TED Community » Alanna Shaikh

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Improving global health, smart aid, and doing international development better

An idea worth spreading

Positive Deviance

Talk to me about

Global health, international development, raising a preschooler, being an expatriate, Alzheimer's disease, Central Asia, blogging, Twitter, and finding a way to start changing the world.

People don't know that I'm good at

I can write a sonnet about anything if you give me about 20 minutes. Not a good sonnet, mind you. But it will be in proper form.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +151.20 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Conversation: The debate about Graham Hancock's talk

  Mar 20 2013: Pick and choose publication is why TED works.
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  A reply on Conversation: The debate about Graham Hancock's talk

  Mar 20 2013: Refusing to have your name on something really isn't censorship.

• A reply on Talk: Alanna Shaikh: How I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's

  Oct 5 2012: Weirdly enough, this is the one comment I find myself wanting to answer...I did have a bad cold when giving the talk. I've played brass instruments since I was young, so I am actually a pretty good breather!

• A comment on Conversation: Who hasn't spoken at TED who should have?

  Feb 17 2011: And I can add another of my own: development economist Owen Barder.
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  A reply on Conversation: Who hasn't spoken at TED who should have?

  Feb 17 2011: Seriously, Noam Chomsky has never spoken at TED?
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  A comment on Conversation: What were the joys of your childhood you wish you could experience again?

  Feb 17 2011: I used to love swinging on the swingset. Just the simple back and forth and the sense of the world rushing by me.

• A reply on Conversation: Why do so many think that population growth is an important issue for the environment? Don't they know the facts of demographics?

  Feb 17 2011: Janet - that's a good point. Maybe it's hard to shed this sense of impending doom because so many living species do face genuine doom.

• A comment on Conversation: What are concrete ways to overcome the greatest human failing, giving up what we want most for what we want now (hyperbolic discounting)?

  Feb 16 2011: On this topic, I really like Kim Stanley Robinson's essay on valuing the future http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/climate_change/time-to-end-the-multigenerational-ponzi-scheme

• A comment on Conversation: Why are not-for-profits encouraged only to share successes or best practices? Isn't there a lot that can be learnt from failures?

  Feb 16 2011: The problem, I think, is that the ultimate donor is not the government agency but the public community that pays taxes to the agency. And a failure report - for example, the corruption investigation that the GFATM did - can easily catch public attention and make taxpayers demand that their money go somewhere else.
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  A comment on Conversation: Why do so many think that population growth is an important issue for the environment? Don't they know the facts of demographics?

  Feb 14 2011: I think we were so scared, for so long of "the population bomb" that we can't quite believe it has really passed us by. Especially since the global population is still growing; it's hard to emotionally grasp that the growth will peak and fall.