Summary: This program from the Famous Composers series introduces the life and music of George Frideric Handel, beginning with his childhood and early musical development in Halle, Germany. The film follows Handel to Italy, where he cultivated his serious interest in opera, and contextualizes the religious conditions that the Lutheran composer faced in the Roman Catholic country. Handel then moved to...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Based on Daniel Goleman's best-selling book, this classic program spotlights Dr. Goleman as he argues that strong interpersonal skills, not just IQ, shape a person's prospects. According to the acclaimed clinical psychologist's research, people who are emotionally intelligent tend to have more success as parents and partners as well as in their chosen field of employment because they have...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1999
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Summary: Daniel Goleman brought the concept of "EI" to prominence as an alternative to more traditional measures of IQ with his mega-best-seller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ - and since the publication of that book, conferences and academic institutes have sprung up dedicated to the idea. In this TEDTalk, Goleman explores the question of why we aren't more compassionate more of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong - a premise he supports with intriguing research and explains in his lucid, approachable book Stumbling on Happiness. In this TEDTalk, Gilbert pursues that idea through a discussion that touches upon brain architecture, experience simulation, impact bias, our "psychological immune system," synthetic...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Formerly a speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore as well as an aide to Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Dan Pink went freelance to spark a right-brain revolution in the career marketplace. In this TEDTalk, the author of Drive and A Whole New Mind examines the puzzle of motivation - why it does or doesn't work. Viewers discover something that most social scientists know but many managers don't:...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Touching on biotech, nanotech, robotics, and bioinformatics, Dr. Daniel Kraft presents a vision of medicine that would be preventive, personalized, and participatory. This TEDTalk offers a fast-paced look at the next few years of medical innovation, focusing on the digital devices that will allow physicians to diagnose and even treat illness without using invasive procedures... and that will...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: After the Chinese Nationalist Government fled to Taiwan, Soong Mei-ling remained in the public eye as the distant and mysterious "Madame Chiang." She continued the role she had played during her years in mainland China, remaining prominent in foreign affairs and devoted to her work with women and charitable causes. This program examines the second half of Madame Chiang's life: her...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong - a premise he supports with intriguing research as well as his accessible and unexpectedly funny book, Stumbling on Happiness. In this TEDTalk, Gilbert presents findings from his exploration of satisfaction and contentment, sharing simple experiments that viewers can apply to their own lives....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: Daniel Tammet has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia - meaning that his perception of words, numbers, and colors are woven together into a new way of perceiving and understanding the world. In this TEDTalk, the linguist, writer, and educator shares his art, his passion for languages, and a glimpse into his unique way of perceiving the world. Tammet is the author of Born on a Blue Day,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved not to think or feel, but to control movement. Wolpert emphasizes the importance of movement by pointing out that all communication - speech, gestures, writing, sign language - is mediated through muscular contraction. In this entertaining, informative TEDTalk, Wolpert provides a glimpse into human motion and how...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2011
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Summary: Philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes and are not what we traditionally think they are. In this TEDTalk, Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don’t we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us. “Dan Dennett is our best current philosopher,” says AI...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas in this TEDTalk, making a powerful case for the existence of memes - “information packets with attitude” so influential that people are willing to die for them. “There are a lot of ideas to die for,” says Dennett. “Freedom, if you’re from New Hampshire. Justice. Truth....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: In this TEDTalk, philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett calls for religion - all religion - to be taught in schools so it can be addressed as a natural phenomenon. He then takes on Rick Warren's book The Purpose Driven Life, disputing its claim that to be moral, one must deny evolution. Dennett sums up his recent work with this statement: "You might say it's about the reverse engineering of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett has some unexpected answers. He argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes and are not what we traditionally think they are. His 2003 book Freedom Evolves explores the way our brains have developed to give us - and only us - the kind of freedom that matters. In this TEDTalk,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Born into a prominent family in China, Soong Mei-ling was nonetheless thoroughly Western in thought and philosophy, having studied in America-one of the first Chinese women to do so. After marrying Chiang Kai-shek, the couple led a China embroiled in years of war and political intrigue. During World War II, she became the first Chinese national ever to address a joint session of the U.S....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: From the day that 14-year-old Ansel Adams first saw the transcendent beauty of the Yosemite Valley, his life was, in his words, "colored and modulated by the great earth-gesture of the Sierra.” Few American photographers have reached a wider audience than Adams, and none has had more impact on how Americans grasp the majesty of their continent. Ansel Adams, from the PBS American Experience...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2002
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Summary: Until the 17th century, the building blocks of the natural world were a mystery. Of elements there were believed to be four - air, earth, fire, and water - and the science of chemistry had yet to be born. This program identifies some of the first chemical elements to be discovered by spotlighting the work of Hennig Brandt, Robert Boyle, Henry Cavendish, Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: Is it possible to see an upside to having a stroke? It is if you’re Jill Bolte Taylor. As a neuroanatomist, she studied her own stroke as it unfolded and has since become a powerful voice for the possibilities of post-stroke brain recovery. In this TEDTalk, Taylor relates what she experienced while having her stroke, what she terms the “stroke of insight” that followed her brain attack, and how...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008
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Summary: In this installment of the Famous Composers series, viewers are offered an overview of the life and music of the Austrian composer Franz Peter Schubert. The film begins by introducing the overcrowded living conditions of the composer's childhood. Schubert received a strong education, however, his father being a school teacher, and eventually gained a choir scholarship at the royal seminary. The...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: For decades in the 19th century, Apache tribes resisted the westward advance of the pioneers and the threat they posed to traditional ways of life. Fighting the longest was Geronimo—one of the most famous, feared, and misunderstood Native American warriors in history. Geronimo and the Apache Resistance, from the PBS American Experience collection, separates myth from reality in the tragic...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1988
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Summary: This dramatization of Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts opens with Jakob Engstrand attempting to convince Regina, his daughter and a maid in the Alving household, to come work for him. She refuses, happy with her position in a proper household, but we are soon introduced to scandal and moral debate when we learn from Mrs. Alving that Regina is actually the daughter of the philandering late Mr. Alving...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
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Summary: In this program from the Famous Composers series, viewers are introduced to the life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven beginning with an overview of his family's history and eighteenth century Germany. By the age of seven, under the tutelage of his father, Beethoven was playing concerts. At 17 Beethoven went to Vienna for the first time and met Mozart but returned home quickly to help support...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: This installment of the Famous Composers series offers an introduction to the biography and work of Polish composer and pianist Frederic Chopin. The film contextualizes Chopin's early life as a child of musical parents, a Polish mother and French father. Chopin was performing and composing at a young age and became an accepted part of the musical world in Warsaw by the time he finished school...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2010
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Summary: This program features two African-American politicians from different generations and opposite backgrounds. John Lewis grew up in a sharecropping family in rural Georgia, while Cory Booker was raised in an affluent, all-white New Jersey suburb. Although both men have devoted their lives to the betterment of African-American people, neither knows much about his own ancestors. In this episode,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2012