Malala's Peace Price Speech - Serious thoughts from a serious girl

The 10th of December 2014, in Oslo, Malala Yousafzai held a Nobel Lecture after recieving the Nobel Peace Price. In this speech, she brings out a lot of her personal history, along with what she is struggling to achieve in this world. Along with the fact that she was shot, she tells us a lot about how everyone in the world has a right to go to school - without severe restrictions applied by a third party force.

Malala displays a great amount of credibility in her speech. First of all, the fact that she was actually shot suddenly makes this a serious matter, with a lot of credibility. As she talks about her experiences with the Taliban and how they affected her life, the viewers quickly realizes she is strictly serious about the presented case. There is not really any doubt about whether she is serous or not, as she really burns for her case.

During the speech, Malala plays a lot on emotions. She is appealing directly to our emotions several places in the text. For example, she mentions “Thank you to my father, for not clipping my wings and for letting me fly”. This is a pretty strong message coming from a girl on our age. Along with her extreme passion for education, these messages can hit really deep.

Malala also appeals to a lot of logical arguments in her speech. After describing the relationship with Taliban and the conditions she lived in, she points towards the fact that not everyone in the world has the right to get education. After mentioning her dead friends which lost their lives that day on the bus, she points to the fact that these people never had the chance to recieve education. Not neccesarily because they were killed, but because it is simply no good learning environment there. She actually hits both pathos and logos here, which hits with great effect.

The speech was well accepted not only by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, but the rest of the world as well. I think that with her incredible story, she has a great selling point on why this is a very serious matter which should be handled as soon as possible. Although the speech is long and may not appeal to everyone, it does give an incredible good understanding on the situation in the Middle East as to this day.

How not to be ignorant about the world

So I chose the talk “How not to be ignorant about the world” for this task. This talk is performed by Hans Rosling, which is well known in the TED community with his highly entertaining way of presenting information. In this talk, he covers common misconceptions about the world as we know it. By reffering directly to the audience with his data, he provides several facts and viewing points about how ignorant, regular people and the media can be wrong about many real-life statistics.

His presentation surrounded the subject about how little people actually know about the world, and clears up a lot of misconceptions. This subject is something the world is highly misinformed about, where most people have little-to-none knowledge about these matters.

Hans have an ability to make the most boring statistics interesting. By allowing the audience to guess and respond to his questions - and them proving them entirely wrong - he creates this amazing atmosphere which makes it suprisingly easy to follow. This did not come as a surprise, as we have previously seen in several of Mr. Rosling’s videos. He is one of the best TED talkers, and at this point, his video triumphs the top with several million views (whereas the other videos have about 600K).

I picked this talk because I knew from the second I pressed play that this is something I do not want to miss out on. This is something no one should miss out on, really. Learning about these misconceptions in such a ridicilous effective way is quite entertaining. The statistics hits close to home too, as several things I have had the wrong conception about for a long time is cleared up. For example, he mentions the swedes’ view on how many people in third world countries have been vaccinated against Polio. Where most people are guessing everything between 20% - 40%, Hans Rosling shocks the audience by revealing that the numbers actually are closer to 80%! These things are very entertaining to learn about indeed, as only Hans could make stuff like this anything close to interesting.