark the start of an amazing new tradition at FIU. This is truly a labor of love for the team involved. Here the FIU News coverage of the event. We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday weekend.
Michael Jackson is alive. Everyone who listened to his music, bought his albums, mimicked his dance moves and felt his message has made sure of that. Tony Succar is a composer, performer and producer here in Miami who started a project called Unity, a Latin Tribute to the King of Pop. At TEDxFIU we witnessed this amazing fusion of MJs original music with Tony’s signature latin composition.
“We did this to prove to the world how important Michael is to all of us. Not only his music but his message of unity. I am Peruvian but grew up here and when people ask where I’m from, I say from all over the place. We are here for one reason, to unite, ” said Tony.
Tony’s Unity Project Band performed two iconic songs at TEDxFIU, Billie Jean and Black & White. Between performances, Tony reminded us what happens with the fusion of instruments and music influences.
“We have the timbales, the conga and the mambo which come from Afro-Cuba, this all comes from Sub-Saharan Africa, just like the African American electric guitar, this is the soul and funk which Michael was a part of as well … so this is what happens when you fuse the different instruments and music together, that is the beauty of life, fusing different backgrounds from different places.”
We are working on the final produced TEDxFIU video of his performance, in the meantime check out this short clip of the rehearsal:
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