TED Community » Matthias Daues

Sign in to send Matthias an email »

About Me

I was born in 1973 in Würzburg, a small big city more or less in the middle of Germany, where I enjoyed a protected childhood, went to school to be imbued with the classic education of a bygone era, and graduated into a world I knew of next to nothing.

I decided to study in Bamberg, an even smaller city some dozen kilometers east of where I came from, and chose Historical Urban Geography, Sociology, Public Law and Medieval Archaeology as my Master subjects. During my time at University I became a concerned member of the human race, an orphan, a piano player, and finally in 2002 - after 8 years - a graduate to a world I could in mental mapping attribute several distinct shapes of white to.

Then my wife and I got married.

Our agreement was that he who first gets a job in his area of expertise decides where we would be headed. It was her being offered a job as research assistant in Cologne, where she started working on the functions of verbal affixes in Hittite, a work begun in 2002 that hopefully will result in a doctorate in the near future. For those who belong to the majority that has, like me, not too clear a notion about the Hittites: They were a power to reckon with in the 2nd millenium bc in what is now Turkey and left vast archives of clay tablets containing all manners of texts, ranging from treaties and annals to prayers and rituals, that offer a lot of work for linguists (like my wife), orientalists, hittitologists, historians and other rare representants of the humanities whose professoral chairs and research institutes are vanished rapidly from the academic map of Germany.

Which is kind of sad, since theirs is a perspective on humankind that can foster a sense of belonging as well as a an understanding of flux and changing. It makes for thrilling storytelling as well, by the way.

The first challenge in Cologne was to find a flat whose proprietor was ready to accept tenants bringing cats and a dog with them. The second challenge was to find a job for one with good to excellent grades in subjects only slightly less cryptic than comparative indoeuropean linguistics who decided to endeavor to find a job somewhere in "real life".

To be continued...

Location:
Germany, Köln / Cologne
Current organization:
TEDxKoeln
Past organizations:
ıdeetransfer., Unitymedia Group
Gender:
Male
Areas of expertise:
Telling stories, Being a gracious host, Connect people, Training and Education
I am:
Brainstormer, Change Agent, Global soul, Job-seeker, Performer, Sales specialist
Languages:
German, English
Universities:
University of Bamberg
Member Picture

TEDCRED 500+ AssociateTED TranslatorTEDx OrganizerTED Attendee

More About Me

I'm passionate about

slowing down time.

An idea worth spreading

will be spread.

Talk to me about

collaboration.

People don't know that I'm good at

kindling fires.

My TED Story

I owe TED to a neighbour, a social entrepreneur sailing under the flag of "adding value to communities", who left Cologne in January 2007 to embrace new challenges abroad and who sent me a book by Guy Kawasaki called "Selling the dream". He did so because, for the lack of a proper word to describe how I saw myself in my job, I unwittingly referred to myself as an evangelist. I read the book and learned to my surprise, that there is a whole job-description associated with what I used as an impromptu metaphor for myself after several kölsch (the local draught) on our last evening out.

I then started researching Mr. Kawasaki on the WWW and serendipitically stumbled upon Garr Reynolds' website and blog concerned with matters of speaking, presenting and designing (a valuable source for the how of the ideaspreading-business, btw).

There I found a reference to Ken Robinson's talk, which was the first I watched.

This was in early February of 2007.

I never got off the hook.

Comments

  • TEDCred score: +1779 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

  • +3

    A comment on Talk: Catherine Mohr builds green

    Apr 14 2010: My two favourite quotes:

    "[...] I'm very suspicious of all of these wellmeaning articles by people long on moral authority and short on data, telling me how to do these kind of things."

    "And remember: It's sometimes the things that you are not expecting to be the biggest to changes, that are."

    Carpeting (see William McDonough's talk on "cradle to cradle") and alternative drywall (see Kevin Surace's talk on "eco friendly drywall") have already been featured on TED. It is amazing to see how the mass of talks has become a sturdy weave of information and crossreferencing. Thanks for sharing.

  • A comment on Talk: Richard Dawkins on militant atheism

    Apr 14 2010: Have any of you seen David Deutsch's talk explaning explanations? What makes a good explanation is the resilience of its constituent elements to be arbitrarily varied. This is why there basically is one theory of evolution with the constituent elements of mutation (random) and selection (non-random). All parts that fill out this explanatory framework are directly linked to occurences in the real world via direct observation or replicable experiments.

    A myth, on the other hand, is an explanation with easily variable elements that have no link to the observeable universe other than their being part of the explaining myth itself. This is why competing myths are so resilient to reconciliation: Their constituent parts can only possess intrinsic value, and to remain of value they must be preserved.

