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Wednesday, March 3, 2010

City Lights TED Ahead: Big Kenny Joins 'Nashville's Greatest Thinkers and Doers' at TEDxNashville

Posted by Jim Ridley on Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 11:10 AM

click to enlarge big-kenny.jpg
David Byrne, Sheryl Crow, Bill Gates, Temple Grandin, KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, Jamie Oliver, architect David Rockwell -- these were some of the speakers you missed Feb. 9-13 in Long Beach, Calif., unless you attended the sold-out TED conference. Not to worry: Montgomery Bell Academy is hosting one of TED's independently organized auxiliary events, TEDxNashville, on March 21. If you possess a copy of McSweeney's, a Sufjan Stevens album or a LEED certification, you've likely heard of TED, which stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design." Devoted to the propagation of "ideas worth spreading," the nonprofit has fostered the arts of public speaking, storytelling and forward thinking, inviting a broad range of public intellectuals to address anything from graphic design to human genetics in a curated forum. The latest announced speaker for the Nashville event is country star and humanitarian Big Kenny, who joins a roster that includes Titans legend Eddie George, award-winning Meharry researcher Dr. James Hildreth, brigade surgeon Maj. Scott Harrington, performance poet Minton Sparks, TSU President Melvin N. Johnson, ethnomusicologist Greg Barz, SPHERE executive director Suzi Peel and VUMC diabetes researcher Maureen Gannon. More will be announced soon, and an up-to-date list may be found on the website. Tickets may be purchased here for the inaugural Nashville event. In the meantime, care to speculate who should be added to the list, or what the ideas worth spreading might be?

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No disrespect to any of the actual smart people who will be at TEDx but these TEDx "franchises" have very little to do with the real TED even and the extreme quality control they put behind the speakers. Kind of bastardizes the whole TED name a bit.

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Posted by not a TED speaker on March 3, 2010 at 1:32 PM

why wasn't i invited??

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Posted by john rich on March 3, 2010 at 1:38 PM

This got my hopes up that Temple Grandin and Benoit Mandelbrot would be at the Nashville TED.

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Posted by Tony Youngblood on March 3, 2010 at 2:12 PM

Sorry about that.

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Posted by mr. pink on March 3, 2010 at 2:36 PM

I am curious how the speakers are being selected, and what it is the organizers expect them to bring to the table. So far, it looks like a hodgepodge — which isn't unlike TED prime, except a hodgepodge looks a lot more compelling when it consists of Gates, Byrne, Mandelbrot, Grandin et al.

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Posted by mr. pink on March 3, 2010 at 4:04 PM

Lets hope it's better than the motivational seminar earlier this year with Rudy Guliani. It was horrible. He was dead on his feet and another person got up and did a 30 min commercial for TD Ameritrade. It was a complete waste of money. You know what Rudy's big tip was to succeed in business...buy a computer. I'm not paraphrasing. If you didn't go, you didn't miss anything

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Posted by waldie25 on November 29, 2011 at 3:23 PM
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