    So yes, the world came into existence - somehow. Now let us look for the constituent parts of the explanation how. We don't need a common denomination for this. We need a common denominator.
  • +3

    A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial

    Apr 14 2010: Another interesting quote: "You're entitled to your own opinions [...] but you know what you're not entitled to? You're own facts."

    This implies that

    a) information is available and distributed in such a way that the participants in a debate are on an equal enough footing to really interact meaningfully (science professionals and laymen, doctors and patients, therapists and therapees, etc.)

    b) that all participants in a debate agree on a given dataset as the basis for making their argument

    c) that the dataset in question is final (sufficiently representative or all-encompassing)

    d) that there is an agreement on the methodic approach to gather relevant data on questions regarding matters of life and death

    and this is not the state of affairs we find ourselves in. To come even close to this we would need a near total remodelling of education in all age levels with the main aim to convey the ability to think critically rather than how to know things for sure. There is a challenge!
  • +1

    A reply on Talk: David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation

    Apr 14 2010: As I see it the whole point of this passage is to show that a myth is not falsifiable, only easily varied in its comprising elements. Falsification applies to hypotheses and theories. Myths are debunked.
  • +20

    A comment on Talk: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial

    Apr 12 2010: My two favourite quotes.

    "Be sceptical, ask questions, demand proof. Demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here is the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof. And we're not that good at doing that."


    "You know, science isn't a company. It's not a country. It's not even an idea. It's a process. It's a process. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. But the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening and it prevents millions of people from prospering."

    Well said. Thanks.

  • A reply on Talk: Sasa Vucinic invests in free press

    Apr 4 2010: Interesting thought. What good, do you think, would a stock market for social enterprise do?

  • A reply on Talk: Sasa Vucinic invests in free press

    Apr 4 2010: According to www.mdlf.org there are three choices for investing (although you can always donate): For US-residents there are "Free Press Investment Notes", for non-US-residents a certificate (Voncert) issued in cooperation with Vontobel (a swiss bank) and responsAbility (a swiss-based social investment service provider), and for everybody the option to invest directly with negotiable terms. The certificate is backed by a guarantee issued by Vontobel, the FPIN has no hard guarantees, and the direct investment has negotiable terms - I am sure investment security is one of them.

    For more information see the website.
  • +6

    A comment on Talk: Michael Shermer on strange beliefs

    May 19 2009: Pardon me for being mockingly rude to the commenter from May 4 2009, but there is one piece of faulty logic that I can't help but dissect a little:

    Science allegedly invented "blood transfusions that cause AIDS in children". Well, no it did not! It did invent blood transfusion and identify the HI-Virus. A small portion of all the donated blood contains it and in rare cases this blood is transfunded to children. This - if it happens - may seem a terrible fate. But when does someone usually receive a blood transfusion? Most receivers of blood transfusions would die without in a matter of hours. Most HIV-positive people have a life-expectancy measurable in decades. At worst, imminent disaster is averted. How can this be deemed a bad thing?

    Kind regards,

    Matthias Daues

    PS: Just by the way, Mr. Shermer's publication is the "Sceptic Magazine", not the "septic magazine", though it may be considered toxic by and to certain minds.

  • A comment on Talk: David Gallo shows underwater astonishments

    Apr 23 2008: @Motti: There is an exemplar species page on the "Encyclopedia of Life": http://www.eol.org/taxa/16486539

    @Trevor: Alas, it seems they must.

    Cheers!

  • A comment on Talk: Tod Machover and Dan Ellsey play new music

    Apr 16 2008: G T, if Dan Ellsey's composition would have been presented without further introduction, it would have been instantly recognizable as a structured piece of music, deliberately arranged and structured, complete with exposition, development, recapitulation, coda and finale. A listener may or may not have liked it - but, as we know, "de gustibus non est disputandum". From a technical perspective one could say that it lacks refinement and that the sound is a little too synthetic. Then we could have discussed Dan Ellsey as a composer and argue about whether he will or won't have a future in his chosen field.

    But this is not the point this talk is about. A technology which allows expression of individual thought, intention, inventiveness, creativity for those who cannot do so with the body they were born with, has been presented to us.

    Nobody besides his relatives, friends and the staff of his nursing home, knew Mr. Ellsey before he came into contact with the developers from the Media Labs. We know of him only because sophisticated hardware and software allows him to communicate with us. His chosen way to express himself is music. Mr. Machover and his team provided him with an interface to do so. It is important to point out that Mr. Ellsey suffers from cerebral palsy to illustrate the intricacies of the hard- and software involved.

    It is also important to know that though suffering from cerebral palsy Mr. Ellsey can now create music that may be judged on the same terms as music composed by someone who can do so using his hands. The presentation is a little too dramatic and Mr. Ellsey's role is too "ecce homo" for my taste, but this is beside the point.

    Cheers!
Load 5 more Comments (Showing 1 - 10 of 15)

Favorite talksSee all »